Category Archives: Life

2016 Week 53 Update

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Happy New Year! May 2017 bring love, peace and prosperity to your lives!!

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I for one am glad that 2016 is over and a new year, with loads of potential is awaiting us. Hopefully this will be a much better year for all of us with wishes being fulfilled and goals achieved.

This is the last update from me for 2016 and this week was a fairly busy week. On Boxing Day we went to the ArtScience Museum to catch the NASA Space Exhibition (Review coming up soon) and also scrambled to get the children and S’ OCI cards in by the deadline which was 30 December. The Indian High Commission here did not reach out to the diaspora at all to let them know that they can convert their PIO cards to OCI cards without any fees, but they refuse to accept it saying it was on their website. Luckily a kind immigration officer told us when we were leaving India and hence the scramble. I don’t check the HCI website unless I have some work with them and no one amongst my friends and acquaintances told me this, so I was completely unaware until the officer told me. Anyway, we made it just in time and hopefully the conversion will go through without any issues.

BB & GG start school in two days time and this year their school ends much later than last year. By the time they come home from school, freshenup and get ready for lunch, it will be almost 3:30 – 4:00 pm. That’s not lunch in my opinion, that’s tea. I should now look at sending them to school with something heavy for recess and also something else light for their five minute break before the last two periods. I need to research this fast before school starts. This year is an important year for both as its the streaming year for them where they have to choose the subjects they will take for their O levels.

Have an awesome week everyone and again Happy 2017!

2016 Week 52 Update

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We’re in the last week of 2016 and I for one am glad that this year has come to an end. 

Merry Christmas everyone! May this day of joy bring the true meaning of the season to everyone’s hearts…

Last week GG got a letter from MOE (Ministry of Education) that she has obtained a scholarship for doing well in school. She was ecstatic, to say the least and was jumping up and down in sheer joy. The money is not much, but a recognition of her hard work during the year. For the first time in more than three years, BB didn’t get anything – neither the scholarship nor the merit bursary. He shrugged it off, but I could see he was very disappointed. Hopefully he buckles down in 2017 and studies hard. This is an important year for both – its streaming year where they get to choose their subjects for their O levels. For GG it’s her last chance to get into the better stream. 

I also helped out in BB’s school this week for the new Secondary 1 registrations. This is something I plan to do on a regular basis this year, irrespective of whether I am working or not. 

Yesterday we also went to buy shoes for the children as well as stuff BB needed for his CCA. 

Hope the rest of 2016 is good and happy and you end the year with a smile. May 2017 be an awesome year too!

Keep smiling….

Wanderlust takes over….

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Growing up, as a little girl, one of my favourite books was my copy of the world atlas. If I remember, I had a fairly old one (it should have been at least a decade or so old by then), it actually showed Jakarta as Djakarta, which was the Dutch spelling, but I loved the book. I’d spend hours reading the various maps and learning the names of all the countries in the world as well as their capitals and major cities. Later on in school, Geography became one of my favourite subjects and I loved the map work which came with it, so much that my classmates would wait for me to complete my work just so they could copy it off me!

 

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Source – That’s a life goal for sure….

What’s the above paragraph leading to? I just saw TripAdvisor’s best destinations of 2016 and this has ignited the wanderlust in me. In fact, the other day S and I were talking about trips to Europe and the States. We have family in both places and a chance to visit these countries would be awesome. We just need to start saving up, with four adults, airfare alone will be a huge expense.

 

 

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Throwback to Siam Reap

Back to the best destination list – London, UK has been declared the best in the world and Siam Reap, Cambodia the best in Asia. London’s already on my bucket list and now that travel has become a lot easier for us as a family, we aim to see a lot more of this region as well as Europe and America. Within Asia, I really want to visit Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Japan and other smaller countries.

 

I guess this is what happens when you come back from a holiday, you start planning for the next one….

 

2016 Week 51 Update

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We’re back in Singapore! We arrived yesterday morning. Quite unusually our Singapore Airlines flight was late departing out of Singapore and so reached Mumbai late. Consequently we left Mumbai more an 90 minutes later than the scheduled time and reached Singapore an hour later. I can’t sleep while travelling so we were quite the zombies when we arrived home. A good meal courtesy of S’ mum and a nice nap and we were good to go. My helper R also arrived early this morning so we’re all set for our normal routines. 

The last week in Mumbai was super hectic with meeting up with friends and some family. I’ve still not recovered from the toll that travels take on you (guess I am getting old) so more next week!!

2016 Week 50 Update

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Another week in Mumbai and we are now counting down to the days before we return back to Singapore and our usual, humdrum life. We leave at the end of next week. 

I will do a detailed post on the poonal, but this will have to wait till I am back in Singapore to gather my thoughts together and put it down coherently. Though I am on holiday, here I realised that I don’t even get 30 minutes to myself. The past week has been a whirl of activities – shopping for things, catching up with my aunts and grandmother and visiting Temples. I also started meeting up old friends and so time has been literally slipping from my hands!

I’ve realised one thing though this trip which never bothered me before – Mumbai is incredibly noisy! My parents’ home is right next to two schools which run on two shifts – the first from 7:30 am to 12:30 pm and the next from 1 to 6 pm. So we have to contend with not only children talking and shouting (as children are vaunt to do) but also listen to them rote learning their lessons. And during both the starts and dismissals, you have children eager to get out of school. Now this is not as bad as the noise generated by horns. I realise now that Mumbaikars love their vehicle horns. Even when there’s no one in the street they are driving on, it’s a compulsion to use the horn a couple of times. And if you are caught in a traffic jam, unless you have incredibly strong eardrums, your ears will be subjected to the incessant noises that horns generate. I’m typing a draft version of this post while waiting for some friends at a mall and there’s a free open air concert by a Bollywood singer going on. The singer is not here yet, but my eardrums are going to pay for this for sure later. I knew there was a good reason I don’t like discotheques and loud pubs….

The meeting with old school classmates was good. We spent a couple of hours talking and catching up on each other’s lives.

As an early anniversary meal, the four of us plus my parents went for lunch at a mall. The place we ate, Barbeque Nation overlooks the descent of planes into Mumbai airport and BB and S had a good time planespotting. Both specifically requested to go to this particular outlet to have the lunch as we had gone here last year too and they had a ball looking at all the planes landing and trying to figure out the airline from their tail regalia and the type of planes. 

This marked week 2.5 of ours in Mumbai. I’m meeting another friend later today and also some more friends during the week. So am looking forward to those gossip and catching up sessions too!