MaddAddam

I never do book reviews here because what the hell why would you.

But this book. This book had me crying, and I mean floods coming down from my eyes, on my face and all the way down my neck before I could stop the tears in any way. This happened in broad day light, on a plane (15 hours flight btw), in front of everybody. So much so that the person sitting next to me asked me what I was reading. I couldn't answer, of course, because I was still bawling. Poor guy was probably terrified thinking that he has to spend the next 13 hours so close to a lunatic.

In this book, my favorite swear word is a deity. Because, help us, Oh Fuck.

Thailand part II - The rest day

Day 3 - Rest day!!

There is nothing to make one feel extremely smug than rain on your rest day! (with the climbing days being crystal clear, that is)

We started the day with a late start (7:45 am) and a very loong breakfast, after which Marian went back to the room to snooze some more, and San and I just sat and watched the waves.

By the time we got going (destination: Ao Nang and its markets!) it was already 10:30 am. The boat left us at Ao Nang pier and we walked around trying to find the perfect cafe in which to plan our Spain trip! Being so distributed requires us to meet in Thailand to plan our trips overseas because we are special that way, yes we are!

After spending four (FOUR) hours in Bernie's cafe and basically stealing their wifi, we took a tuk tuk to one of the Ao Nang markets. Mind you, it was NOT the market where we went five years ago, but, with uncle Pan not there to guide us, we had no bloody idea where to go (uncle pan, this is YOUR fault!)

AND THEN THE MARKET!! It was a muslim thai market but still! Fresh, delicious street food!

Delicious thai fish cakes (THE BEST EVAH!)! Grilled squid!!! Zomg (and this is why I do not loose any weight, ever!)

Bags and bags of fresh chilli!!!

Rambutan!!

Weird fruit! (btw, what is this fruit? Anybody?)

Fishies!! Fishies! fishies!!

We took the tuk tuk back to Ao Nang and we walked around some more. Walk walk, talk talk, and then the rain started again. Still, the highlight of the day was finding San's chicken drumsticks, finally, after three failed attempts, which included eating a very sweet chicken satay and a not so sweet chicken innards thingy. Behold the drumsticks!! They were delicious!

Tamarind!

I was going to blog about the second part of the thailand trip today but then I found tamarind in the market and was distracted!!!! I ate so much tamarind during this trip it's not even funny.

One picture Tuesday

The truly authentic Thai restaurant can be determined by the quality of its signage:

Very important decisions

Because you cannot go even on a five day holiday without making sure that you have adequate reading materials, and because we know about the kindle's issue with indexing , I have been using my spare cycles for the past few days to think about what books to put on the kindle. They must be holiday books but also interesting books. Books to read on a beach waiting for the sunset but also books to read  in the morning before everybody WAKES UP already!!!

Me: "San, what books should I put on the kindle!!!!??!!!!! For the trip?!" 
San: "I don't know.. All?"
Me: "Cannot!"
San: "It's a climbing trip, not a reading club"

So finally, with no help from my friends, I have settled on twenty (TAHWENTY!) books from which I will choose something depending on my mood:

1. - man in the high castle
2. - american gods
3. - the dispossessed
4. - kraken
5. - iron council 
6. - dirk gently's holistic ...
7. - the city and the city
8. - wise man's fear
9. - and the mountains echoed
10. - the fortress of solitude
11. - infinite jest
12. - bloodsucking fiends (christopher moore - got this by googling funniest books list - we'll see where this gets me: either laughing like mad on a beach in Thailand or throwing my kindle overboard in anger: you never know with "funny" books)
13. - a dirty job (same as above)
14. - hard boiled wonderland
15. - brief wondrous life of oscar ..
16. - never let me go 
17. - mountaineering the freedom of the hills
18. - blood rites
19. - breakfast of champions
20. - name of the wind

Now of course, having just spent twenty minutes typing this, two hours searching for some of these titles, and ten minutes pestering my friends, I'll probably end up just reading the guide book. Snort.

I love Adelaide

For many reasons, one being that you can buy ghost chili pizza! Nothing goos about it really other than its inherent spiciness (went for the milk after the first slice if you must know :) ) - but still, GHOST CHILI PIZZA!!!

Such a purrfect day

1. My running partner came back from the states and brought me these!!!! I had one three and they were awesome!!

2. A former student came into my office and gave me these (no I cannot be bribed with food)! Habaneros for the win!!!

3. A colleague stood me up for lunch. This left me supremely tired and hungry, so this had to be remedied.  Veggie tacos from a food truck parked outside the university!!

4. Sat on a bench, ate the above, glanced and the below view, and read Joel on Software. Life is good.

One picture Tuesday

I have two of these in my fridge. May add them to my omelete tomorrow morning. And I might just miss work because of that, but at least I will have fun!!

As per wikipedia:

"The Ghost Pepper (Bhut Jolokia)^[1][2] is a chili pepper previously recognized by Guinness World Records as the hottest pepper in the world. The pepper is also known as Bhut Jolokia, ghost pepper, ghost chile pepper, red naga chilli, andghost chile.^[3][4][5]

The Bhut Jolokia is an interspecific hybrid cultivated in the Indian states of Nagaland and Assam and parts of neighbouring Bangladesh.^[6][7] It grows in the Indian states of Assam, Nagaland and Manipur. It can also be found in rural Sri Lanka where it is known as Nai Mirris (cobra chili). There was initially some confusion and disagreement about whether the Bhut was a Capsicum frutescens^[8] or a Capsicum chinense pepper, but DNA tests showed it to be an interspecies hybrid, mostly C. chinense with some C. frutescens genes.^[9]

In 2007, Guinness World Records certified that the Ghost Pepper (Bhut Jolokia) was the world's hottest chili pepper, 400 times hotter than Tabasco sauce; however, in 2011 it has since been superseded by the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion.^[10] In March 5, 2012, some ghost peppers tested hotter than the scorpion pepper varieties. Now the ghost pepper and scorpion pepper are tied for the world's hottest pepper."

The Trinidad Moruga Scorpion sounds most interesting as well!!

Realization. Part 244

Assuming I live till I'm 80, and considering that I'm still technically 30 (for a few weeks at least), and assuming that I will read on average, one book a week, then we have:

50*52 = 2600

Which means that I have life in me only to read 2600 books. Or 2548 if I go ahead and admit that

I'm 31 already.

This makes for a very small amount of books considering how many good books are out there that I have yet to read, and just how many books I would want to re-read.

I've been having issues ...

... with my kindle. You see, at some point last year I went to New Zealand and encountered many many days of superiorly shitty weather. At some point during the trip, I also acquired, among many other things, a library of about 1000 ebooks, which I then immediately put on my Kindle Keyboard. To be fair, I would probably not read most of the books as they tend to be in the "love-vampire-books?-well,-here's-a-thousand-of-them" variety.

And then the battery on my Kindle started to act up. I would charge it and then it would discharge to 75% within hours and then to 50% within a day, and to about 10% within two days, even if I did not read anything at all. Not connecting it with the addition of books, I first thought that there was a problem with the firmware. And when it wasn't that, I thought that the time had come for a new kindle. What better time than the beginning of February (HINT HINT HINT) for such a thing to happen? Endless conversations with San about which Kindle model is better, and after finally deciding on one ...

... I googled the issue. That is when I realized that maybe Amazon hired some of our students  to write software for the Kindle.  Here's what the interwebs had to say:

Also, keep in mind than from time to time, the framework likes to mess around with the index files, even if nothing's changed in the content, and the more books you have, the more CPU it'll eat. (That's kinda true as a whole too, since it'll churn a bit on the index file every time it wakes up from sleep, too).

I went all crazy with this new piece of information and removed all but two books (Perdido Street Station and Mountaineering, the Freedom of the hills, if you must). No change in battery charge in the past two days. All iz well!!

Realization. Part 243.

Just realized that one of the immediate (non-academic) perks of being here for a long(-er) period of time is that not only Suzie will not go on intercontinental flights but NOW I CAN BUY BOOKS!

If I ever have a dog

I will call him Mao Shan Wang, or Shan for short. Another possibility would be to call him "Durian" or, Kopi. Today, while researching about the awesomeness of Mao Shan Wang, I have found that "the coffee tasting durian" is indeed a variant, or a "cultivar" if you must of the durian. It's called Kop!

Regardless, there is something really really naughty about eating durians in a three star hotel, and I just done done it :)

Life is good

You take the plane over a sea (an ocean?) and arrive on a new continent. You're a tourist in your former home city and things are weird. You rush through customs, collect your bag, refuse the expensive cabs the uncles at the airport taxi stand try to give you, and take a normal cab. Arrive at the hotel, queue behind the 200 zillions iranians and their families that were just checking in, and then finally check in yourself.

A quick shower and change and you are out again. Wearing jeans, tshirt and running shoes it's only normal to run to the MRT station rather than walk. Your jeans tighten around your legs as you realize just how humid it is. You run and run, descend the 90 steps into the MRT station only to realize as you reach it that: a) you have no cash in the local currency; b) you may not have money on your MRT card; and c) you might have to climb the 90 steps back up. Luckily, the MRT god smiles on you today and your card works.

You reach the destination and roam around aimlessly realizing that you have no phone and thus no way to tell your friend you have arrived. Also, no way of spotting her as she is, like everybody else, short, skinny, and with black hair. Finally you spot her and give her a sweaty bear hug. Onwards for a Tom Yam soup and a chat and life is good again. I've missed you San!

My name is Lian

Du Lian.

It's amazing how absorbed you are with things when you attend workshops - I attended at teaching workshop for the past two days and yesterday i was convinced it was Tuesday! 

Anyway, I bought this smelly frozen goodness yesterday night and we have decided we're going to eat it on Sunday - it is only a thai durian but nonetheless, A DURIAN! On my kitchen top! THAWING! nom nom nom! I can barely contain my enthusiasm.

Good to be back

Having spent the past 3 months travelling through Australia - if numerous work and/or pain visits to Brisbane, Sydney, Goldcoast, Grampians (Horsham!)  can be considered travelling - I had forgotten how absolutely glamorous Singapore is. The first hit of glamour is when you reach Changi airport and everything is shiny and spotless and pwetty.

And then if you happen to have arrived at night and you take a cab in the city, the Singapore skyline leaves you truly and utterly speechless. It's all glass and steel and fancy, funky architecture (well, at least until you reach the HDBs, but then again not many tourists do). I had never realised just how nice this actually is. Alas, while admiring it, it also dawned on me how much I would detest living in a big city again. I must admit I was a bit surprised, as it never occurred to me that I would be such a boring, homely girl. Wait, I'm not!

Anyway, it's good to be back for the besties (more musings on this tomorrow),  for the food (FOOD! FOOD!), but also to see my (former) supervisor, and to realise, just how much of a copy of him I have become*. Let the feasting and the shopping (ahem) begin!!

*minus the sociopathic micro-management issues that is.

How not to write an Amazon review

When we came back from Nepal I noticed three people in the plane reading the same book. No, each of them had an individual copy. And yes, I do notice what people read. Actually, I make it a point to notice. Anyway, these three people were reading "Shantaram" by some Roberts guy. The book has rave reviews on Amazon, so I thought I would give it a try.

However, the way it is written (that is, the construction of the phrase etc - e.g. "the eviscerated shelves", "eyes the color of the desert before the rainstorm" - wtf?!) is so annoying (at least to me) that I just want to stop and kill the guy. I guess this is also because I know I can't really last 1,000 more pages of this shit.

So I went back to amazon to read the reviews. And I found this little piece of Internet wisdom. All are excerpts from the same reviewer.

"I found Shantaram at Target just days after returning from India. You may have well already imagined that I had fallen in love with the countries. I know what a dichotomy, France and India as two of my favorite cities. Surprisingly there were plenty of French on vacation in India. [...]

Shantaram is not a memoir, yet is a memoir. While author Roberts does not write his story, the book is based on his story.

[...]

For me a good book is one that appeals to my senses. "

Giving away my babies

The nice website with my babies can be found here. Click and then comment on this blog if you want the book. Some of them are in romanian. First come, first served. The list can be found below as well. I still have some books at school but most are romanian sci-fi.

Aww i am so sad to be giving them away. But please please do not make me happy by not taking them!
-- Antologie SF Vol. 3
A.P. Cehov -- Logodnica si alte povestiri
Alan Weisman -- The World Without Us
Alex Garland -- The Beach
Alexander Solzhenitsyn -- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Alfred Lansing -- Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage - Jensen
Arkadi, Boris Strugatki -- Picnic la marginea drumului
Arthur C. Clarke -- Ghost from the grand banks
Arthur Golden -- Memoirs of a Geisha - Nandini
Brandon Sanderson -- Elantris (ro)
Ben Okri -- Starbook
C.B.E., Sir Chris Bonington -- Annapurna South Face: The Classic Account of Survival
Chuck Palahniuk -- Lullaby
Clive Cussler -- Walhalla (ro)
Dan Simmons -- The Terror
E. M. Forster -- A Room with a View and Howards End - Nandini
Ed Viesturs, David Roberts -- No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks
Ernest Hemingway -- The First Forty Nine Stories - Seth
Garcia (Gabriel Garcia Marques) Marquez -- Un veac de singuratate
Gary Jennings -- Aztec
Geoff Ryman -- Air
George Orwell -- O mie noua sute optzeci si patru [MUST PROVE THAT YOU WANT IT] Bogdan
Hamish MacInnes -- The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters: True Stories of Rescue from the Brink of Death
Haruki Murakami -- What I talk about when i talk about running - Doris
Haruki Murakami -- Padurea Norvegiana (ro)
Heinrich Harrer -- The White Spider - Shu
Heinrich Harrer -- Seven Years in Tibet - Shu
Ian Mcewan -- Atonement
Ian Rankin -- Dead Souls
Ian Rankin -- Hide And Seek
Ian Rankin -- Tooth and Nail
Ian Rankin -- The Falls
Jeffrey Eugenides -- The Virgin Suicides
Joe Simpson -- Beckoning Silence
John Gribbin -- The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors - Jensen
John Keay -- The Mammoth Book of Explorers
Jon E. Lewis -- The Mammoth Book of Climbing Adventures - Jensen
Jon Krakauer -- Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster - Shu
Jonathan Kellerman -- A Cold Heart - Nandini
Jonathan Kellerman - The Murder Book
Jonathan Neale - Tigers of the Snow: Sherpa Climbers
Jostein Gaarder - Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy - Nandini
Kazuo Ishiguro - Remains of the Day - Jensen
Lily Prior - La CucinaSofia
M. Bulgakov - Diavoliada
Marin Preda - Marele Singuratic
Mario Vargas Llosa - Matusa Julia si condeierul
Marion Zimmer Bradley - Negurile
Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Markus Zusak - The Book Thief - Sofia
Matei Calinescu - Portretul lui M
Michael Ende - The Neverending Story - Nandini
Michael Moore - Stupid White Men: .and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Bogdan
Mihail Bulgakov - Maestrul si margareta
Mike Horn - Luptand cu imposibilul
Mircea Cartarescu - Nostalgia
Mircea Cartarescu - Orbitor
N Steinhardt - Jurnalul fericirii
National Geographic - Fotografia - Ghid Practic
Nick Hornby - How to Be Good - Shu
Nigel Shepherd - Go Climb
P.D. James - P. D. James Omnibus: ""A Taste for Death"", ""Devices and Desires"", ""Original Sin"" - Nandini
P.D. James - The Black Tower - Nandini
Philip Pullman - The Amber Spyglass
Philip Pullman - The Subtle Knife
Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles - Nandini
Razvan Radulescu - Teodosie cel Mic
Shusaku Endo - Silence - Nandini
Sir Chris Bonington, Charles Clarke, Clint Willis - Everest: The Unclimbed Ridge
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris - Sofia
Stefan Agopian - Tache de catifea: Roman
Stephen King - The Eyes of the Dragon - Nandini
Umberto Eco - Baudolino - Bogdan
Virgil Ierunca - Fenomenul Pitesti
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita - Andreea
Walter Bonatti - The Mountains of My Life
Yann Martel - Life of Pi - Doris
Bohumil Habral - L-am servit pe regele Angliei
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Cei frumosi si blestemati
Harper Lee - Sa ucizi o pasare cantatoare
H. Hesse - Cele mai frumoase povestiri
Agatha Christie --- Ucigasul ABC
P.G. Wodehouse --- Jeeves si spiritul feudal

Giving away my babies

Here is what I posted on Facebook today. Am writing it here for the benefit of the only person I know that does not have a facebook account. Ahem.

Dear Jenny, Shu, Eli,

I am moving out of my apartment and will be moving out of singapore in the future (me hopes) so I cannot bring my babies with me. And since it's very expensive to ship my babies to Romania, I have decided to pass them to the only three people in Singapore (well, plus Sandra but she don't have no account), that I know are readers.

So, that being said, would you be interested in taking some of my books? If any of you says yes, I will make a list of the books for you to choose from. Please take them, your house must be filled with books, if not for you, then for your future kids (oh my, i suck :)) )

claud
ps will post this on e blog too for san to read

Truth is, it costs 225 SGD to ship 20 kg of books to Romania. I think I have about 40 kg. Brr.

Why I love Singapore

• Durians! - it's as simple as that. A fruit. Calorie-free* too! (well at least in my book:D)


• It's VERY clean - as in septic, sometimes.


• It's VERY green - it's at the tropics!


• It's VERY safe - as in, can go running at 2 am in most neighborhoods and nothing will happen to you


• Climbing with Sandra and Doris. A pleasure!! And sometimes, during my fat/weak days, a curse.


• It's summer all year around. Bring on the sandals! Skirts! T-shirts! Flip-flops! Air-con!


• For some of my friends, I am the only caucasian they have ever met. Or, after Crystel came here, their favorite caucasian. Ahem.


• While for caucasians I am of average height, bordering on shortish, here I am tall! My hair is light brown, but here people see me as blonde!


• The variety of cuisines you can find here is amazing!


• Fruits, fruits, fruits!!! Pineapple, mango, guava, papaya, soursop, dragonfruit, rambutan, starfruit, apples, pears, plums, grapes, jackfruit, DURIAN, mangosteen, all-year-round!


• TOM YAM! - my favorite soup, right up there with my grandma's borscht soup, I need my almost-daily fix of this spicy and sour soup. Or else.

*Apparently some people say a durian has 800 calories. Yeah right! These people don't know my truth: it has ZERO!

A series of unfortunate events

1. I joined the climbing team a long time ago and I met Sandra.


2. Sandra introduced me to peanut butter about 3 years ago. I still blame her, because I had not been aware about this delicacy sprouted from the refined american cuisine. The fact that it sprouted really does not bother me, but the fact that I can get easily addicted to it, does.


3. On Monday night I had to return to the lab to work after training. I knew I would be famished and I was scared I would do something rash and like raid the snack machines, so I bought a small peanut butter jar (fat), a carton of soy milk (protein), and some bread (carbs). It looked perfect for a post-training meal and i enjoyed my two slices very much.


4. On Tuesday I started to help myself to tiny spoons of peanut butter, every time thinking that "This is just a tiny one, it's the last one!"


5. Today I went to get the vietnam visas and when I came back I decided to read a bit about vietnam. And since this was entertainment and I can't do entertainment without munching, I reached for the peanut butter jar. What's left is just a tiny half a a teaspoon pod on the bottom of the jar*. And i thought i was dieting, yes i did ...

*It's done. I licked the jar clean. I am never buying peanut butter again.