Last Saturday I was lucky enough to get to the free concert by A.R.Rahman, put on as part of the Sydney Festival. For those of us who don’t recognise the name, Rahman wrote the soundtrack to Slumdog Millionaire. Although he’s been booked to perform for a long time, the recent tension between India and Australia… Continue reading India Australia Friendship
Author: mag
Bilingual Schools
As of this year, NSW will have 4 bilingual schools where lessons are to be given in both English and an Asian language. I spoke to the principal of Scotts Head Public School , which specialises in Indonesian and found out that all new students will be taught the normal curriculum in Bahasa for at… Continue reading Bilingual Schools
Hair drives men to lust
Being a Muslim country, or a mixed religion country with a large number of Muslims, many women in Borneo wear headdresses in public. Interestingly, I saw a number young women in high heels, tight pants, tight tops and push-up bras wearing the headdress too. I wonder if this means that Malaysian men are more distracted… Continue reading Hair drives men to lust
Brunei Family
The highlight of my whole trip was spending new years eve with a local family in the capital of Brunei. I was sharing a hostel room in the youth centre with a Japanese man who was travelling outside Japan for the first time. He’d brought his badminton racquet and befriended a local man on the… Continue reading Brunei Family
Swimming Proboscis
If I have any complaint about Brunei, it’s around the tours. There used to be a government funded tourist information counter in the post office, but that closed down and now one of the tour companies provides information ‘free of charge’. Of course, that information includes details of the tours they offer themselves. I don’t… Continue reading Swimming Proboscis
Fire
On our first morning in Kuching (first morning in Borneo, in fact) we saw the headlines of a local newspaper saying that a fire during the night had destroyed 7 shops. A couple of hours later, we followed the smoke column to a row of shops on the river, just beyond the area we’d walked… Continue reading Fire
Friendlier People
If I had to compare them, I’d probably have to say that the people of Brunei are even friendlier than those of Sarawak. I was told that the direct bus to the capital of Brunei was broken so I took a series of local buses to get here. At the second stop, I asked someone… Continue reading Friendlier People
Health Check
My first real contact with the people of Brunei occurred at the border from Sarawak. The local bus took me through 3 stages – stamp out of Malaysia, health check and stamp in to Brunei. We all got off the bus at the second stop and presented our health papers to an official in a… Continue reading Health Check
Watching Movies
I was checking out a Blue-ray movie (Ice Age 3 if you must know) in a shopping centre in Miri when I felt something on the back of my knee. I haven’t dwelled on it much yet, but I’m getting eaten by insects here. I have welts all over and nothing I do stops them… Continue reading Watching Movies
Markets
We’ve seen a few markets in the cities we’ve visited in Sarawak. They carry the usual stock of fruit, vegies, fish and live chickens. One stall that stood out to me had a pile of roosters wrapped in tubes of paper with their crests all neatly aligned at one end. An occasional twitching claw was… Continue reading Markets