‘llo all – Happy New Year and all the good things that come with it to you all. Had a great holiday in Malaysia, although far from a white Christmas (much more multi-cultural there. And of course, most of my family are varying shades of brown).
Three main bits to my holiday; Christmas, obviously, New Year, and, on Dec 21st… The Return of the King! The much awaited third Lord of the Rings film saw us check in to the Mandarin Oriental hotel, where my siblings and about 17 first cousins and one or two stray aunts got together and watched The Two Towers, played games, shopped at KLCC (a BIG mall) and eventually got to the cinema for the 3 hour extravaganza that was Peter Jackson’s final instalment in the series. Review coming, no doubt, on my flashy new ‘reviews’ blog (use the main navigation to get to reviews, or click here).
Christmas was a family affair; Christmas Eve at hour house, playing games, singing carols and having Punjabi Claus hand out the gifts at midnight. Arvind, in his MBA-isdom, decided on a ‘push’ rather than ‘pull’ system for gift distribution. That didn’t work too well, but eventually the gifts got around and there was much happiness. My haul included a batch of books, hence my motivation to get the reviews page finally up and running, if only so I can keep a log of my reading and film-watching.
New Year’s was spent with friends; Gil & Katie’s Australasian excursion ending up in Singapore/Malaysia, so, following two days of ‘tours’ around major KL malls, we ended up in Bangsar; an expatriate (and apparently Indian)- favoured drinking area in KL, where we visited a couple of bars and rang in the new year several times with a crew of several thousand crazy Malaysian Indians with spray streamers and other party favours. It was surreal, fun and ended with a slightly scary encounter with a psychotic taxi driver, who kept saying to me (and my Malay is shaky, so if there’s an alternate translation I’m not aware of, please do let me know): “tiga orang dah mati, say tak salah, saya tak salah”. My translation has this as “three people are dead, it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault”. He then proceeded to drive us home at about 120km/h in a 50 zone… Yowza.
So a good season; returned to more job applications, another bout of tonsillitis, and various new year’s resolutions concerned with healthy eating and exercise. Resolutiontastic.
Of course a lot more stuff happened over the holidays; my encore classical guitar was destroyed by Malaysian airlines, a replacement Yamaha C-40 was acquired, my cousins and I performed with professional singers an an orphans charity brunch, the Abbalorious SPSetia dinner, the lambtastic Christmas eve dinner, driving like the devil and shopping like it was 1999… All good.