TRAVEL AND LIFESTYLE DIARIES

I’m far from done with my Oslo fotos and I’ve also received the package from my parents with the USB stick with our Cebu and Bantayan holiday fotos but strangely when I copied the fotos into Picasa, only 1 folder was successfully replicated and the other folders in the USB stick were deleted? UGH, I hate this really! I was only able to copy our Bantayan Island holiday fotos and all my Cebu fotos were gone. Murphy's Law. NOT AGAIN. I’m scheduling another appointment with my mom. I will just remote control her laptop and download the Cebu fotos one by one. This will for sure take h-o-u-r-s! Anyway, I felt obliged to share now with my readers the fotos I had in Manila during our few days stay there just last month. After the super typhoon in Manila last weekend, I just want to show Makati, at least, at her best, before the aftermath. We didn’t really get to go around Makati much so we only had a few fotos of the place. This is along Ayala Avenue at the Makati Avenue crossing. You ...

Dutchman and I visited the controversial Miss Landmine exhibition in the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum in Akershus Fortress (Oslo) featuring the candidates from Cambodia. The project is currently banned by the Cambodian government just last 28 August 2009, a week away from the pageant opening date to be held in Phnom Penh. Officials say that the beauty pageant will destroy the dignity and honour of the disabled, especially the women. A taboo. Here are some of the contestants below: Cambodia is clearly not yet healed from its tragic past. But being Asian myself, I can also see the other side of the coin why the Cambodian officials refuse to go along with. In Asian culture a disabled beauty pageant can indeed be seen as a mockery. Asian people in general are respectful, traditional and sensitive, meaning they can easily be offended. They are also a very superstitious lot that tend to put meanings into almost everything. In addition there are still thousands of undetonated lan...

Hi, just back from Norway and for those into flying, I’ve got here some airplane and airport eye candies while I work on my Oslo fotos. Flight to Norway is about 2 hours including taxiing. The flight itself was uneventful; I mostly spent my time reading the travel entries in the in-flight magazine. One of the interesting stories there is a Norwegian couple who got married in a romantic chateau in France. For the Norwegians, and their astronomical eye-popping prices duly inflated with government tax, it is much cheaper for them to wed outside their home land. Or, to vacation all the time and stay away from home. We took Norwegian Air, the new price fighter airline company of Norway. They fly direct to Oslo and Copenhagen from Amsterdam. I’m not fond of flying. I get tense when its take off and landing. And when there is turbulence I try to diffuse my nervousness by forcing myself to nap. There are a few airports in Norway but the main international airport is called Oslo Airport ...

A lot of painters—and artists per se, lived very poignant and pitiable lives. Most of them had mental illness, suffered from severe depression and at some point were suicidal which makes you wonder and question the significance of their art. Perhaps this is the crux why they stand out, why their artworks have become world famous. It suitably and subtlety channels the volcanic chain of emotions gripping them in to their paintings, and then to the ordinary viewer, like you and me. Like Edvard Munch , he was a great example of the above. He was constantly tormented by his psychoneurotic obsessively religious father who was utterly devoted to pietism, which I consider perilous by the way. I do not trust these radical religious fanatics. So tomorrow I’m off to visit his legendary children—he was childless and considers his beloved paintings his children, and hopefully I will feel and experience the anguish he felt when he painted ‘The Scream’. Until next week. In Oslo, Norway! Trav...

When Dutchman and I are together—say during the weekend or when we are traveling, just like what happened during our travel to the Philippines last month, and this is when there is no family around—we tend to eat twice only in a day. We love to sleep in so by the time we wake up it is already brunch, and then later, dinner. I wish everyday would be like this but I guess a big part of the morning is gone, which isn’t good also. So when we were in Makati, and after a tiring shopping day without lunch, we scoured Glorietta for a place to eat. We don’t want heavy stuff, no fast foods either, we just want to snack a bit, but at 4:30PM it looks like the restaurants are empty or they are getting ready for dinner. Then we passed by Cabalen and I had to stop when I saw the poster: Cabalen Merienda—P138 only! I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me so I quickly did a Peso to Euro calculation on my head. Huh—that can’t be? That’s just €2 for a limitless merienda (means snack) buffet! Cabalen ...

It looks like the Swiss know their act this year in spite of the global financial crisis and the continuing pressure from the European Union and the world business leaders to open up the nation’s best kept secret—the Pandora boxes of bank accounts from wealthy individuals. Switzerland may have the wealth status but many regarded this wealth as coming from—questionable, and even blood money. I guess the Swiss can turn the eye other and pretend they are humanoid borgs. All for the glory of money. The 2009-2010 Global Rankings: 1. Switzerland 2. United States of America 3. Singapore 4. Sweden 5. Denmark 6. Finland 7. Germany 8. Japan 9. Canada 10. The Netherlands 11. Hongkong SAR 12. Taiwan, China 13. United Kingdom 14. Norway 15. Australia 16. France 17. Austria 18. Belgium 19. Korea, Republic 20. New Zealand 21. Luxemburg 22. Qatar 23. United Arab Emirates 24. Malaysia 25. Ireland . . . 87. Philippines The usual Nordic suspects are in the top 10 except for its Salmon producing sister fa...

One of the little picturesque villages in the Netherlands which happens to be just a stone’s throw away from Amsterdam is Ouderkerk aan den Amstel. By car, it’s the first exit from the highway after leaving the A10 highway ring and joining the A2 highway to the direction of Utrecht and Maastricht. An easy option from Amsterdam would be by bike or boat as it is fairly near. If taking a look at the map of North Holland province, one can see that the village is right across Amsterdam Zuid Oost with only the A2 highway separating it. I’ll have to warn though that this village is REALLY small. The place is ideal for lunching or having afternoon tea combined with a nice walk or a bike excursion in and around the surroundings, which I must add, the landscape past Ronde Hoep nearby is very pretty. The zigzagged dike doubles up as the country road is above sea level and the canals and vast fields below form a majestic panorama. Or, if you arrive by a boat, you can always dock somewhere and then...

Watched Quentin Tarantino’s new movie yesterday – Inglourious Basterds and I’ll have to say that if you have watched Pulp Fiction then this is about the same caliber, as fiction as you can get yet with the right prudence of seriousness, extremely funny scenes with equally funny characters, violent as usual, and with a storyline that has different plots crossing and locking into each other. Typical Tarantino brand. I’ll leave you to go over at the official website of the Inglourious Basterds to watch the trailers. Make sure you watch the different trailers they have. I think the International version is the best although these trailers will never do justice to the film. Then traverse over at Youtube and do a search on the movie’s name. Read the comments as they are just hilarious. You will also see remnants of the neo Nazi propaganda, posts from anti-Jews and anti-Americans fighting for comment space in there. We watched the movie in Pathe Rembrandt Theater in Utrecht. Good thing that ...

In the last years, I have to admit that I’ve become a bit paranoid about keeping this blog. Part of me wants to lead my life privately but the other part of me doesn’t want to let go chronicling my life, well at least the fraction that I am willing to open up to the world wide web. Obviously, there is a great deal of my life that I don’t write in here and don’t intend of doing so. Not now and not in the future. And apart from sustaining a busy life and having less time to attend to extra blogging and social networking affairs, this paranoia is the major reason why I closed the comments, the chatbox and took my email address out from this site. I am selfish. I want something that I can control. I only want one-way traffic and nothing else. So seeing that I approximately have 26,000 views of my profile perplexes me a little bit. The other day, one of my colleagues at work told me, “I think I’ve come across your blog.” (I might have flushed in shock and embarrassment when I heard him say...

While waiting for the USB stick to arrive loaded with our Cebu and Bantayan Island holiday fotos–a replacement from the damaged fotos–allow me to muse over Philippine’s famous beach destination, Boracay. (I had my mom on the phone yesterday and she said we should receive the package this week or next week, yehey!) I’ve only been there once which was a couple moons and eons ago. As you can clearly see my fotos below are already chipped, flawed replicas of the old pre-digital camera age. I know this is a bit odd, but I don’t really hanker to go back to this numero uno desired holiday spot. I mean really, about every breathing creature in the Philippines raves about this place. No joke, until now the media moguls in the Philippines are still screeching with the headlines – Boracay is (still) it. But, whenever Dutchman and I are in the country, we prefer to discover new places and tread down unknown territories rather than exhibiting and carousing ourselves in trendy places. D...