How not to win the lotto

Yesterday I was talking about winning the lotto on a €3 qickpick. It seems someeone else had a better idea of how to win - a couple of Chinese bank guards recently lifted about £3 million from the bank, then put it all on the lotto to win it all back, replace the money before anyone found it, and pocket the difference! Read about it Here.

Lotto

Well, I've done something I haven't done in a long long time. I went out at lunch time and got a 2-line lotto ticket. Normally I don't do it as I go by the old quote that "the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at maths" (or "bad at probabilities", depending on which version you hear. I figured today tho that for the sake of €16 million (or part thereof) I could afford to spend half of what I paid for my (overpriced) lunchtime sandwich in O'Briens!

bright...shiny....burning....thing...?

This feels weird. For the first time in over 2 months (44 days according to the newspapers - I think) it's not raining. It hasn't rained at all today. I didn't get soaked either coming into work or going out for lunch. There are big clouds around the horizon but right now there's a big patch of blue sky overhead with the sun shining down. Does this mean that monsoon season is finally over?

No more starbucks!

Well, in the Forbidden City anyway. One of the most jarring things I saw last year when I was living in Beijing was that there was a Starbucks in the Forbidden City. So, one of the big symbols of Amercian capitalism was smack bang in the middle of the old seat of Chinese Imperial power! Today though, I read a Reuters article that said that the Starbucks has been shut down. One down, 3,000-odd to go!

Bali - getting there is half the fun (pt 2)....

Well, once we were here, we had to have some way of getting around. So, we decided to rent a car. Oh, what fun this turned out to be! The car itself was OK, but then we had to worry about getting around. Now, Bali isn't exactly designed for the tourist to be able to get around easily - the attitude seems to be "ah, don't bother your poor little tourist head about getting around, just stick to the beach and the tourist strip, and if you need to get from A to B, take a taxi. Leave driving to the locals". One village looks pretty much the same as another (yup, and the Adolf Hitler award for cultural sensitivity goes to....), with no signs saying where you are, and the general rule with road signs - where such things exist which is infrequently - is that they have to be placed right behind a tree/wall so you can't see them until you're right on top of them. We did have a map that came with the car, but I was half tempted to bring it home with me,as I'm sure it'd be just as handy to get around Dublin with it as it was to get around Bali with it. What we wanted was a road map, like an OS map maybe, with proper road signs, placenames and street names. What we got looked sort of like the sort of tourist map you'd stick up on your wall when you get home as proof that you were there, but you wouldn't really use. Unfortunately, we were using it.

After a while my impression of the person who drew the map was "more enthusiasm than accuracy", around the level of a leaving cert geography project. After another while, I began to suspect that the artist was in fact Stevie Wonder. No way of telling main roads (where such things existed) from secondary roads (or tertiary roads - yes, there are words worse than our worst irish country roads!). Roads/road junctions on the map where no road seemed to actually exist, and vice versa (as in, we'd hit a T-junction on a stretch where the map said it was just one straight road). Villages on the map where no villages existed, and villages which didn't exist on the map. Villages on the wrong roads or with their names spelled wrong. The map wasn't the only difficulty tho. The balinse attitude to road signs was that they were put up wherever they felt like it, and forget about the rest (shur the locals know where they're going anyway, right?). Then, where these rare beasts did exist, it seems a tree or bush was planted in such a position that the sign was covered so you couldn't see it until you were right on top of it. As for name signs for villages, well, forget about it too. The only way I knew where we were a lot of the time was by trying to catch the name of the place on the front gate of the local temple as we went past!

Despite all of these "challenges", we managed to get where we were going nearly all of the time, altho sometimes it was by dead reckoning (as in, "well, the sea is over there so we have to turn right here") or just stopping and asking someone. I also discovered what Joey had meant when he said that whenever he let Nina drive him to Bandung, he just closed his eyes and ignored everything that was happening on the road. Nina seems to have some sort of pathological aversion to staying behind any other vehicle for any length of time, and her overtaking maneuvers normally included the beeping of some horn, either hers to try to get the guy in front to get out of the way before we hit the bend ahead, or of the oncoming car as we swerved back in to avoid it just in the nick of time. Have you ever overtaken a car which was itself in the process of overtaking another car? Well, now I have (well, as a passenger anyway). After the first few "interesting" overtakes, I decided that if it was my time, it was my time, and if I'd managed to survive Garuda then the chances of me living through the holiday were hopefully still good!

More pics from jakarta

I've just after getting a few more pics from my trip to Indonesia from one of the other guys who was there, Michal. So, here's his gallery

Where am I again?

Well, I finally got the beach in Bali. Not exactly like the picture postcards! You think Bali, you think sun-drenched beaches with white sand, clear blue skies and cobalt blue calm seas. If I don't look up the beach and see the palm trees (or the guys trying to sell me fake watches) I might as well be on Tramore beach at home! Grey sand, grey skies, grey sea, hint of rain.



At least the water is warm, even if I got a bit deeper in than I originally intended first time.....

Bali - getting there is half the fun (pt 1)....

The trip back from Singapore was pretty uneventful anyway, with the one bad point being as soon as I got back to the hotel in JKT I had to login to work and check to see how things were going ! The next morning tho was not fun at all. I was going over to Bali with Nina, the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-coworker who'd decided to go over with me, and as it was extreme short notice (as in, booking the fri before!) all we could get on flights were a 6:30am takeoff - which meant waking up at 3am to get there in time! So, we sleepwalk our way to the airport, and everything seems go ok right up to the point where we are taxiing out to the runway. Next thing there's an announcement: "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the captain speaking, we've discovered a problem with the flaps, so we have to go back to the terminal". We were just lucky I suppose that they found the problem then and not 5 mins later when we're trying to take off - this is Garuda after all we were flying with, who don't exactly have a stellar record when it comes to safety and, well, not crashing (3 planes in the last 3 months!). When you book at the last minute tho, beggars can't really be choosers.

Unfortunately tho, the "quick trip back to the terminal" turned out ot be a bit longer than we were anticipating. after half an hour sitting on the plane, they deplaned us and sent us off t the execs lounge for free tea/coffee/whatever we could grab. At least that way they were a bit better than Ryanair, who'd bend over backwards to try to avoid giving you anything at all if there were any delays (I remember the 5hr delay in charleroi - "get what you want in the cafe, then send the receipts off with this form to the ryanair customer service dept for a refund"). as nice as leather couches and free tea/cofee/soup/little-sandwiches-with-the-crusts-cut-off are, we were still waiting another 3hrs before we got a working plane. So, our 6:30am takeoff became a 10am take-off, and we'd been up for 7hrs already!

Things only got more fun when we got to Bali, as we were supposed to have a driver picking us up at the airport and bring us to the hotel, but there was no sign of him! after nearly 45mins of waiting and phone calls to the hotel asking where the hell h was, we finally figured it out: he was waiting at the domestic arrivals for us, but for some reason (maybe 'cos we were so late getting in) we came in through the international arrivals! It was only through me taking a bit of a wander and seeing a sign for "domestic arrivals" that we copped it! We eventually got to the hotel at about 2pm, or 11hrs after we woke up.

So, they say getting there is half the fun........

Techy Shopping in Singapore

How did I forget about this? There are three really big places to get good cheap techy stuff if you can get to them: Hong Kong, Akihabara in Tokoyo, and Singapore! It was only when I saw one of the big electronics malls when I was on my ay to Little India that I remembered! Mmm, shiny shiny! 5 floors of camera stuff, computer stuff, laptop stuff, TV stuff and general techy bling bling - could have spent the entire day there and come away with a great big hole in my credit card! Unfortunately I had to limit myself to what I could carry in my hand luggage on the plane, and I could'nt rally justify a new laptop or an iPhone-style PCA-cum-phone to myself. So, I limited m purchases to a few bits and pieces - an 8Gb USB pen drive for about 1/4 what you'd pay at home, and a MP4 player with a nifty little 3" screen was pretty much it. The UI on the MP4 player leaves a lot to be desired, and the software CD that came with it didn't work, but is a handy little thing to be able to watch videos on the plane/train/car/wherever. The memory ain't hugely great either, 1Gb internal and 2Gb on the SD card, still big enough for 3, 4 movies tho.

Next time I go prepared with a shopping list!

Sentosa

I've now been swimming in the pacific - well, the Singapore straits anyway. Close enough.

Today I decided to see what the beach was like in Singapore. There's an island called Sentosa just off the coast of Singapore (literally just off the coast, you get to it by bridge) which has been turned into one big huge holiday resort. According to the guidebook, it's one of the things in Singapore you have to see. SO, I went to see it. Took the MRT to some big-ass shopping center at the end of the line, then took the monorail across to the island. The beach itself is all artificial, and you can easily tell. It's like a shelf of sand that goes out into the water, and you can tell by the feel of it under your bare feet that the sand is artificial as well. The beach itself is pretty steep once it gets in the water - like nearly 45 degrees! You walk out on step, you're at your ankles. Next step, your knees, next, your waist nearly, and after about 6 or 7 steps out you're pretty much nearly over your depth. Not sure do I like that! Th water itself is lukewarm - it makes some difference not having to steel yourself against the shock of the cold water hitting your toes, and you can still feel them even when the water is up to your waist!

The strangest thing about going swimming there tho is the view. Once you don't look out to sea it's ok, you have the beach, the palm trees, the sea, the people playing frisbee or volleyball (my first time seeing chinese chicks in bikinis - nice!), the beach bars etc. Then you lift our gaze to the horizon - and all you have is huge container ships as far as the eye can see! Last time I saw anything even remotely like it was off the coast in Hong Kong, but this was way more crowded!



Apart form the swimming, my guide book warned me that Sentosa was tacky, loud, tourist-trappy - "". Maybe it was because it was a weekday, after a few days of rain, coming up to the end of the off-season, but there wasn't much going on there. I didn't get hassled with guys trying to sell me stuff at all! I decided to see what the view was like from the top of the island, so I took a chair lift up to it. Was a sort of strange feeling, getting on a chair lift without skis on my feet, both getting off and getting on (getting off is harder actually, you can't just push off and let the skis do the work)! The view wasn't that much better than from down on the beach, so I decided to go a bit further and take the cable car to Mt Faber, apparently the highest point in Singapore. Waste of time, you can't see much from there at all, isn't like the view from the Peak in HK at all! Coming back it was getting dark, and the big Merlion statue on the island was lit up in purple light with lasers coming out of its eyes. Now that was tacky!

At least getting down from the cable car stop to the base was more fun. They have a thing called "the luge", which is basically about a 650m long go-kart track down the side of the hill. It was late in the evening at that stage, so I nearly had it to myself. So, "brakes? What brakes? Let's see how hard I can hit this chicane!" :-)

All in all, Sentosa: nice, but you're not going to go to Singapore just on the strength of seeing it.