All My Bags Are Packed & Ready to Go...

...coz I'm leaving on a jet plane and dunno if I'm coming back again...

Will I return to Perth someday?

Will I fulfill my dreams of working or migrating here?

Will God grant me this one desire?

Am I making the right choice by choosing love over career?

Jer 29:11
" 'For I know the plans that I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.' "

I can only trust the Lord for His never-ending grace and goodness.

Kat's 30th Birthday - Kangaroo (& Tick) Adventures

"You have aged! Check out the wrinkles on your face!"
Geez, thanks Kat! That was the first comment she made when we met at Perth train station. We have not seen each other for nearly 2 years, ever since she started sail on board a ship. Nope she's not a pirate or a sailor. She is serving God on board the MV Doulos, a huge cruise liner that holds a homely christian bookstore.

Kat and (wrinkly o') me.

Anyway, I forgave her tactless comment and agreed to take her out on her 30th Birthday still.

Bush walking at Yanchep National Park was our itinerary for the nice spring day. Yanchep National Park is about 51 km north of Perth city and is home to cool caves (bout 600 documented), native Australian flora, wild flowers during spring, as well as (tick infested) kangaroos and koalas.

Mr. Koala with his face stuffed into eucalyptus leaves. Too busy munching to notice us.

Can u spot the sleeping koala dreaming of an eucalyptus paradise?















Wild orchids.


Opps a Daisy!

Kangaroo Paws














Time for something tourisy! We did a tour to one of the limestone caves when we had enough of bush walking.

Ancient limestone architecture (more then 60,000 years old) in Crystal Cave.

Conservations effort are being made to revive dried up streams (above right) and their ancient bacteria.





We then explored the Boomerang gorge which was littered with beautiful limestone boulders! (Ah - hoe, bet you wish you were there!)

Dwerta Mia Trail led us through the Boomerang gorge.


li
Pockets Full of Rye (5+)

All that nature is unleashing the jungle spirit!

Cavegals rule!


So there we were, 2 happy bush trotters looking for adventures, chasing kangaroos and exploring caves. Then we discovered some unwelcome... companions hitching a ride on us.

What's that on Kat's socks?


EEEEEwwwww.... a giant tick! About 3 x the size of a regular brown dog tick. Humans tend to be accidental hosts when we go tromping through bushes (that would be Kat and me chasing kangaroos).

Check out the hosts of these 8 - legged bloodsucking critters...

Are they keeping to the pavement to avoid more ticks latching on? Smart one, guys!


Our bush trail - I wonder how many ticks are hiding in there waiting to ambush us.


HAPPY BIRTHDAY Kat!!! - hope you will never forget your big 30 spent in the bushes with me!

PS: Guess what I found attached to my butt the following day...

Insomnia Days Are Back...

Hopefully not to stay! I'm being bombarded w a truck load of maj decisions to make since returning from Thailand. As usual, my brain is ticking through e wee hours of e darkness. No wonder i'm getting wrinkles. To sum it all up, the million dollar question is：what do I do w my life? I've got this uncomfortale（n slightly sinking) feeling that it's time I look for stability. Bye Bohemian spirit. So sad it has to go. Sometimes it feels like its e end of my dreams. But I guess there's always better n more exciting goals with each new phase of my life. Cheer up, Audz, got to be more positive in life!

Bailey Goes Off To Boarding

Sent cheeky Bailey off to a fren's house yesterday to board for a month while I'm make an errand trip downunder. Hate to have to sent my furry friends off to unfamiliar surroundings :(. Tmr will be Trix's turn! Hope they won't think I'm abandoning them.

Back... But NOT For Good!

Got back on Sept 11 from Bangkok.

Nope there was NO anarchy in Bangkok. Life and business was as per normal. All that media hype...geez!

My beau, mighty Melvin, came to pick me up from Sawang Daendin.

We took a train to Bangkok before flying back to Singapore. Thank God for providing again! The trains (operation was ceased due to the demonstrations in Bangkok) started running just 2 days before our appointed date of departure.




Anyway, have been spending lots of time in Mackers checking e- mail coz I terminated my e-mail account at home. Trying so hard not to mooch Mr SMC's wireless internet account from the comforts of my room. Wish he/she will have more sense to install a password and stop tempting me.

Ok will make some more effort to update my blog again. From Mackers of course.

Stay tuned!

Across the Friendship Bridge

One fine morning, Pi Mem and I made our way across the Thai-Lao Friendship bridge, over the Mekong river, home to the giant catfish. My Thai visa had expired after 2 months. I needed to renew it for another 2 months anywhere outside Thailand (it's their regulation), then make a re-entry. The nearest country was of course Vientiane, the capital of Laos.


At the border, still in Thailand.


Welcome to Nong Kai, realm of the 7 headed Naga.

We stayed at the town of Nong Kai the night before, so as to hit the border early in the morning, hoping to miss the crowds of foreigners having plans similar to me. Nong Kai lies just next to the Mekong river along the north-east border of Thailand; Vientiane lies along the opposite shore of the river.

Wind blowing hard on our faces - having fun on the motorbike!


Mekong river landscape.


Vendors next to the river.


Stillness at sunset by the Mekong river. Where's the Naga?


Me getting fattier over the months!

Nong Kai is an interesting place, being next to the Mekong river. Legend has it that the Mekong river is inhabited by the 7 headed giant serpent, known as the Naga. Scary... if that was really true! The town has sculptures of the Naga, with its 5 monstrous heads, twirling comfortably around lamp posts and various important signs. It's surprising that the people choose to celebrate such a scary belief.







Is that what John saw in his prophetic vision in the book of Revelation? Did God bring him on a visit to Nong Kai?

Anyway, on to Laos....

One word to describe the place - boring. 2 words to describe it - boring and sleepy. Worst then Sawang Daendin. Their biggest grocery store was a large mini mart (like the Econ minimarts found in the HDB estates). Prices were generally steeper then in Thailand since most of their products were made in Thailand.

We were stuck there for 2 whole boring days, coz it took a minimum of 24 hrs for my visa to be done. Geez... yawn...anyway, here's some of their places of attraction. We skipped visiting all the temples coz it was too hot and too spiritual.


Patuxay - built in the 1960s to celebrate at independent struggle (Wikipedia).















Pha That Luang - the Golden Stupa, National Symbol of Laos.
P.S Do you notice the pounds I've put on? Thanks to the visit of my friends from COTL!


So bored .... that I made friends with the resident pooches of the guesthouse. Every morning he basked in the sun on the stairway leading to my room.


That's what a real dog should do!


Shared a big pau with this new friend.

Frogs Are Better Than Ants and Mice

Thanks to the rains, ants and frogs alike are finding access into the church for refuge. Think I much prefer frogs for now.

My Daily Battles

Geez, everyday I battle against sneaky intruders trying to disrupt my peace.

First, it was a suspected mite attack when the gals from my church were here. Lynette and me broke out in a sudden spotty rash on the inside of our arms one morning. Within the next 2 days, it spreaded to our tummies, bum and thighs. Then Wanyi started developing some, followed my Dawn. It took 2 weeks of furious scratching before they started to subside.

Second, were the ants. One rainy day, I found a trail running from the window to a tiny whole through the paint work in a corner of my room. That's fine I thought. I've been leaving with lizards, beetles, mosquitoes, flying bugs of many sorts, (and have even eaten some big mamas but that's another story) I'm sure I can put up with some harmless ants.

Few days later, the ants had formed another trail continuing out of another part of the panel some distance away. This time I was a little more alarmed coz it led to my wardrobe. I checked the drawers - true enough, there they were, not many though, scurrying around trying to look for a new place to settle in. There was nothing much in the drawer except a fuzzy bath towel so I decided to leave them to sort themselves out.

I didn't think much of it ( I'm usually quite nonchalant about bugs) until I decided to use a nice, clean and fresh towel that evening. It was like an ambush. My towel was brown. The ants were brown. Of course I didn't notice them. And boy were they angry and fierce when they found themselves stuck to my wet skin. They started biting me furiously!!!

The nasty welts lasted for at least a week, with me scratching furiously every so often. (Worst them mossie bites in my opinion. The welts were much bigger and persisted longer. But mite rash looked the most scary coz you get lots of little red itchy spots everywhere.)

Next they started attacking some sweets on my table. They worked thorough my entire pack of Halls sweets, tediously making holes in every individual wrapping. Fine. I moved all my snacks to the table in the common area, placed them in a bowl on a plate of water to form a "moat" to keep them off. Never did I expect, their next assignment was to attack my instant noodles. Get this right - they actually bit through the packaging to get to the noodles!!!

The last straw was when they decided to migrate into my Apple notebook. The nooks and crevices amongst the keypads, ventilators, speakers and electronic chips must have appealed greatly to their lifestyle. That was it - I declared war when I saw them scurrying around beneath my keypad. I plug in my laptop to charge hoping to either electrify them or burn them alive somehow. Every ant that I saw escaping, I crushed them to death with my invincible thumb. It took about 3 days for them to finally clear out from my precious computer.

Today, I got hold of a can of Bygone and I attacked their hangouts on the wall panels without mercy.

As I entered my room this evening, I heard a rustling in my bin - something trying to get out. A lizard I thought. Must be a big one for all that noise. I waited for it to scurry out.

Then a pointy nose and 2 beady eyes emerged amongst my papers and discarded chip bag. YES... THERE IS NOW A LITTLE GREY MOUSE IN MY ROOM. Great... Guess I should thank my lucky stars it's not a rat. At least it looks kindda cute.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Here's a taste of my present workplace (or more accurately, volunteer-place) - Rainbowland Child Developement Centre, located in (ulu) Sawang Daendin, Thailand.

It's kids, kids and more kids everyday!!!!! It's actually not as bad as I thought (i've never been a "kids" person), the kids can be rather funny and cute at times. Some will try to speak Thai really s-l-o-w-l-y and LOUDLY to help me understand. It never deters them though, knowing that I can hardly understand Thai. Everyday, they will try again, just in case I get sudden enlightenment in the language overnight and can manage to understand them the next day. Of course it has yet to happen.

Btw, life is NOT a bed of roses here. The teaching can get rather hectic and tough at times. To teach English to totally non- English speaking kids is indeed a challenge. Even when you give simple instructions (like " put up your hand" or "let's read together", you draw blank stares - from both the children and their teachers alike!! At times I feel like I'm standing alone on an island, trying to command the monkeys on the coconut trees to come down.

Just for your info, there are officially no English classes in every first week of school; there are also no English classes every Mon for the nursery and K1 kids (age 2 - 4). Why? Because English is scary. And English teachers are even more scary... Boo!

During my first few weeks of teaching, some kids will just start to cry for no apparent reason in class. Some of the kids from the nursery class will literally push me away when I try to talk to them. When the gals, Lynette, Wanyi and Dawn from my church visited and helped me teach, there was a boy who cried every English lesson for the entire 2 weeks except on the last day. I'm sure in their little heads, they were the scary English- speaking - giants - from- Singapore. Of course it didn't help that Wanyi's built is on the taller side and she wears glasses.

Anyway, things are moving along and the kids are no longer afraid of me, and by the law of association, English has become less scary too. Yay! - for the kids.

Still... God help me please!

On Board the Picnic Bus

It was a long ride from Pak Cheong, about 70 km North east of Bangkok, to Sawang Daendin in Jangwat Sakunakhon. The ride took approximately 8 - 9 hours on board a local open air truck known as the song tiao.

Here are 10 interesting things about the song tiao:

1. It has no door. U can jump out of the truck out of its back end anytime you want. At your own risk.



2. It has big rectangular cut-outs framed by metal stems for windows. These cannot be closed. If it rains, you just unroll a flap to cover the window opening.



3. It has only 2 long benches running along each side of the truck. There are only lower backrests but no head rest.



4. That means you can't really lean back to take a nap, coz the windows are directly behind you and you'll fall out.
5. The wind is so loud you can barely hear yourself when the truck is on the move. Definitely a strain to talk.
6. Do NOT stick your head, hand etc out of the window or you may risk loosing it.
7. The central portion of the truck have grass (the kindergarten sort) and foam mats laid out so commuters can have a picnic. ie. sit, recline, play guitar (which the locals did but not that you can hear it), eat snacks and sleep during the long journey.












8. Or you can curl up on the narrow and thinly padded benches if your are desperate enough to get a shut eye ( which me and many others did. At times like these, I thank God for my petite built.)
9. It can travel at no more then 70km/hr.
10. Hence, you snack like crazy on the truck coz minimal rests stops are preferred. Or else you'll never get home.

You will want to pray hard that the song tiao does not meet with any mishap coz very likely either
a) fly out of the rear end of the truck,
b) fly out of one of it cut-out windows
c) get get stuck in one of them if you're too fat.


One of the hyperactive kids, Christy, on board.


Me sitting at the cranial end of the truck so I got to rest my back for a bit.


My very shy translator, Kickapo, to help orientate me coz everybody hardly spoke a word of English.

Thailand - the land of ... Stagnant Water

I'm so relieved I got the internet to work on my comp!! Am I glad I decided to bring my laptop after all. The computers here are so slow that when 5 people tried to chat with me on MSN, it hanged.

After months of anticipation and an 8 hours ride on board an open-air local bus called e song tiao (will post some pics soon - its an amazing journey aka picnic-in-a-bus), I've finally arrived at my ultimate destination, Sawang Daendin.

This is barely my 3rd day at Christchurch at Sawang Daendin and am still trying hard to adapt to the sub-urban life here.
The locals seem to be even more traditional then those at Bangkok.

The toilet is a manual scoop - and - pour flushing system; you need to make sure you don't choke it up with toilet paper coz the drainage pipes are pretty damn narrow (those that have been to climbing trips at Krabi shd be familiar with this). Not sure how it handles big offloads form big guys, ha ha. Got to check with Melvin.

One end of each toilet is quartered off with bricks to contain water for the flushing. At any one point, every toilet in each Thai household will contains enough stagnant water guaranteed to make even the slackest NEA ( National Environment Agency) officer cringe.

Having been drilled thoroughly about the perils of Dengue Fever (which is also present here btw) by the Singapore government, one of the first things I did compulsively was to peer into the deep and stagnant waters of the tank to observe for any moving creatures. Amidst the floating dead beetles, other bugs and dismembered wings (yes, yucky isn't it), lo and behold, there it was - the condemned larvae of the our bloodsucking foe, a wriggler!!!. Alright... this is Thailand, I told myself, it's ok and its normal.

But it is NOT ok when the number of wrigglers increased from 1 to 2, and to 5 over the last couple of days. Every time I visited the toilet where I stood still for > 1 s, I got bitten.

So I decided the NEA officers are right (if they had been there) - the tank needed a 10 minutes Mossie Wipeout http://app.nea.gov.sg/cms/htdocs/article.asp?pid=675
Ok... make that a 30 min Moissie Wipeout. I pulled the plug and drained all the water in the tank, which took forever. Then I drowned the struggling wrigglers at base with a generous helping of chlorox (I didn't want them to complete their life-cycle in the sewage). Next I flushed out all e dead insects and wriggler remnants well before refilling it again with fresh water (which again took forever).

Bye bye my wriggling companions , I thought to myself happily with a big sense of satisfaction. Since then, I have yet to be bitten by any mossies in that toilet.

However, I have a feeling that it won't be for long before I have to do my 30 min Mossie Wipe-Out again!

But that is only a small part of the big picture. Out on the fields, there are countless large and small patches of stagnant water every where. Yes, please sent truckloads of NEA officers to fumigate the place!


Check out the enormous urns of stagnant waters commonly found in Thai households ( toilet, backyards and all)

I Miss the Greedy Little Putty

The title says it all.

Papayas in Pattaya

Right, let me clarify first. There are NO papayas in Pattaya. Coconuts maybe, since it is by the beach. it just makes a catchy title - it's called alliteration. (You know like Froggy the Frog, Peter Pan, Donald Duck etc.) I recalled that from my literature lesson in Sec 2. Stop being a show off, do i hear you say?? ha ha..

Back to my main point.

For the weekend, I went to Pattaya for the Alpha weekend organised by my new found friend Jane (see previous blog entry). Alpha course is a programme for introducing the fundamentals of Christianity to non-christians.

I had the pleasure of Ar's company, my new Thai friend, to explore the place with. We communicated with bits of stuttering English and Thai. Its amazing that we clique still. Gail or Jane would then intervene to translate (we make them do it) when the conversation gets too tedious.

I've known some people all my life, and seen them almost every week, yet we have less then 10 words of exchange each time. My friendship with Ar is truly against all odds. We hardly share anything in common - we speak different languages; I'm sporty but she isn't; she's not a believer; she's an accountant, while I'm a vet etc. Yet we enjoy each other's company in a strange and incomprehensible way, literally. I guess I enjoy her down-to - earth, laid back attitude. And of course, there's always my brilliant, beaming smile to break the ice.






Alas, non my new-found friends will be going up Northeast to SawangDaendin with me. Sigh, it does get draining at times to keep making friends. And it sounds like it's gonna get harder from here. From what I hear, less then 3 people can speak good comprehensible English in Sawang.

God please help me to learn Thai quickly!!


Pals beyond borders - Ar and me

Gail (Director of Rainbowland Childcare centre) and me

I sure hope I can make a trip down back to Bangkok to visit my friends after my 4 month stint before flying back to Singpaore!

.