My 24-hour journey……

I am now on holiday in the United Kingdom with Jester. We are here for a week-long holiday and will be spending most of it in Manchester.

It took us around 24 hours to get to Manchester from Brunei; a journey which can be broken into three parts.

The first part was from Brunei to Singapore by Royal Brunei Airlines. Nothing much can be said the national flag carrier’s service. The inflight magazine, Muhibah, was not available; apparently it was not available anymore though it was only the 14th day of the month. Perhaps it was a commemorative issue on the Sultan’s birthday, but not a copy was available.

The second part was from Singapore to Dubai on an Emirates flight. We had a four-hour transit at the Singapore airport, which we used to explore the new Terminal Three. The terminal was impressive and huge. It felt more like a shopping mall than an airport terminal. I also had my first encounter with an Airbus A380. It was huge! We left for Dubai just after 1am that morning. The flight was largely empty. The service by Emirates was much better than our national carrier. There was an individual screen, which was touchscreen monitor, from which we had a choice of more than 500 music and video channels. The food was not too bad either.

This plane is huge! And I saw three more after that, one is Singapore and two in Dubai.

When we arrived in Dubai, we had another three-hour wait for the last leg of the journey. We did not do much at theDubai Airport. We went browsing but could not find anything to buy. The flight from Dubai to Manchester, also on Emirates, was almost full. We were seated next to this friendly English gentleman who shared his month-long motorcycle expedition in Vietnam. The service by the Emirates staff was equally good.

The touch-screen individual monitor. Incidentally, one of the available channels showed the Top Gear episode where they were on a motorcycle trek from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. This apparently inspired our neighbour on the plane to do the same thing.

One of the snacks provided by Emirates

When we arrived in Manchester, we were ushered to queue for almost 30minutes before we got our passports stamped. I could not understand that there were only four counters avaiable for non-EU passports, which required longer time to process, compared to the ten counters forEU passport holders, who were moving very fast.

The new UK landing card. And I noticed the Immigration Authority is now called UK Border Agency

Finally, after almost 24 hours leaving Brunei, we reached the hotel in Manchester, where I was glad to get to to freshen up….

 

Holiday

It’s the start of my 2-week long holiday! It’s my first long holiday in a long while.

I am away for a large part of my holiday somewhere and I am not sure if I am going to have any access to the internet, so expect some interrupted service.

Until then, enjoy the festivities.

 

13th NBT Treasure Hunt

After winning the inter-function badminton tournament at work on Friday, the week was capped with a top 10 finish in the 13th NBT Treasure Hunt.

I felt this year’s Treasure Hunt was better than last year. I was a bit miffed a bit though as the first part of the Hunt involved us driving to 13 locations just to get our log bool stamped, with

some extra bit of activities at three locations. In Gadong, there was a 5-question ‘signboard’ hunting and both at Bukit Shahbandar and Pantai Muara, there were 2 challenges to be completed. On top of this, we were to break the clues and bring three treasures back to the mid-point control. And yeah, there was also a Rebus-type of challenges.

In the second part, we went to Kiulap to do a 15-question ‘signboard’ hunt. This probably came from experience, but I had to admit they were a bit too easy. We were out of Kiulap in less than half an hour.

I was not expecting a good position, as we messed up our challenges. We lost at least 5 precious points from these failed challenges. We were banking on our hunt answers to get into a good position.

Last year, we came in the 8th position; for the two years before that, we got third place back-to-back. I was hoping that we would at least better last year’s position. And we did just that. We won the seventh place! And we won two return economy tickets to Singapore, though there were four of us in the team.

See this, 7th place for team no. 79…… so 779! That’s my car number!

 

Champions Finally….

I just have to announce it to the world that…..

….. we are the BLNG Badminton Champions!

Well, it is quite a hollow feeling to gloat as I only contributed one point to the team. And that one solitary point came from the loss of the only game I played during the tournament.

Organisational-wise, I am glad that the tournament passed with no major incidents. The changes that we made to this year’s tournament were well-received by many people.

My colleagues and I have some ideas on how we would want to organise it next year. But until, I am gonna savour and milk the title that we’ve won this year.

 

More about the Flu…..

I was sent this link, which summarises the Influenza A H1N1 infections globally.

Looking at the many statistics that are available on the site, I’m quite surprised with the situations that Brunei has found itself in.

1. The country with the highest growth of cases in the past ten days.
2. The country with the highest density of cases per 10,000 of the population.

These are the two records that I’d imagine the Ministry of Health of Brunei would rather not have.

However, we shall not panic. We have to ensure that we are protecting ourselves against the infection by practicing better personal hygiene (wash hands regularly, for example) and better social etiquette (cover mouth when sneezing and coughing, refrain from handshakings). As the Medical Officer told us during the Influenza A H1N1 briefing at work yesterday, at this time, we just have to be frank and honest about protecting ourselves from getting infected. We shall not get offended if someone refuses to shake your hands or if someone wears the facemask while talking to you.

 

Say What?

As heard….

1. On Brunei’s only private radio station…..

“The group will also be promotioning their album at the Expo……”

2. During an Influenza A (H1N1) briefing…..

Someone asked about “tamilflu”, instead of tamiflu……….

 

Irresponsible Driving….

What could be worse (or isn’t it just as bad) than talking on the phone while driving?

It’s reading while driving. It may sound unbelievable, but that was what I witnessed just a few days ago. I was on the faster, right lane, when I caught up with a car which was driven much slower than mine. After a while, the car moved over and as I went past the car, I noticed the driver was reading his newspaper. He had folded them and actually placed it on the steering wheel.

It’s stupid, dangerous and irresponsible. It’s good thing to read, but do it appropriately and safely.

 

Work’s Badminton Tourney

It’s going to be a busy week for me. Wel, not really busy at work, but rather it’s going to be a busy week after work.

For the fourth year, some colleagues and I are organising the company-wide badminton tournament. It’s taking place on Monday, Wednesday and Friday of this week. More than 100 players from eight teams are taking part. This year, we have introduced some changes to the format of the tournament. For the first time ever, mens’ single matches are introduced. We’ve reduced the number of teams from ten to eight. Also, the tournament is also taking part over a period of three days, rather than the ten that we had in previous years.

In tonight’s match, my team met the Combo team. The team won but I lost my men’s double game. It was quite disappointing but it was only the first match. Hope the next matches are better.

The last game of tonight’s matches finished after 9.00pm. It’s going to be like this for the next five days.

 

2nd July revisited…..

Right after lunch on my birthday, the Lunchgang came to the office. I kinda knew what was going to happen, but yeah, I did not want to look too eager so I played along!

So Kakarrot came in with a fancy paperbag and I fished out the contents of the bag……..

Yup… it’s my birthday card and a present from the Lunchgang!

The inside of the card…. A little too cryptic. And apparent–ly I liked mussels…..

WW asked not to put this picture, but I ignored her. Don’t ask why she was at a distance from us.

Hmmm……. What’s your wish, eh?

If only we had a real DJ set in the lab….!

Yeah, I got a set of noise-cancelling headphones, which I somehow hinted during one of our lunch outing. I did not even realise I said it, but Jester heard something about getting a noise-cancelling headphone set. Thanks guys, it is going to be helpful during those long-hours of flights.

Later in the evening, we had a small celebration at home. And I got my first birthday cake of the year! Thanks to whoever got it for me.

Thanks to Redlob for the bday gift. And thanks too to all well-wishers, either through Facebook, this blog, sms, email and phonecall.

 

33!