Wednesday, January 16, 2008

First Post of the New Year

Welcome 2008, and hello to my loyal readers (mum) and bored colleges around Toyama. I’m back in Japan feeling refreshed and relaxed after my 2 week holiday in Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore.

The holiday with Jose, Jake, Joy and Andrea was great, I’ve posted pictures on flickr and facebook and I’ll be darned if I have to post them here too.

The best thing about the trip was the friendly and funny kids we kept running into in Cambodia. Sure they were trying to sell us things, but they made me laugh so much I wanted to buy from them in the end. They weren’t begging, they were little entrepreneurs in the making. I learned a lot about buying and negotiation from them!

Singapore was basically a shopping mall, but that was ok because I needed some new jeans and a jumper. Jose is a very good shopping partner.

Malaysia was cool. It probably meant the most to Jake to go here, as he got to catch up with all his old mates from the days when he used to live here. Great beaches on Langkawi. Kuala Lumpur is cleaner and better organized than any other big city in the region, but I think when I went there I’d rather have been on the beach than in a big city. I think the east coast of the west part of Malaysia might be worth exploring in the future, as we had to stick to the west coast due to the rainy season affecting the other side.

If that sounded a bit boring, it’s probably because a) it was, and b) I’ve been giving presentations to my students about this holiday every day this week and now I’m doing it in my free time too! But I wanted to make a note of it here for the future.

By the by this month I have just finished Noam Chompsky’s What We Say Goes and I’ll finish Richard Branson’s Losing My Virginity and a book on NLP before the end of January.