The inept and dishonorable Malaysian civil service

I have great respect for Mariam Mokhtar the writer...

I am taking the liberty to use her full article here, appended below...
Go ahead and read what she has to say on the Teoh Beng Hock verdict...

Now, just what the hell is an 'open verdict'?

Ok, it is not suicide nor homocide...

For the love of god then, what in the world is it?

A prayer, a resolution, and fish-head curry for dinner

Took advantage of the sunny morning to visit the local shrine for the first prayer of the year...
Sumiyoshi Jinja (Shrine) is situated in the neighborhood, along the route of our morning walks...

The entrance to the shrine is the 'torii', decorated with bamboo plants for the occasion...

Just beyond the torii-entrance is a place to wash hands...
Dangling above the wash area are some amulets(?) to ward off the evil spirits...

Guarding the shrine are two lion-like beasts...
On the right is the beast with its mouth opened, as if saying the word 'Aah'...
On the left, is the closed-mouth beast, as if it is saying 'Umm'...
Apparently, 'Aah' signifies 'birth' while 'Umm', death...  

The humble Sumiyoshi Jinja, embellished with ropes made from rice stalks, and bamboo plants...

I made a resolution to 'listen to my wife and be a kind husband'... 

Back home, I tried to repair the punctured tire of my mountain bike...
I had repaired it some months ago, but had not done a good job...
It was leaking and I had to pump air twice a day whenever I cycled to work...

In the evening, my missus cooked 'o-den' and fish-head curry for dinner...
Delicious...

Noodle-out, noodle-in

The Japanese have a tradition to spend the last day of the year slurping (soba) noodles...
'Toshi-koshi soba' as the Japanese say...
Noodles are long, so to slurp noodles means 'long life'...

Yours truly has always been fond of noodles...
So, naturally on the last day of 2010, slurping noodles it was...

And if there is such a thing call 'toshi koshi soba', there will be a thing call 'toshi ake udon'...
Udon (thick noodles) unlike soba, and is made from wheat as opposed to buckwheat...
It is the specialty of Kagawa (or Sanuki the old-name), hence, 'year-opening thick noodles' it is...
So, for lunch on the first day of 2011, you could have very well caught us merrily slurping on noodles...
Happy long life to you...

Back to a dreary Japan...

Yes, we had a pretty boisterous lunch-party at a friend's house on the 28th...
It was, I'd say, more of a "ladies' party"...
The husbands, the men that is, stayed at the sidelines and watched the ladies yakked and roared...
It was a good opportunity for us husbands, to connect and establish rapport...
And for me, it was particularly refreshing to get to know the children of my friends...
The boys, handsome as they are... and the girls, pretty and charming...
It will be a joy if I can meet them again in the future...

After the party, we took a taxi in the rain to KLIA...
As in most of our travel back to Malaysia, the midnight flight was tiring and taxing on our senses...
How long more can we take this, I sometimes wonder...
Thankfully, we managed to fly back home safely to Japan...
From a pleasant temperature hovering around the high 20s (as in 28 or 29 degrees Celcius) in Malaysia, we were welcomed by a windy 6 degrees at Kansai International...
From there, it was another 5 hours by highway bus before we can get to our front door...
It felt good to be home again, after two weeks of moving around...
But wooh, how cold the house was...
We set the heater thermostat to 18 degrees, but still it felt cold for me...
As in my daily practice, I took my blood pressure before heading for my bath in the evening...
Wooaah... my eyes almost popped out of their sockets when the meter showed 154/92 with a heartbeat of 86...
Was it the greasy, cholestoral-packed food that I so happily gulped down in Malaysia?
Apparently no, as the weight scales showed 62.8 kilograms with 16% fat... (thank god)
My doctor had mentioned that the blood pressure reacts to cold weather, so perhaps my body had yet to adjust to the sudden cold...
Good thing that on the next day, the blood pressure indexes were back to normal at 113/78 with a heartbeat of 72...

The weather forecast is for colder weather on this last day of 2010...
The winds are howling, and there is a layer of ice on the pond...
Good thing, the goldfishes are not frozen yet...
The frigid weather is to continue until early 2011... brrrr...

Anyway, we have been spending our year-end-year-beginning days in Malaysia for the last few years...
Perhaps we may go for new year prayers at the local shrine tomorrow...

Happy new year to anyone reading this post...

Discrimination, you say?

The habit of waking up early in Japan is thankfully not lost even while I'm vacationing in my village...

My missus wakes up before six to catch the morning news in Japan...
I crawl up at about seven, just in time to watch the day gradually brighten up...
And oh my, the singing of the birds... trhe misty morning views... this is as heavenly as I could wish for...

Normally for breakfast, we would have some hot Japanese green tea (brought from Japan) and wheat bread purchased from the minimarket the previous day...
I bought honey, 'Madu Tualang dari Cameron Highlands' for the first time...
It has a faint sourish(?) flavor and I like it...

We'd sit at the table in the back of my brother's house, cherishing the early morning calm as we watch the village folks pass by on their motorbikes and motorcars...

You know, I was really thrilled to witness the invasion of cyber space into my ancestral village...
The initial prospects and anticipation of being able to link up through the net within the comforts of my village soon turn into bewilderment...

My niece had contracted Celcom Broadband and man, talking about being frustrated waiting for the 'broadband' to link up...

Of course, I'd be foolish just to sit there, waiting for Celcom to do its work... While trying to hook up, repeatedly, that is, I listen to the radio... I enjoy the views from a distance through my binoculars... and at times, I read the papers...

Once it took me almost two hours to give up trying...
Thing is, I would have enjoyed updating my blog more often if the connection had been better...
So much for 'broadband' in Malaysia...

Anyway, my missus and I were very honored to be invited by an old classmate to his house to celebrate Christmas...
We haven't seen each other for 35 years and just some days earlier, We accidentally bumped into each other at a tosai shop...
So, there we were with his family and their friends, listening to Christmas songs and chatting about work... about family life and how one of his daughters love sushi...

Soon, another old classmate came along and it was fun to catch up...
This guy grows orchids as a hobby and has two young lovely daughters...
The conversation was pleasant and cordial...
Till that episode that almost made me, cringed...

My friend had sent his daughter to a Chinese school...
And in his daughter's own words, she 'geram' when her (Chinese) friends bullied her in school...
Apparently, her dad then transfered her to a national school when she was in Standard Four...

So, there you are... the discrimination in Chinese schools...
I don't know why, but I felt somewhat bad for the girl that such a thing happened...
But I suppose that discrimination occurs everywhere... even in schools in Japan...
Still, somehow at the back of my mind, I thought to myself...
Now, if the Chinese Malaysians are so inclined to voice out how bad racial discrimination in Malaysia is, they should first watch their own backyard...

The mother of this bright little girl is Javanese...
Her dad is of the Punjabi lineage...
Just imagine... she speaks Punjabi and probably Javanese as well...
Her English is super fluent and I suppose her Bahasa is equally good...
Put in Mandarin, and can we envisage what kind of Malaysian we will have in her when she grows up?

I say, when she asked for a transfer, that Chinese school should have conducted an investigation and should have reprimanded the culprits (if found guilty)...
Now, we can only feel sorry for yet another case of lost opportunity in cultivating inter-community goodwill, among other positives, that is...