SOUL SCRIBBLES

I went fishing in Norway last week; at a fjord near Bergen, a city on the west coast of the country, to be exact. The weather was fine; a little chilly despite the temperature recorded at 20°C.  Between the 13 of us, including the captain of the boat, we not only caught five fishes, but also got ourselves a little bit of a tan being in the sun. Jon Erik Steenslid, the Norwegian Seafood Council regional director for South-east Asia, identified the fishes we caught, which were then released into the water after a brief photo taking for keepsake.  The Norwegian Seafood Council arranged for the media trip to enable us to learn more about the Norwegian fisheries industry, especially on two of their biggest exports, namely salmon and trout.  Contrary to popular belief, the salmon we eat at most Japanese restaurants here do not come from Japan but from Norway. In fact, salmon was never part of the Japanese sushi and sashimi menu until the 1980s after a Norwegian seafood deleg...

In kindergarten, I remember singing this English nursery rhyme asking for the rain to “go away, come again another day, little Johnny wants to play”. In the Malay nursery rhyme Bangau oh bangau, however, the frog calls for rain as a snake wants to eat it. With the heatwave that we are currently facing, we would be more likely to sing (or in this case, pray) for the rain to come.  The average temperature here is 27°C, but, in the past month or so, temperatures have soared into the upper 30s. One can check the Meteorological Department’s website, where there is a banner with information on temperatures in 15 or so locations. On Workers Day, for example, the highest temperature recorded was 37.9°C in Kuala Krai, Kelantan. The highest temperature ever recorded in Malaysia was 40.1°C in Perlis in 1998.  The Instaweather application on my iPhone tells me that the temperature may be, say, 33°C but it “feels like 42°C with 9kph winds and humidity of 66 per cent”. I daresay that the ...

My friend and I will be in Bali next week. This will be our first trip to the Indonesian island this year but the seventh in the span of three years. When we told friends that we are heading out to the island yet again, they were surprised. What else is there in Bali that we have not seen? We have visited almost all the tourist attractions on the island, but this has not stopped us from making more trips there.  Our decision to go again is not influenced by the republic’s “Wonderful Indonesia” tourism campaign. I must say that the Indonesian tourism authorities have been aggressive here. I have seen their huge booth at the Food Truck Festival in Putrajaya last February and have also watched and listened to their commercials on the Express Rail Link (ERL) whenever I go to the administrative capital.  And, I believe their investment is paying off. In the first two months of the year alone, 726,625 tourists were in Bali, with Malaysians being the seventh largest group after tou...

Ridesharing services are not new in Malaysia.  I remember way back in 1970s when I was growing up in Johor Baru, they were called kereta sapu or prebet sapu. You share rides with passengers into town in private vehicles. You hail these cars at bus stops (somehow you know how to identify these cars). It will also drop you at the nearest bus stop to your house, not to your doorstep. It did not replace the public transportation services back then. Rather, it complemented them as buses were too few and too far in between. Taxis, too, were scarce.  The services died a natural death when the public transportation sector improved. Some people still used the services to send their children to schools when school bus services were unavailable in their housing areas.  These days, the ridesharing services have taken glamorous names like Uber and GrabCar. You can book these door-to-door services via an application on your mobile phone. Rates are a little bit lower than a metered b...

Those who attended Form 5 in 1979 were the last batch using English as a medium of teaching and learning in schools. Some were introduced to the language at home as their parents spoke English to them while others began learning it at kindergarten back then.  We started spelling in Standard One, while reading and writing comprehension, and dictations were from Standard Three. By Standard Four, we were speaking and writing English quite well. I remember we had comprehension, dictations and spelling until we were in Standard 6. We graduated from saying, “Teacher, teacher, can I go out to pass water?” to “Teacher, may I be excused?”  I was in that 1979 batch. We didn’t have a choice really. We had to learn the language because all subjects, with the exception of Bahasa Malaysia and Agama, were taught in English. We were also fined by our teachers if we spoke Malay outside our Bahasa Malaysia classes. Parents, too, pushed their children to learn the language.  A friend of ...

Earlier this month, a 36-year-old mother was sentenced to a day’s jail and fined RM200 for stealing a 2kg pack of Milo at a supermarket in Kuala Lumpur. The Milo was for her two-year-old child.  Last week, we read about a father of three who was caught shoplifting RM27 worth of food at a hypermarket in Bukit Mertajam. The food was for his hungry children. Instead of turning him to the police, the hypermarket manager offered him a job there and money to help him out.  Facebook, too, has shared a few stories of compassion for those in similar situations overseas.  One story is of an Alabama cop giving a woman two truckloads of food after she was caught stealing five eggs to feed her starving family. Another is from Miami, where a Miami-Dade county police officer gave a penniless mother, Jessica Robles, a misdemeanour citation instead of hauling her to jail for carting away with US$300 (RM1,200) worth of groceries. The police officer, Vicki Thomas, also bought Robles US$1...

The summer palace in Beijing, China; Sydney Opera House in Australia; Cathedral of Notre Dame in France; Vatican City in Rome, Italy; Blenheim Palace in England; Borobudur and Prambanan Temples in Indonesia; Jeju Island and Lava Tubes in South Korea; and the walled town of Carcassonne near Toulouse, France, have something in common. They are all listed as world heritage sites by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).  Four sites in Malaysia are also on Unesco’s list; two are natural — the Gunung Mulu National Park and Kinabalu Park; and two cultural — the Historic Cities of the Straits of Malacca, namely Malacca and George Town, and the Archaeological Heritage of the Lenggong Valley.  It was on these visits that I realised that a site need not be ancient to be on Unesco’s list (Sydney Opera House vis-a-vis the Cathedral of Notre Dame, for example) but each site tells a story. And, of these ancient sites, I noticed how good the construc...