These are some of the books we got from our trip to London. Faris had a fair share this time. He wanted to read everything about Liverpool – Tommy Smith, Kevin Keegan and Alan Hansen autobiographies.
Yours truly got a couple of books written by Khaled Hosseini, the Kite Runner, which we have seen the movie but my friend told me its better to read the book as well, and A Thousand Splendid Suns which was also recommended to be read. Also I am going to read about Barrack Obama and Lewis Hamilton. 
The drive back was quite smooth. It took 3 hours to drive from Calais in France to Holland via Belgium. As I said there was no traffic jam along the way except for some slow traffic in Belgium and Holland because of snow and falling hails. Road speed limit in France Motorways is 130 km/h and 120 km/h in both Belgium and Holland. Roads can be quite slippery and one need to be quite alert as car pile up could easily occur in this condition.
Roads here are well built, the tarmacs are quite porous which allow water to move to the side quickly. This is to prevent stranded water on the Motorway that can cause what is term ‘hydroplaning’ which is a common cause of accidents in Brunei when it rains. Hydroplaning or aquaplaning by a road vehicle occurs when a layer of water builds between the rubber tires of the vehicle and the road surface, leading to the loss of traction and thus preventing the vehicle from responding to steering, braking or accelerating. Highway engineers often mitigate hydroplaning through measures which allow water to drain readily from the road. Here’s our short video of our drive back, you can see the hails and snow starting to build up on the road quickly.
After breakfast, the kids and my Missus went to Waterstones at Oxford Street. We left London at 11 am and luckily no traffic jam along the way. It’s Easter Monday so the roads were a bit quiet. It took us 1.5 hours from Central London to reach Folkestone but we have to wait 45 minutes for our EuroTunnel train. Actually we could hop onto the train straight away but I guess the tunnel operator also wanted people to wait and stop over at the duty free shops and spend some money; otherwise these shops would have run out of business in no time. There’s an MPH store in there, so yet another load of books to buy.
Here’s a photo showing cars lining up to enter the train and the view inside the train. While inside, you would just stay in your car while the train run its course. The whole trip normally takes 20 minutes to cross the English Channel. Once on the other side, it was another 3 hours to reach home. All in all it took us 6 hours from Central London to reach Holland – not bad.
We thought we should have proper Malay breakfast before heading back to Holland yesterday. Bonda Café was still closed and so we tried out the Lagenda Restaurant at Holiday Villa Hotel, a Malaysian run hotel at Leinster Garden, located between Bayswater and Paddington. I found out that the going rate at this hotel is about £90 per night for a standard room and £180 pounds for a family room.
The breakfast was quite expensive; it is after all a restaurant in a hotel. We had 4 nasi lemak, 1 roti canai and 5 drinks (tea tarik). Cost us 54 pounds! You will probably get half the price at Bonda Café and a tenth in Brunei!
This is funny, because of its size this car managed to park in this tightest of space.
Last night we had a meal at a restaurant nearby with one of our uncle who is here from Paris. He is visiting his son who is a resident at Brunei hall. The Al Arez restaurant was a bit crowded and we had to wait a while before getting our table. We had been here twice before but always in the quieter period for lunch.
We thought we left cold Holland for warmer weather in UK. But today was as cold as it could be. Temperature was hovering at 2 Deg. C and snow fell for a couple of hours. And this is supposed to be the traditional warm Easter weekend, the official start of Spring. We took a video of the snow falling down behind the Hartland Road house.
It's 6 o'clock in London. An early rise today - Sepang F1 is starting in an hour. After last week start of the F1 which was full on incidents with only 7 cars left to finish the race, today's race will be equally exciting as rains and thunderstorms are expected. Ferraris will be desperate to score points, will need what ever help there can get, usually from the corner of F1 authorities. And not surprisingly to me when I read that the Maclaren duo Hamilton and Kovalainen, who are leading the championship, have been hit by a 5 position penalty for the starting grid, accused of being too slow on the outlap. So we will see if this will help Ferrari to score points today.
We will be driving back to Holland tomorrow. Today we plan to go to Waterstones in Oxford Street to buy some books. Even though the temperature has been unusually cold for early Spring, that hasn't dampened people from flocking to Oxford Street. But then there were just far too many people on the street(see photo).
It's Saturday. After breakfast at Bonda Cafe (Nahar), me and Faris headed for White Hart Lane to watch the game between Spurs and Portsmouth. The girls in the meantime headed to Oxford Street to do their own bits. We have ordered the football tickets back in Holland and paid a fortune for that. Spurs tickets are very hard to get as all their home matches are always sold out weeks before the actual game. Even today's game which was telecast live, it was still a sold out. We got one of the more expensive tickets, £48, which is at the Lower tier of the West Stand. However, because the tickets could only be sourced from those who are willing to sell back, and of course the handling agent also need to make a cut, we paid 200 Euros each for these tickets.
Nevertheless, the experience was amazing especially for Faris who has never been to a Premier League game before (it's his birthday present!). We were already there quite early just in case, but the place and the souvenier shops were already crowded. Inside the stadium, it was all singing and chanting, Spurs fans were very loud. The same can be said of Portsmouth's fans. It was quite cold though, people here were well prepared for that. I can't say we were that prepared for the hailstones that came everynow and then during the match (see the video). Quite weird conditions.
In the end it was a very enjoyable game to watch - obviously Spurs winning 2-0 did help. Darren Bent and Jamie O'hara scored in succession. Players like Jonathan Woodgate, Tom Huddlestone, Robbie Keane and Dimitar Bebatov who are the key players are hugely impressive and bigger than what we used to see on TV. After the match we had quite a bit of time to spend in the Spurs shop. So that was today. Started at 10 am, we reached back at where we stayed at 6pm. Here are some short videos we took showing the game, the freakish weather and the celebration after the first goal. 
Today we spent the whole afternoon in Regent and Oxford Streets.
Three things I learnt today.
3) It can rain hails in London in early spring. Agree. That was what happened today and we had to take shelter for sometimes to get away from the painful rain of hailstones. You can see the small white stuff on the pavement - that's hails.
It’s good to catch up again and meet our cousins in London. Moments like these are rare but useful, for the kids to meet up and get more acquainted with their cousins, and for the grown ups to catch up with what’s happening back home. It may sound weird but sometimes being away from home is a form of needed ‘escapism’.
Its the start of a long Easter weekend and 3 weeks school holiday. In Holland there are only 7 public holidays in a year of which two of them fall this weekend. Most of Europe have Friday and Monday off for Good Friday and Easter Monday. This year Easter coincides with Maulid Nabi or Prophet's birthday which is public holiday in Brunei. In some MiddleEast countries, they have up to 2 public holidays for Maulid and they continue with the Easter break. So it is a much longer break for these people.
Today, our Dr Rock left his job after working for 19 years. In those many years his passion for rocks and real geology touches the boundary of madness. Amongst others was to be the first of his countrymen in obtaining a PhD in Geology. At times he could be seen as a lonely figure by the side of the road hammering at rock and in somewhat some ritual feat engaging himself in a fascinating and complex jigsaw puzzle – rocks and geology. His involvement in the local oil industry warrants more than just being a well-known name mooted by all young geologists who have been fascinated by his obsession. No wonder it is a sad day for all his colleagues today. But things have to move on. This probably is one of the many steps that increasing number of Bruneians are doing now, expectation are changing. Priorities do evolve as the situation around you change. The world is not static. Otherwise we are in danger of being too static. The face of Brunei is changing. Whether we like it or not, we have to take things like this as a positive change.
Here I write about the famous Belgian waffle, the one in the photo is what we had in a small cafe in The Hague. Waffle is the Dutch (and the Belgian) version of pancake. It is normally sold by vendors along the street during winter and served hot. Eating one does helps to beat the cold temperature briefly. A ‘waffle iron’ made up of two hot plates is used to cook it and give it the distinctive pattern. Normally the outside gets cooked quickly making it crisp while leaving the inside tender and light. The ingredients are simple like any pancake - flour, sugar, salt, milk, eggs and some butter. On the street, it is already prepared and only waiting to be warmed.
Faris, our youngest, is a Liverpool fan. He only realised a few weeks ago that he shares the same birthday as Fernando Torres, the Liverpool hit man, who is on a remarkable scoring streak right now. Torres is now the second top scorer in the Premier League and is the first Liverpool player since Robbie Fowler back in 1996 to score 20 league goals in a season. And yet there are 8 more games for him to play.
Here's Faris busy filling up his blog. Most of the time he collects his ideas from the Liverpool website and searched for photos from Google before writing his blog. In this way he can keep track of Liverpool progress. Here's his blog. http://liverpoolfc2.blogspot.com/
It’s an unwritten rule in this place that during Saturday and Sunday you don’t bang around and make loud noises too early in the morning. People are still asleep. So today I have to wait till 10 am before starting to roll out the ever reliable electric mower to do what it’s meant for – mow the lawn - finally after weeks of waiting for the weather window. This mower, bought in 1996, is still working admirably except for a few bits of metal and plastic on the sides that have fallen off.
The outside temperature was just nice at 10 deg. C then. The last time the grass got tendered was in November last year. Looking at the amount of heap collected, the grass has not grown a lot, stunted by the cold weather. It has been bitterly cold this Winter but still hotter than a normal average, as everybody telling us so. Somebody out there still wants to make a point about global warming theory and to make the point claim this and that Summer was the hottest ever, the Winter was the warmest since record began and so on. What ever it is last winter to me was very cold, subzero temperatures on a number of occasion with lakes frozen at times.
Back to the leaves, remember, leaves and organic stuffs have to be put into a big bin which are then collected once a week like normal garbage. No open burning is allowed. This is such a no brainer and an obvious thing to do. The collected organics are transformed to compost on an industrial scale and no open burning means the neighbourhood is not choked with smoke whatsoever.
After all the effort put this morning, it’s nice to see the compound now clean and tidy. The goal post is also back in shape after being wrecked by the strong winds during the last few weeks. Together with Faris, we had a bit of kicking the ball after that. Temperature rose to about 15 Deg. C by noon. Faris and Fiz later decided to do some jogging.
The F1 season starts again today. Hopefully it's much better than last year when the McLaren and Ferrari spy case and the fall-out between Alonso and Maclaren dominated the news. I always thought the ruling on the spy case was biased to favour Ferrari. Even though the real culprit was somebody from Ferrari but somehow the council seemed to think otherwise. On the other hand Renault doing similar thing on McLaren didn't get penalise at all. But I guess all these 'scandals' are also part of the plot to make this sport more lively.
Last Sunday was uneventful. After a long rest during the winter was planning to do some gardening, mow the lawn and clean-up the compound. But alas, the weather was not permitting. It rained from morning till the evening. And it was also windy and temperature was quite cold. Holland is taking its toll as well from the strong winds that's hitting the UK right now. This is the photo of the front of our house on Sunday. Looked gloomy but at least the hedges stays green during the winter whereas most of the big trees outside are still bare without any leaves at all. In the next few weeks these will change, a major transformation, where leaves will start to come out and flowers blossom. Also next week Kukenhof will open, this is the biggest open-air flower park in the world.
I will tone down a bit. The low light of the 'meeting' last week was the recurring excuse of ‘it’s in the plan, it’s already been looked into, and it’s going to be implemented, and so on’. Some of these excuses are for some serious in-actions on the part of the responsible organizations resulting in massive problems and public nuisances. These slip-ups if were to be discussed in the British Parliament the responsible parties would get a massive mauling from the other members of Parliament.
This week I spent some times in the Lab to do some experiments. Don’t want to bore you with the details. And that reminded me of an interesting discussion on the web on ‘brain drain’ in Brunei. What's interesting to know is that we have a ‘lost generation’ of past student achievers who seemed to ‘disappear’ and are not very prominent in the present Government set-up.
Today seen Euro reaches its highest value ever compare to other currencies. The trend has been steadily increasing ever since its introduction as real currency back in 2002. It was started on par with American dollar, fluctuated for a short while, before climbing back again. Today it is trading at US$ 1.548, the highest ever in its history.
It’s the election fever right now in the States. One continent that suffered the most experimenting with democracy is Africa. This 700-page book took a while to read last year. It is literally a history book, the 50 years of Africa’s experimentation with nationhood and of having own leaders dictating their own destinies.
Today Malaysians voted in the general election. It was quite interesting to follow the results, to see who have lost and who have suddenly appeared out of the blue. This supreme form of democratic process is, although can be considered to have reached acceptable maturity and grassroots reach in Malaysia, can still be dogged by all sort of complex and side issues - ethnic, religious, wealth gap, personal, dynastic clan and so on. So not only it is an interesting and just process to choose a government but more often than not the process is coloured with all sort of ‘interesting’ sideshows.
This is the 12th general election since the first one was held in 1959. The election this time involves 222 parliamentary and 505 state assembly seats. This time BN, the ruling party, only won 135 compare to 198 seats four years ago, while the opposition won 82 compare to just 20 seats last time around. The same story with the state assembly where the opposition quadrupled their seats from 51 to 195. Apart from Kelantan, the opposition won 4 more states - Selangor, Perak, Kedah and Penang. It’s been a wind of change.
Hazimah went to a birthday party of her classmate today. The place called Dutch Water Dreams is located in Zoetermeer not far from the Hague about 15 minutes by car from our home. It is an amazing place - in this flattest land on Earth the Dutch are very ingenious in coming up with all sort of things for leisure and activities. See the website.
The complex was completed in late 2006, housing an artificial Olympic wild water rafting and canoeing circuit, the exact copy of the one being built in China for the Olympic Games. For now it is mainly used for training purposes by European rafting teams. The other big thing is an indoor wave boarding centre which contains 3 flow riders. This is what Zim and the other kids tried. They were taught how to surf on the artificial waves which are generated by flow rider machine. For beginners, the water flow speed is moderate to suit their needs. The other two flow riders are much stronger and are for the more skillful players. See the video.
Today the temperature outside was about 11 deg. Celcius, a bit cloudly but no rain. It’s the start of a quiet weekend – except for a birthday party that Zim wants to attend in Zoetermeer, Fiz wanting to watch movie and the lawn that need to be mowed finally.
Fiz got her first pair of glasses on Wednesday. Surprise surprise…. all this time her world has been a blurry one…she needs a minus 1.5 degree on the lens.
In the LegCo today, questions were raised regarding lack of local news coverage. Sometimes ago (a month ago I think) I watched RTB news online. It was quite long – 45 minutes. I jotted down the time split between each items and I thought is useful to share the statistic since I realised the very subject was discussed in the LegCo today.
There are four main river basins in Brunei: Temburong, Belait, Tutong and Brunei. The Temburong, the smallest of the rivers, drains a catchment area of about 430 km2 (nearly the whole of the Temburong district), directly into the Brunei Bay.
Brunei used to have a small 10km rail which was operated by the oil company. It was mainly to provide direct access through the thick jungles between Seria and Badas to the water pumping station located upstream of the Belait River. 
It’s a good practice (is also a sunnah or Prophet’s tradition) to eat some fruits before eating.
The library in Dutch is called bibliotheek. There are altogether 19 libraries in the city of The Hague, a city of nearly half a million people. We went to check out the biggest one which is right at the end of the main shopping street (the Spui) in the City Centre. This striking white building in the photo is the Hague Central Library. The building is part of the City Hall/Library complex, designed by an American architect.
Basically this is what I could gathered. Cheese is made by heating milk and adding a coagulating agent referred to as rennet or enzymes, producing the cheese product. The majority of cheese manufacturers now are using vegetable rennet and synthetic rennet manufactured in laboratories from various fungi microbial rennet.
2) The rennet derived from permissible animals (e.g., cows, sheep and goats) that have not been slaughtered according to the Sharīaah. There is a difference of opinion amongst the four madhabs. The position in the Shafī’ī and Mālikī schools, is that such rennet is impure, and the cheese derived from it also impure
After the Amsterdam tour on Saturday, we brought our visiting relatives to Beverwijk for the usual Shoarma meal experience. First we had lentil soup, which also originates from the Middle East The soup usually contain vegetables but can also be made with meat stock. Then the meal itself served with all sort of sauce and dressings.
While in Cambridge, I also finished reading this book written by Reza Aslan. The book got raving reviews such as…. thoroughly an engaging personal exploration…an opening up of knowledge too long buried…and so on http://www.rezaaslan.com/nogodbutgod.html
