A friend says, “you just need an excuse to get another blog”. Well, he’s right. I thus present adriannatan.com, which will be my new home for all writing about business, tech, entrepreneurship, the tech business, the startups I’m trying to run, and other things like that. I aim to try to write an essay there [...]
A crash. A breakdown. 200 kilometres in the opposite direction. Andrew and I were left without our native son, and we screwed it up in as many ways as it was possible to. Yercaud more than made up for it, though.
There comes a point in every traveller’s life when the experience of going to a foreign place no longer feels the same, nor as exciting as it used to be when she first began. Cities blur into similar skylines, restaurants and bars. Non-cities remain precisely that—good in small doses but rarely more. The magic of travel fades into a succession of airports, suited executives and boring business hotels, or a kaleidoscope of lobster-red package tourists and concrete bungalows on dirty beaches. Even I could not avoid that fate.
If you looked on a map, the holy southern Indian city is merely 185 kilometres from Madras. If you took a bus, it would take just under five hours. If you travelled by car, perhaps three and a little bit. Since we took an autorickshaw, our estimated travel time was something like eight hours. Or before nightfall; whichever came first.
There are slower ways of seeing India. On a buffalo. On a “two wheeler”, a motorcycle, stacked to great heights with assorted luggage until you can’t see what’s in front of you. Or on foot, “by walk”, like a sadhu with no clothes on.
We travelled by autorickshaw.
There I was, sipping my welcome drink in a posh Ubud resort, when I almost choked on it.
I was accompanying friends as they sought the best wedding venue in Bali. Concerned about the monsoon, they asked the hotel manager why it hadn’t rained at all in the week we were there. Without batting an eyelid, she informed us there would be no rain for the entire month. “You see, Julia Roberts is in town.
One of the projects that’s been super fun to work on has been the birth of the Klang Valley’s first homemade ice cream outfit, The Last Polka. M and E run the ice cream empire, I help out with the other bits, like the… tasting of the ice cream. And the copywriting. What started as [...]
It’s no secret I’ve lost interest in writing a blog — I’m not sure when that happened. It just did. Uni came and went. Life and love took me places. I got caught up in my projects, and soon the fun that blogging once was paled in comparison with real life. I still wanted to [...]
A year in review 2009 was a year of many things: it was the year of change and death. More so it was the year of change because of death. Many famous people died that year; my grandfather, who was not famous, somehow also did the same. In April I called him from a phone [...]
Some friends from Turkey came to visit this past weekend. I had a great time hanging out with Melissa and Emirhan in Antalya when I stopped by en route to Istanbul (from Damascus), so I naturally returned the favour and put them up at my place. After three dinners (not at the same time, albeit [...]
Beirut Downtown Beirut was swanky. Saifi Village was strange. I had to duck into a hair salon and get my hair cut by a gay man in Ashrafieh to avoid the guy following me on his scooter, and the other guy trying to sell me drugs. All I wanted was a steak. Walking around Beirut, [...]
Weddings, funerals and fortune tellers depress me. Weddings, I’ve been known to say, make me linger too long on the idea of happiness. Not that it’s ever been bleak on the romantic front. The wedding type of happy simply seems worlds apart from the love type of happy to me, but then I was the [...]