ElephantCamelCow

By popagandhi | Published: 29 September, 2009

home decoration for people with no artistic bone in their bodies

ElephantCamelCow - the mural on my wall in KL

Befriend an artistic person, especially if it’s the inimitable Jason Li of iheartrecession and iheartbrown (Barcelona).

Smoke shisha with him (Dubai, en route to Saudi Arabia).

Promise to have his babies (Dubai).

Invite him to visit you (KL).

Several beers and a nice dinner = Free mural and paint job. (KL)
Happiness (my room).

Each panel stands for a region I’ve had a particular affinity towards. Elephant/dog, oddly enough, is Thailand/Indochina. Camel and castle is, of course, the Middle East. Spaceship and cow (or, Second Coming of Cow), represents India — and err, India’s gleaming future? Space beneath each is to be filled with my best pictures from each region. I want to do squares of canvas prints, but… at $50 a piece, it’s understandably taking some time.

Other things which have been taking time: all my online endeavours. I’ve been quite far behind on both Popagandhi and Fortylove. A week shy of my 24th birthday, I’ve been spent most of the last few months in some kind of an existential re-evaluation. I sometimes wake up thinking, no, wishing, I was in Beirut or Damascus or in a mountain somwhere, but hot, musty, humid tropical Southeast Asia is now home, as in a home I live in, along with all the adult responsibilities of rent, education loans, insurance, and business.

My friend Lainie, the uber-talented designer, recently relocated to Melbourne. We hung out on my frequent trips to KL back in the day, and the many parties at the house meant I was fairly familiar with the house and all the people in it. I took over her room shortly after. I live in Kuala Lumpur now (okay, to be more specific, Petaling Jaya), most days, and commute to Singapore and other parts of Asia in between. There are several good reasons.

First, so that I could live, for the first time, in the same city as my girlfriend. We chalked up so much SIN-KUL and LON-DXB mileage, and had a lot of fun doing so, that it appeared the only way to avoid bankruptcy was to live in the same place. (Okay, okay, I kid — it really was that my poor heart had no way of doing long distance anything, any longer.)

Second, AirAsia. Living in the home base of the best Asian low cost carrier is a definite plus — we’ve already gone to Taipei for under US$100 return, and our next few holidays are, I can safely say, planned around AirAsia’s promotional fares. They’re my favourite carrier. I admire their vision. I love how they link me to all the destinations that are handy for a. going home to Singapore b. going back to south India c. travelling all over Southeast Asia d. visiting the obscure destinations I seem to enjoy e. heading back into the Middle East, which I will, at some point.

Third, the food. Living in KL has some fantastic perks. The local food that’s available is cheaper, tastier, and also far more varied than the local food we get back in Singapore, which, as a poll on the ground will indicate, is now becoming increasingly… inedible. Not sure what’s up, but a combination of rapid development, soulless food courts, and the older generation of hawkers dying out (and being replaced by people who don’t know what they’re doing) definitely has something to do with that.

Fourth, I love this city. I really really do. If your knowledge of KL is only restricted to KL city — and all its horrible taxi drivers and tourist traps — you don’t know this place at all. Instead, the disorganized jumble of hotspots within the Klang Valley, many of them largely residential, like Bangsar, Petaling Jaya, Subang, Klang, come together to form a city that’s never short of things to do, and never short of great people to be around.

Fifth. The girl, the girl and the girl. She’s pretty amazing.

For all its disadvantages (terrible traffic, and the nightmare of public transportation) and political shenanigans, this city is, essentially, not difficult for me to assimilate into, since it’s not different at all from where I grew up (with the notable exception of… infrastructure). I enjoy living here. I live with really cool people who have been my friends for some time — in the self-styled hippie commune we call /SLANT (it used to stand for all the people who lived here, past and present… but no prizes for guessing what the acronym also represents). The cost of living is low, I still earn in foreign currencies, and the exchange rate is good to me. I’m also continually inspired by all the wonderful people I’ve met here. I said on Twitter some nights ago that whereas Singapore has no shortage of passionate, talented people either, it appears as if the ones in KL possess a certain attitude that’s markedly different — one that has them pursue their art with seemingly little care for conforming to expectations of “career”. That many of them make wonderful careers out of their passions. The arts scene is small but active, there are always great shows to go to, and great projects to be involved with. My decision to base my projects here, both personal and professional, is one I will not regret. I commute to Singapore regularly for some other work.

“So, what exactly do you do for a living?”

I’m not really sure how to answer that. If this were an elevator pitch, mine would read:

I write and I photograph (60/40). I have been for some time. What do I write and shoot? Travel stories, food stories, documentary-style stories. For whom? Magazines. Books. How can you do this too? I’ll tell you some day. I run a Europe/Middle East travel short film site in my spare time (although video editing is not my forte, so some time to update). I travel. I eat. I’m now re-evaluating career options. The economy isn’t great for what I do at the moment, which makes writing/shooting commercial/lifestyle work more viable than the human interest work I love. I’m happy to do the commercial/lifestyle work, but I’ve reached the point where I feel like it’s not going to change anybody’s life, not even mine, although I love the lifestyle. I’ve always wanted to startup my own tech thing. This is what I am doing right now, running two of my own gigs out of KL, out of Singapore. It has something to do with travel. And tech. And travel tech. I still write and shoot, but only when it’s something I really care for. I’m also writing a novel about post-war Malaya.

Short answer: a combination of all the things I love and am good at, brought together by two important things — that I don’t have to wake up to an alarm clock every morning, or need to be in any specific location everyday. That’s all I’ve really wanted (in addition to being super fantabulously successful), and I think it’s working out.

So, KL. I’m quite happy to live here for some stretch of time. To prove it, I bought myself a stove and an oven. Although I still need a bed-frame. I also need to bloody learn Cantonese and Malay… and how to drive. The quicker the better.

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Trip Notebook

By popagandhi | Published: 15 September, 2009

Staying

Beirut: 17 April
Pension Al-Nazih Very small, not much atmosphere, but clean and friendly (once you get to know them). Two dorms — one female, one male, 5 beds each. US$12/night. Total: 6 x US$12 = $72

Damascus: 23 April
Sednaya, Syria Al-Rabie Hotel Ramshackle old house in old Damascus, situated in one of the oldest houses in the city (and we know Damascus is… very, very old). Charming little place, though practically creaking. Dorm with 4 beds. 600 Syrian pounds. Includes breakfast. Shisha/hookah available in the lobby. Hard beds. Probably best place to meet travellers (of all stripes: general demographics were between 21-55, Europeans, Japanese and Australians. Families.) 1 x 600 SYP = US$13

Al-Haramein HotelJust down the row from Al-Rabie, carved pretty much in the same vein; same type of house, clientele, and services, prices. Shower in basement: if you never saw yourself precariously tottering down several flights of stairs in a several centuries old house, you will, at the Al-Haramein. I’d still pick this over Al-Rabie, only because the Al-Rabie’s beds were rock hard and it was pretty noisy at night.2 x 500 SYP = US$22.60

(Stayed with my Syrian-Russian friends, the wonderful Kayyali family, for the rest of Damascus. 2 days turned quickly into 2 weeks, with their home-made vodkas, Russian farm parties, and superb Syrian hospitality.)

Palmyra: 26 April
Wow, what a shitty town. What a shitty town so close to fabulous ruins. That’s why anybody even comes here, I guess (and why the town got so shitty). Law of Circular Destruction in the developing world (think: Vang Vieng, Laos).

Baal Shamin Hotel Set a little behind the main strip, I booked for a dorm bed in a 4-bed dorm but as the only guest, had the hotel to myself. Not that it was much of a hotel. But you can always count on the manager (Ali? Mohammed?) making a pot of shai every time you come downstairs, and sitting you down for shai, TV and small talk. 2 x 300 SYP = US$13

Kraks des Chevaliers: 28 April
Bebers Hotel the only hotel here as far as I can see. Amazing views right cross the castle. Met a tour group in Palmyra (I don’t do tours, but if I did, I’d do an Intrepid trip. I’ve crossed paths with lots of Intrepid groups all around the world, and their guides are friendly types and unusually obsessive about what they do), so off I went to Kraks with them. The group had come from Cairo overland and were going through Syria on the way to Turkey, overland, too. Sort of what I was doing, minus the company. Shacked up at the Bebers with this bunch for the night. Asking price for a double room was 1000 SYP — drove a not-so-hard bargain to 800 SYP, including breakfast. This would be my only “proper hotel” on the entire trip! Appreciated laundered sheets, presence of air-conditioning (though I didn’t need one, it was good to know I could), and uproarious English-speaking company. (Europe) biker types were the other people at the hotel, they’d ridden into Kraks at dusk and seemed to be on a long bike journey. Note to self: learn to ride a bike so you can do this, too. 1 x 800 SYP = US$17.40 Damascus, Syria - Old City

Aleppo: 5 May
What happened to Aleppo? I didn’t stay here as I was running out of time and needed to get on the twice-weekly train to Turkey. But do yourself a favour. Go, no, RUN, to Aleppo. Don’t stay at the Baron Hotel, but go to the bar. Walk around the grounds. Take a photo of the “telex room” as you’re going to the loo. Sneak a peek into the guestbook (though it’s usually locked up), to discover names like Agatha Christie and Lawrence of Arabia.

Antalya: 6 May
Stayed with the lovely Melissa Maples. Went to a Turkish mystic. Good fun.

Goreme: 9 May
Some of the most beautiful natural settings you will ever lay eyes on. Underground cave cities, churches, Dali-esque surreal rock formations. Went quadbiking all over Cappadocia in an All Terrain Vehicle.
Kose Pension: 10 euros for a bed in a triple room. Quiet, beautiful little house, free wifi.

Istanbul: 11 May
Second time in Istanbul. What a delightful, romantic city. Turkish food is not the same outside of Turkey — more so than any other cuisine. Turkish food in Turkey is… superb, fresh, varied, and wonderful. Turkish football. Ritin rooftop bar, lots and lots of my favourite midye dolma (very awesome one across Ritin).
World House Istanbul: 13 euros. 4 x 13 = 52 euros

Going
Damascus, Syria - Old City London-Singapore-Dubai-London: 420 GBP [plane]
Dubai-Sharjah: 100 AED [taxi]
Sharjah-Beirut: 493.65 AED [plane] *note: if I were to do this now FlyDubai.com flies out of Dubai directly, not Sharjah, and is only 150 AED!
Beirut-Damascus: US$12 [taxi, 2.5-3h] from Charles Helou taxi
Damascus-Palmyra: microbus to Harasta station (10SYP) + 200 SYP [bus, 4-5h]
Palmyra-Kraks: hitched a free ride, but otherwise 150 SYP I think and with a switch of vehicles at Homs
Palmyra-Homs: hitched a ride, so, free, but otherwise 80 SYP in a microbus
Homs-Damascus: 110 SYP [2h, VIP bus] + microbus to Al-Bahsa (10 SYP, but wave madly, point excitedly, and speak whatever Arabic you can)
Damascus-Aleppo: 200 SYP [5h, bus]
Aleppo – Adana: 1010 SYP [9h, seat on train]
Adana – Antalya: 45 TL [12h, bus] *note: Akdeniz is the only bus company that does many daytime departures to Antalya. You can catch a microbus from outside the Adana station (cross the road, in the direction of the Otogar) for 1 TL. There are a bunch of bus offices at Merkez Otogar, and Akdeniz is at No. 4. Upside of this: they will pick you up and send you to the Otogar for free.
Antalya – Goreme: 40 TL (9h, bus)
Goreme – Istanbul: 50 TL (12h, bus)
Istanbul – London: 25 GBP (yes, you read right! 25 POUNDS!!) God bless Pegasus Airlines

Syrian visa: US$33 (For Singapore passports. Issued at the border. Not possible if your home country has a Syrian embassy, in which case you need it processed there.)

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The Sound of Settling

By popagandhi | Published: 2 September, 2009

I’ve been freaking out a bit more than usual these days, at all the oddest and most mundane things. Things that wouldn’t have made me bat an eyelid in another life.

Peeking into my wardrobe made me panic slightly. I… have a wardrobe? With clothes in them? I haven’t had one in years, or what felt like it. I’ve lived out of backpacks for far too long. Even when I ‘properly moved’ somewhere, to Dubai last year, it never felt like it could be home, so I never put things into my wardrobe. Not that I had to since I left Dubai every other week.

I could not understand the logic of wardrobe organization for a couple of weeks. Where should blouses, pants, jackets or underwear go in one, and how they should be folded. I now have a permanent room, i.e. a place at which I did not have to pay a daily rate, and which wasn’t a friend’s couch in a random city, but for the first few weeks I lived like a vagabond out of my own room, out of several suitcases. Now I’m doing a little better — most of my clothes have made it out of bags and into the wardrobe. I even got myself an iron so I could feel reconciled with the idea. (Though there’s still a suitcase with some of my possessions sitting in a balcony in The Greens in Dubai, the boxes with my pillow, bicycle, water jug and some clothes from a London apartment near Regent’s Park have finally arrived…)

Life has a funny way of getting back at you. As a child (and a teenager) I knew I would live outside Singapore the first chance I got, but in those daydreams the venues were inevitably in the northern hemisphere. What happened? I got there, found neither America nor Europe as attractive as they once were, yet instead of Bangkok or Bombay — my probable destinations in Asia — I found Kuala Lumpur. Love had a lot to do with that, but life is working out for me in and around this city.

It’s a familiar city. The food, the people, the languages. The fact that I’ve spent most weekends here in the last two years, that I visited very frequently from childhood, and never once thought of it as foreign. It’s a city with my favourite haunts and favourite people in them, one with a circle of friends and acquaintances, and opportunities wherever I want them. One in which I have been paying rent for some time.

For all the insane travel of the past years, I never properly moved into a city. I made bases out of a handful: Bangkok, Bombay, Bangalore, Dubai. I passed through many of the same ones on my way somewhere. I made my plans for every aspect of the year ahead, right down to what airlines I fly and which cities I fly in and out of and in which order, around passing through London at least once every five or six weeks. Chalked up frequent flyer mileage and was upgraded to Emirates Silver way too quickly. But I never had to put anything into a wardrobe.

Never had to buy an air-conditioner. Never had to own a water jug. Never had to do laundry on a regular basis. Never had to go shopping for tables, bed frames, or measure the width of curtain rails. About this time six months ago I agonized over how much I missed owning my own pillow, and plotted madly to aim for some measure of ‘stability’, ‘constancy’, and normality. Now that I have it, I’m enjoying every moment of it but I find I have to re-learn some very basic things.

From graduation until now I have aspired to relish whatever I could grab — the quirkier, weirder, the more dangerous the better. I needed to have relatives of former headhunters tattoo my back with tribal tattoos the traditional way — with sticks and needles. I needed to live in a mud brick house in Sana’a's Old City with descendants of the Prophet. I had to smuggle myself into a Yemeni bus in a full burqah/balto for 12 hours so as to pretend to be a local, since foreigners were banned from riding certain routes for fear of risk of being kidnapped or shot in the head by terrorists. I meandered from Beirut to Damascus to Palmyra, Homs, Aleppo, Antalya and Istanbul in a succession of buses, taxis and trains. I needed to go straight from a longhouse deep in the jungles of Borneo straight to Barcelona so that I could eat at El Bulli. I needed to wander about Europe with no plan and no money. I lived out of a backpack and quite successfully made a living with a pen and a camera. That life? It was beautiful. Wonderful. I consider myself lucky to have had the chance to live it. It was also incredibly hard. And pretty fucking lonely. (Which was okay, for a while.)

Since I’m now here, it evidently got the better of me. I’m never going to give that up, but like all my photojournalist (and other hobo type) friends, I’m coming around to the idea that I’d like a place, and person, to come home to. KL, and the girl in it, is that place and person. Life is, as usual, throttling ahead and I’m fumbling in trying to catch up with it. I’ve learned they always work out in the end.

So here’s to paying rent, painting walls, filling wardrobes and building a life in a city not too far from my own.

P.S. I wrote a book. It’s out at Borders, Kinokuniya, etc.

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India Redux

By popagandhi | Published: 3 August, 2009

I know my writing archives here are in an udder mess. I’m trying to work on it.

Since there’s been an influx of new readers over from Desicritics, I’ve decided to put together a loosely compiled list of Popagandhi posts about India, love and loss, often at the same time. Pick any at random, there’s no method or logic to the way they’re presented.

Comparing four years of India at different points in my life in Diplomats and Physically Challenged Only

An emotional response to to the Mumbai terrorist attacks, in Mumbai Nightfall/My City Burning

Monsoon nights and Indian summers in Bombay, and missing it in Singapore: The Marine Lines

Funny advertising as it can exist Only In India

My rare message of love and nostalgia for Singapore centres around the Indian-ness of My City

How I stumbled into what I do, in the Tollygunge neighbourhood of Calcutta, Then and Now

Feelings of lesbian Asian identity and memories of Sonagachi, evoked in Excavation

Lovers bid each other farewell onboard the Guwahati Express as one starts a new life in Calcutta and the other remains in Bangalore, and I peek into their lives for fifteen minutes, in Portraits Unphotographable: Neha Sahoo

I almost got left behind on a highway in the Indian desert, and lived ran fast enough to tell the tale in 7 Stories to Tell

No matter what I keep coming back to Sudder Street again and again, and keep missing my golden Bengal, Amar Shonar Bangla, where there’s monsoon masala aplenty in Calcutta and You Could Forgive the Monsoon

And the Calcutta I can’t stop talking about is also a Rough City.

Somedays, I am left Dreaming of India

Other times wondering What Am I Doing Here

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Bar Italia Needs To Get Its Act Together

By popagandhi | Published: 31 July, 2009

29 Jalan Berangan, Kuala Lumpur

I wanted to like this place. It opened some time ago in KL to as much hype as any new venture of Paolo Guiati’s, ex-Neroteca, would be expected to have. We genuinely liked Neroteca back then; it was a chilled out space at the ground floor of Somerset Apartments in Jalan Ceylon, away from the madding crowd, had free wifi, lots of Italian wine and beer, decent Italian food (for KL anyway), and real pig. Bar Italia seemed to be taking a page out of that book. At first glance, the swanky but understated shophouse lot on Jalan Berangan (a stone’s throw from Changkat Bukit Bintang) appeared promising.

To cut to the chase, not only do I dislike this place now, I dislike it so vehemently that I am breaking one unsaid rule of Popagandhi.com: to use my site as a platform to complain at length about it. The quick verdict: the food sucked. Bad food is not criteria enough for me to devote such a long space to this. I guess you can put it down to this: Bar Italia had horrible food AND the worst service I’ve ever had in my entire, entire life. Period.

I won’t spend much time dwelling on the food. There were plenty of huh? moments. The menu was as insipid as the wine, but with a table of 8 we ordered, I suppose, a sampling of just about everything. Pastas, lasagnas, fish and meat mains. The food was an absolute let-down — nothing one would expect of ex-Neroteca talent. My fish main gave me the impression that I was better off eating fish and chips from a Malaysianized Western stall. Their pastas tasted of not very much. Fine.

[Reading some forums and blogs, and comments left by Bar Italia defenders (who sound suspiciously like each other), it seems like anybody who complained about the food was told, "you just don't know what Italian food really is!" I write and photograph food for a living; I'm supposed to. But if only the food was my primary complaint!]

Bar Italia has the worst service in KL, which is not an easy throne to ascend to so quickly in several months. You essentially have to out-suck the inattentive, impatient, incompetent and aggressive service levels at all the other restaurants in Malaysia, which is a fair number of them. But that was the one thing Bar Italia did very well.

How well? We weren’t sure anybody spoke English in that place. For an upmarket establishment, that is unacceptable. It wasn’t even like anybody spoke Malay. Service staff chattered to each other in Cantonese, mostly ignoring customers. The Italian dude (was it Paolo?) spoke English, but was more or less incoherent — it wasn’t the accent, it was just how he flitted from table to table mid-sentence without completing any, and went off without properly understanding what anybody was saying.

Since the menu was so badly put together, most of us came away not properly understanding what our options were, and needed assistance. Assistance that wasn’t rendered. Simple questions like “so which pasta has which sauces, tomato or cream?” were greeted with blank stares by the waitress. Did she speak English? Did she speak Malay? Maybe she’s was Burmese? Nepali? Maybe she really just didn’t understand English? Who didn’t even know how to say “I don’t know, I’ll ask,” so we had to ask for her. “Can you get someone who knows to serve us?” Another long, blank stare. It was the same with every other waiter, including Italian dude. Questions were cut short, requests (even for water, or the bill) either never arrived or took half an hour to, nobody was interested in doing business. Dumb (and I mean this in a literal, not-talking sense) waitress went back to chattering in a corner in Cantonese, probably complaining about all her customers. Great — if only she knew we all understand Cantonese too.

Just as we thought the nightmare was over, the bill came and had an additional entry for 80 ringgit for 3 glasses of wine we never drank. A simple “can you look through this again” request was pointedly rejected by Italian dude, for no good reason other than him saying “no”, flatly. We’d tried to take the bad food and terrible service in our stride all night, but this was too much. Only when 8 angry people glared at him did he abruptly throw a hundred ringgit back at us… literally.

No matter how bad food was anywhere, I don’t think I’ve ever felt “I’ll never come back here ever again and you don’t deserve to call this a restaurant”. Well, I’ve found that place, and Bar Italia — 29 Jalan Berangan — is it.

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