PhotoHunt: Flags

Les Invalides is a complex of buildings containing museums and monuments relating to the military history of France. This complex contains two churches, the Eglise St-Louis was for the soldiers and the Eglise du Dôme for the king. Well actually they are connected, so the king would go in via one entrance and the soldiers via another.

In Eglise St-Louis, there are flags hung at the barrel-vaulted nave of the church. I initially did not know what these flags were for and I saw one which had my chinese last name on it (張). After reading the brochure, only I realised that these flags were from captured enemies during that time.

Fish Leong's concert clips

I just found some YouTube clips of Fish Leong's concert in Malaysia which I recently attended. The quality of these clips is really good, so I had to include them in my blog.

The guy who took these must be from the media as the recorded angle in the first clip seemed to be from where the members of the media were seated. Helped too that he had such a "canggih" camera.

Anyhow, looking at these clips reminded me on how much I have enjoyed that concert! Oh and today a friend who went to the same concert told me that Fish Leong is getting married soon.

AnimalCare - help save the animals

AnimalCare is a community project supported by the Subang Jaya Buddhist Association, for the purpose of relieving the suffering of animals and providing for their wellbeing.

With the plight of strays in mind, AnimalCare aims to sponsor the spaying and neutering of strays, rescue & re-home of strays, as well as to organise education programs to promote the needs of animals.

As we have heard so much about the suffering of strays in this country, perhaps it's time we get involved and help out.

Click here to know how.

Message from Axel: Please help...

PhotoHunt: Creamy

A creamy glass of hot chocolate!

Getting intimate with Fish Leong

I went for Fish Leong's concert last night.


I have only one word to describe it.... MAGNIFICENT!

Yeah... the whole concert was magnificent, she was magnificent. Her voice was so clear and she was in tune at all times! I think my admiration for her has increased ten-fold after the concert. By the way, this was my 1st Fish Leong's concert. The last time she held a concert in Malaysia was 4 years ago and I missed that one.

She sang all the songs (about 30 of them) flawlessly and almost the whole stadium was singing in unison with her. It was indeed a great feeling.

I am not very sure how other concerts were as this was just the 2nd concert that I had ever attended. However I do understand after last night that there's a vast difference between attending a live concert and watching a DVD of a live concert.

Fish was so down to earth when interacting with the audiences and her guest artistes. Her official guest artiste was Michael Guang Liang while her unofficial guest artistes who went up the stage during encore were Ah Niu, Z Chen, Phoebe (DJ from MyFM) and another guy whom I do not know.

Although she is mega successful (in my opinion) in the chinese community, she seemed so approachable and just "like one of us". I am going to be her fan for many more years to come.

The concert started around 8.15pm and ended only around 11.30pm. It was so well worth the money! One complaint that I have though. The song lyrics that were displayed on the screens were lacking the pinyin. I am sure Fish Leong has a lot of "banana" (Chinese who do not read chinese) fans like me, and the experience would have been much greater if we could also sing along to all of the songs.

I didn't bring my camera there and just used my PDA phone to snap a few pictures. That explains the quality of the pictures below. Anyhow, photography was not allowed and when they caught you snapping away, they would flash some bright lights on you. I noticed the guy sitting in front of me got flashed a lot, hehe.

I will prosper

Although I have been to Singapore a few times and have seen the Fountain of Wealth, I have never once set foot into it or to witness its laser performance until last night.

Yeah, we were at Suntec City for the PC Show 2009 and after that, we walked to the Fountain of Wealth to catch the laser show. Although the laser show was not really that spectacular, watching the lights and fountain in action was.




Fountain of Wealth is listed as the largest fountain in the world. It was built to create very good feng shui for the area. It is also claimed that when visitors enter the fountain and walk around the central base's mini fountain 3 times while touching the water, they would gain some good luck... which was exactly what I did. This was of course done after they have turned off the big fountain.

Superstitious or not, I am sure I will prosper after that.

I want it soooo much!

The new iPhone is already announced. It's going to be released on 19th June in US. Not sure when it will come to our shores though, maybe after the rest of the world get bored of it.

Anyhow, I want it soooo much! Then again, wanting it and owning it are 2 very different things.

PhotoHunt: Advertisement

These are what I would call Fishy Advertisements!




(Pictures taken at one of the streets in Bangkok)

Fetch

Be careful when playing fetch with your dog.

They should have known better!!

Today is the 3rd day of my toilet leaking fix process. After they hacked off my tiles and the cement on the first day, they did waterproofing yesterday.

Let me tell you something embarrassing. I always thought that for waterproofing, they would install a layer of special plastic across the toilet floor to stop the water from seeping down, then cement the area followed by the tiles. I was certainly wrong and had not idea where I got such a ridiculous impression, cos this is how waterproofing looks like:

It's this mixture of cement paste that they apply across the toilet floor, especially around the corners and the drain outlets, and it has this pungent smell. After applying this, it had to be left overnight to dry. So basically on the second day, the contractor only worked for about 2 hours.

After the waterproofing dried up, they did the tiling today. Once they have finished cementing and tiling the area, I went and had a look.

Okay...everything seemed normal...

Then, I saw something not right!!

They cemented the area to a level that is too high. So after tiling, the level of the toilet floor is only slightly lower than outside! So this would mean that water from within the toilet area can easily flow out.

I was like, are you kidding me??!! They are the contractors and would have done this a million times. How could they not think of this?!!! They should have known better!!!

Well, it's already too late and the best they could do was to create this border at my toilet door to keep the water in. I thought it looked ridiculous but what can I do? So damn "kik sim".


Sigh... just have to live with it la. Guess I need to make sure I am gentle when pouring water onto that area.

For you guys who have to re-surface your toilet in the future, please be sure to remind the contractors about the leveling of the toilet floor. They may not be as smart as you think.

Don't be like me as by the time you utter "They should have known better", it is already too late. :-(

They will come install my toilet bowl tomorrow. I am glad this is almost over.

Hacked!!...my toilet tiles ler

After dodging my downstairs neighbour's complaints on my leaking toilet for almost 6 months, I finally got the contractor to start work today.

Fixing a leaking toilet is not a simple and quick task. It involves the removal of the toilet bowl, hacking of the floor tiles and cement, re-waterproofing, re-cementing and re-tiling, and then fixing back the toilet bowl. All of these will take 3-4 days.

Yes...it is a very very troublesome process, especially when you stay alone and working. You would need to take about a week leaves to be at home. The cost too is not cheap and depends on the size of your toilet. Luckily I managed to arrange it to happen during my "in-between jobs" period. As for the cost, I guess I need to forget about a new PDA phone. :-(

The contractor and his worker turned up 2 hours late. They were supposed to start at 9'ish but they came only 11'ish. After checking my toilet, the contractor left his worker to do the work. The foreign worker then started his tasks and managed only to hack off all my toilet's floor tiles and cement for today. I believe he could have accomplished more if they turned up as initially arranged.

The drilling and hacking sound were soooooo irritating. I couldn't watch my taiwanese series as planned due to the noise and ended up playing games on my iPod Touch and chatting online.

Oh... and the mess it made.



At the end of the day, the contractor came and I chatted a little with him. He said that I was probably the 2nd nice person that he knew who are paying 100% for the renovation cost. Usually in cases like this, either the 2 units share the cost or the owner of the upstairs unit would totally ignore all the complaints, although by law the owner needs to bear it.

I wondered when he called me "nice", did he mean that I am a sucker?

Anyhow, I thought this is the right thing to do. Hmm... I am a nice person after all. ;-p