Saturday, July 30, 2016

Started to miss home.

It has only been 15 days. I started to miss home.

Started to look at my flight ticket going back on September. Started to look closely what exactly is my flight time. What exactly is the date and time that I will reach PJ. What should I do and how should I adapt to the timezone back in PJ. 

I should just enjoy here first before all that. After all, there is still a lot of place that I haven't been to. :)

Saturday, July 16, 2016

How to handle jet lag?

I just reached Montreal yesterday. So I had been here for about 12 hours. Since it's a long distance flight which is more than 24 hours, the time in flight is so important. My flight depart at 2am and will reach Doha in 6 hours. After that, i will need to wait for 4 hours, to take another flight to Montreal. That flight will be 13 hours. I will reach Canada at 2pm Canada time. 

So I thought, I must sleep a little when I am in the flight to Canada, then when I reach, I must stay awake until night time only I can sleep.

So I sleep for about 3 hours in that flight. When I reached, I am very hyper because I drank coffee in the flight before it landed. So I reached my hotel and unpacked my luggage. Take a long shower after a long 24 hours flight, buy some groceries and food, rest up a bit and when I try to update my blog, I fall asleep at the sofa. I force myself to my bed and fall asleep immediately. That sleep lasted for 7 hours. I woke at 2.30am and try to sleep again. Woke again at 4am and this time it's really hard to sleep. Since it's 4pm Malaysia time, I thought I should just see what's the update on facebook.

After checking for a bit, i thought, maybe I should just wake up and do a bit of research on where to go later. So yeah, I am awake, and my next sleep should be 18 hours later. Then my jet lag problem will be solved.

Trick is to sleep at the right time. Just need to get tired for once and sleep at the right time. But since I can't do it at once, because I am getting too sleepy at 7pm, I think doing it twice is ok too.

I met a guy at the airport. He said, he traveled a lot to Malaysia, UK and he is a Canadian. So I asked him how he handle his jetlag. He said, the way to handle it is not to think about it. If you keep on thinking you are 12 hours behind, you will get very tired just for thinking about it. 

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Born poor

Warning - Long post ahead. 

These few days of gathering with my brothers, made me think back a lot of things from the old time.

My grandparent is rich. They have quite a lot of land and property. However, they sold off quite of them to pay for my dad studies and business. My dad business never succeed because of his attitude. He is a terrible boss and never go to the field to monitor the business progress. In the end, he still ends up working for people.

With RM1800 per month, he needs to feed my mom, and 3 of us. We never have enough every month. We know the feeling of being poor. We don't get to join Uniform Club in school because each uniform cost more than RM100. We sometimes can't buy books to be used in school because we don't have money. When teacher asked where is your book, we can only answer, we haven't buy because don't have money. Feeling sympathy to us, sometimes the teacher will just give us the book for free.

We also never had a car at home. We rarely sit in car when we were a kid. We owe money to some mini markets because we don't have enough to pay them. We only have 1 motorcycle until I was in form 3. Situation forced my dad to buy another motorcycle so my elder brother who had the motor license can fetch my younger bro and me to school. It's actually a way to cut cost so my dad don't need to pay for our school bus fee anymore.

Situation got worse when my dad retired and my mom passed away. I was in Methodist Pilley Institute then. My elder brother stops studying and starts working so the house can have some income. I try not to stay at home because no one is cleaning it until I started my new life in KL.

First 2 years in KL is not easy. With RM1800 earning per month as a starting pay, I am struggling to live a normal life. There are a few months I need to borrow RM50 or RM100 from my elder brother just to have my meal. At that state, I cant even send money back to my dad. 

While my bad situation in KL, my elder brother is not having a too much of good life too. He is struggling to make the ends meet. My dad who is not providing to the family anymore, need to be taken care by my brother. In the end, my elder brother quitted his job to take care of my dad. 

My younger brother who started his new job, faced financial stress. He started his job with good pay but got stressed by dad to provide some money to family. Yeah, it's normal to send money back to parents at home but considering how much we earn and we are not stabling down yet, sometimes, it's really stressful to provide too much.

That is all what happened at the past few years. We are all born poor. But we don't want to die poor too. That's why my brothers and I are working so hard to earn more. Being cheapskate is what we always do to cut cost. But cheapskate is one thing, we also look at efficiency. For example, we went to Jogoya Starhill on last Friday. Driving there is definitely cheap. However, the stress on the road, the parking, petrol, time taken, totaling all of that together, plus Starhill is in Bukit Bintang area, we decided to just take Uber. It's more efficient and not really much more expensive than driving too.

Born poor is not our mistake.... but dying poor is not a mistake too. Some people don't even had a chance to become rich. Or even a chance to live a normal life. Sometimes life needs a bit of luck. 

I heard of a story before, a real one, there is a girl who is good in her studies and thought she will live a good life when she graduates by getting a good job. Her parent owned some land, a house and a few big fishing boat. One unfortunate event happened where the girl's mom fell down. She got taken to hospital and need to be hospitalized for around 5 months. Her parent sold off everything because they need the money to pay to hospital. House, fishing boat and land too. She ends up has no enough money to finish her study. Miserable life.


Friday, July 1, 2016

Syok Sendiri cell group

I had a great dinner with my cell group members last Tuesday. We went to Bulgogi BBQ, eat all you can type. Even though it is Korean food, it's quite cheap. However, the choice is quite limited.
 
The gathering is really happy and exciting. Some of us came late because of the traffic and work. Although the mood at the first half of the dinner is a bit down (I believe is because everyone is hungry), we became the loudest group at the second half of the dinner.
 
We talked about going to New Zealand for a vacation, maybe at 2018. After a bit of discussion, we change our mind. 2018 is too far ahead and the cost for New Zealand trip is too high. So we planned for other country. In the end, we found out that we are really the type of planning but no one will really join the vacation or activity.
 
Original plan: New Zealand (RM8000)
Second plan: Taiwan (RM4000 - 50% of the original cost)
Third plan: Pulau Redang (RM800 - 10% of the original cost)
Next plan: Sunway Lagoon (RM80 - 1% of the original cost)
Next next plan: Watch movie (RM8 - 0.1% of the original cost)
 
And guess what, even our watch movie plan failed.
 
So when we want to head back home, suddenly everyone had the urge to sing. So we thought maybe can randomly organize one sudden karaoke session....
After a few minutes of discussion, some people don't sing, some people have other plan, even the karaoke session doesn't work out.
 
We also had one experience where we tried to organize an ATV session. We planned for 2 or 3 months ahead and even combine it with other cell group to have enough people.
In the end, the plan failed too.....
 
That is why we label ourselves as syok sendiri cell group. Haha.
 
 
Meet the member of syok sendiri cell group.
Clock wise from the left
-Ng Dick Tern (Segi Uni Course Consultant)
-Christopher James Wong (Optometrist)
-Eddie Wong (Senior QA)
-CZ (Application Developer)
-Joshua Lim (Mega CMC Staff)
-Shirly Lee (Mega CMC Staff)
-Evelyn Pua (Finance Audit)
-Ting Seng Gine (Project Engineer)
-Pou Hung Nguong (Instrument Engineer)