Infinity and Beyond

I'm going to stop blogging for a while indefinitely. 

Online Shopping

I actually don't really like online shopping. Shopping is an experience in itself with the smells, the layouts, the novelty of getting something new, the joy of bringing it back home and unwrapping it at home. Sometimes I don't even unwrap it but leave it there until I want to use the item.

Online shopping is like going to the tailor. You don’t get joys mentioned above at the tailor, certainly not the smells or the layout.

However, I have been shopping online quite a lot here because the deals are better and because the weather (sometimes too hot, sometimes typhoon) makes going out so prohibitive.

I recently ordered something from the official Nike Taobao shop. It’s the same price as the brick and mortar shop but comes with the added fun of being able to track its progress to me.

It came in a nicer box than i anticipated.

In it, of course there was my tee shirt and also a paper bag and a zip-lock bag that contained the receipt. Pretty nice zip-lock bag actually. I am a sucker for details like these:

Le Driver

We have been having some problems with the driver of late.

 

We pay for the fuel, parking charges and toll charges on top of overtime pay. All these including the number of hours of overtime is tabulated on a timesheet.

 

Recently we have found that the charges seem quite high even when we don’t go out much. Then we decided to keep our own time sheet to tally with his at the end of the month.

 

We found that on some days, his ending hours differed from us, usually by an hour. On one day, it even differed by five hours! We even delved deeper to see the distance travelled in the last few months versus the petrol charges and calculated mileage costs.

 

We did this for two months before confronting him.

 

Apparently, he lists the end time as the time he reaches home. We were flabbergasted. If you think about it, for normal working people, the working hours are when you reach the office and knock off time is when you leave the office.

 

He said this was the industry practice but grudgingly agreed to my formula.

 

Then I asked him how come one day was five hours off from our records. He couldn’t give an answer. Eww Eww Oww Oww..

 

Grand total of savings: RMB110. Not a very big amount but the principle aint right.

 

 

Journeys

I recently got to know a Malaysian girl who still lives in JB but works in Singapore.

 

She takes the bus from her house in Iskandar every morning to Jurong East then takes the MRT to her office on Maxwell Road. That’s a 1.5 hour journey.

 

She says she gets to come in a bit later so I asked her what time.

 

“9+”.

 

9 plus isn’t a bit later! Most people come in at 9+ anyway.

She then takes the reverse trip back every evening after work.

 

That’s three hours on the road every day. Pretty crazy. She must love her work a lot.

Gift Galore

It was Someone’s birthday the other day.

She typically doesn't ask for any particular presents but I decided to get some cheap toys from Taobao. Cost me a grand total of S$5. Lots of cheap and good stuff on TB but mostly fake.

During this time, I saw that my friend bought a new mouse that was apparently very fierce.

This was the Logitech G700s.

Cost a bomb on the local shopping websites here.

I was getting irritated because once I have my eyes set on something, I don't give up.

Amazon China surprisingly sells it at a similar price than in Singapore.

BHAM! Arrived in two days.

My own gift to myself costs 24 times more than Someone’s birthday gift. Haha.

The mouse’s battery drains quite quickly so I have to remind myself to switch it off every day before I leave the office. Thus, this sticker on my monitor.

Decadance

I have written often about how I come across decadence and how surprised I am. It’s not like I’m a model of austere living.

A couple of weeks ago, my President visited one of my clients and the client hosted a dinner.

As my President is new, this client wanted to impress him so he started talking about his hobbies and how he likes to collect things like cigars, fish, wine and good food.

He went on to say he had a fish farm in Hong Kong like a kelong. Said he had more than 1,000 fishes that are more than 2m long and 10,000 fishes that are shorter than 2m. I found that pretty incredulous really but I guess anything’s possible with these guys.

He then mentioned that he had specially brought the red wine which we were drinking that night so that we can try. I am not a big fan of red wine but it tasted pretty different. I am not sure if it was psychological. It probably it.

After that, he said my President should have come one day earlier. It had rained in Kunming two days ago. The rain caused a lot of mushrooms to grow. Client’s friend then sent these mushrooms to him yesterday. So he got to have fresh mushrooms. As fresh as can be. He asked my President to monitor the weather in Kunming. If it rains, he should make plans to come to China. *sweat*

Dessert came. I had heard him as the server to bring out THE peaches. I would actually prefer mangoes than peaches but who was I to demand fruits? Sliced up with their white and reddish skin still on it and looking rather soft, it didn’t look that appetizing at all. But golly, the moment I sank my teeth into them, the juice-filled pulp just burst into a million wet dreams. I gobbled my portion down in double quick time partly also because no one was paying me any attention.

After I got back to Shanghai, I couldn’t take my mind off them.

When we saw some at the supermarket, I stopped and checked the fruits section. They were selling peaches too! Three for S$17. Woah. That’s expensive. They gave us some to try and yes, they were the same I tried a few days before. I made an executive decision to buy them despite their price.

Alas, we got cheated! Those we bought weren’t half as soft nor succulent nor juicy as those we tried! They were as crunchy as apples in fact. What a downer.

I was so traumatized by being cheated so I decided to call my colleague in Wuxi (recently found out that Wuxi has good peaches) to buy some for me and courier it to Shanghai.

He did and that’s why I have two boxes of these last weekend.

 

MOST of these were the real and a couple were too hard or rotten. But the good ones were da domb! They weren’t exactly cheap either. 8 for S$30. Heng my colleague said one box was his gift to me.

Yoga Adventures

Because the both of us have been troubled by tight muscles, necks, backs for the longest time, we have decided to embark on yoga.

 

I actually got the idea of yoga quite some time back as a solution to our ailments. In fact, I thought it’d be better for Someone than me given the problems she has but there was a lot of inertia for her to go until quite recently when we got to know a Singaporean who has a yoga package here.

 

Someone had already tried one studio before I joined her for the first time. When I got there, the class before us was lying down. My friend told me that this was the dead man’s pose usually done at the end of each session.

 

I thought, “What a pussy move. Such a low impact ‘sport’. I’ll probably be dozing off.”

 

The class started off with a cross legged meditation. I was seated for less than a minute before I was already feeling like my upper thighs were burning and I was feeling very mang zang! I almost felt like I couldn’t breathe and I was trying so hard to calm down. No way I was going to survive this if I could take the first two minutes of meditation.

 

Thankfully, the meditation was over in a while.

 

Soon, the poses were getting difficult and I was working up quite a sweat. I began to understand that this could indeed be a workout and could actually be beneficial. I was quite glad for that actually. I am not the most flexible person and I know that so it wasn’t a big surprise to me that I couldn’t do a lot of the stuff but up and down, up and down, I was feeling a little dizzy. It must be my motion sickness again.

 

Time passed pretty quickly. Soon it was the end and time for dead man’s pose. I was so bushed that I was so thankful to be able to lie down and do the dead man’s pose.

 

BUT

 

I couldn’t rest. My legs were aching and my head was swirling. I was panting even, somewhat. I was trying to calm myself down by thinking of nice sceneries. I tried thinking of France but I realized that I have never gone to France before. Then I thought of the Maldives, but the waves weren’t helping with the motion sickness.

 

We were in Dead Man for about 15 minutes before the class dismissed.

 

I struggled a little to get up and limped to the showers and limped downstairs.

 

I limped for the next two days but I actually felt rather good for quite some time. Perhaps this is the way to go for a stretched life. A life free of tightness. We’ll see.