first wurst of the season

it's that time of year when the first christmas market tentatively rears its cheery head before the others start mushrooming all around it. the smell of grilled wursts never fails to get me and i've long learnt that resistance is futile. the mister has a little more self-restraint but even he surrenders when the gentlemen running the stall are german. language barrier and miscommunication aside (they forgot our order and kept us waiting 10minutes longer than absolutely necessary in the spitting rain) all was forgiven and forgotten when we bit into our steaming hot currywurst. in spite of myself and valiant attempts to minimise nitrate intake, processed meat and curry powder make everything better.

pretty darn psyched to go on a christmas market stir-crazy in the next few weeks. there's supposed to be a good one in bath (next up on the trippin' uk hitlist!), and we're visiting friends in lucerne who're taking us "hiking to the valley floor to visit an alpine village and eat traditional food'.

berwick beach

while walking on the walls, we saw a lighthouse in the distance. buoyed by memories of our recent lighthouse stay, we couldn't resist trying to find it on foot. with tiny alleyways and many nooks and crannies, it was harder than it looked! but we did eventually make our way to the beach and walked along the breakwater.

to make our way back to the city centre, googlemaps told us to take a short cut that turned out to be a long cut across a golf course. hadn't realise just how precarious balancing on the edge of the cliff would be, skirting the greens to avoid being hit by errant balls, avoiding poop-bombing gulls and the odd geriatric walker with rabid dogs. how unexpectedly perilous.

flying solo

(interrupting the berwick posts for a real time weekend update!)

when the mister first decided to get married in iceland, my concern was that it was a lot to ask of our family and friends. iceland might've been a hop away for us, but oceans away from singers where most of our 20+ guests were coming from. to assuage my bride-guilt, we told everyone to please please please make a holiday of it i.e. stretch the trip out, and make the most of being in europe / scandinavia before and after. naturally, we were absolutely thrilled when his best man seized the moment and proposed in paris before they joined us in iceland. how awesome is that? about 17 months later, it's the mister's turn to cross the globe and return the favour. unforch i wasn't able to get time out (i also kind of have exams next week) so it was a solo weekend for me.

it was quite telling how everyone (ok, just my gran) presumed i was going to curl up and die with the mister away. um, do i really send out co-dependency vibes?! in fact, when i told her during our weekly chat that i was going walking in the country with friends, she seemed almost horrified that i was -gasps- doing something on my own (ish). maybe it's a generational thing but i think it's so important that we get time apart, and time with our respective friends. don't get me wrong, the mister's friends are great and incredibly inclusive when i join them, but dude time is good for him. leaving singers was a big change and the mister managed to catch up with a ton of friends over the week he's been home. it's not often that we see the lovely folks we've grown so fond of over the years, but it's always a bonus when we do. 

as you might've guessed by now, the mister has boundless energy and really packs our weekends in london. so it was quite nice to take things down a notch and meander through the weekend at a more leisurely pace. T of BFG fame is also the possessor of our grad group's solo car, so he's really the main man when it comes to making for the country. thankfully, he was ever so kind as to drive to a faraway town and then lead the walk. the colours are changing and the river flowing fast. we passed horses, sheep and the odd rabbit hutch. some of those country manors are absolutely stunning with gorgeous victorian conservatories. after the walk and while high on tea and cake, i was being all nosey along main street, eyeing the ads at the realtors and plotting my way to a stately country pile. one can dream, no? :)

after the day's exertions, i'd dinner with dear girlfriends and a +1! we'd been meaning to try a new restaurant under the railway arches, and accidentally stumbled on a pizzeria so hip it hurts that i've a feeling the mister would be keen to try upon his return. it was also over dinner that i learnt of the methadone clinic at the other end of the road (the brave +1 used to stay next to it) and how we were so close to renting an attic flat a few doors down. phew! relief doesn't being to describe how i feel.

berwick wall

excuse my patchy history but from what i understand, berwick is on the scottish border and has a long-standing heritage of keeping the scots out / english in, depending on who you ask. as such, it's got a wall around it, a garrison and magazine. it's between the river tweed and the north sea, and i couldn't help but think of the expression 'between the devil and the deep blue sea'. pseudo-nationalistic sentiment aside, make of that what you will. the great thing about the walls (apart from serving its original purpose centuries ago!) is that they made for some very good walking. we arrived in the afternoon and walked on the walls till sunset, then made our way to the pub. typical.

(apologies if almost all the photos are of the mister! when traveling in a twosome, there's really not much else to take.)

11b

almost two years ago, i bravely joined an orienteering race in edinburgh. we took a mini-bus up and as we were passing through berwick, a final yearer who'd done her rural GP placement there insisted that we drive back and forth across the bridge. she'd described an idyllic month, staying at a local b&b and swimming in the sea after clinic every day. at that point, i was more concerned with learning how to run while holding a compass (still haven't mastered it!) and sort of glazed over as we passed the town by. then came a weekend when the mister and i got itchy feet. we'd been to edinburgh while backpacking summer 2008 (gah, so old!) and wanted to venture north-ish. berwick came to mind and off we went!

oh, heart-warming story before i begin. so when we went to print out our berwick tickets, silly me hadn't realised there were eight (!!!) tickets involved. we picked up the one and went to have coffee, when to my horror it dawned on me that our solitary ticket read 1/8. my heart sank and we ran (ok i ran, the mister trailed and smirked) back to the station. there'd been some recent renovations and it was a mess, but basically the lady by the ticket machine checked and said all eight had been printed and she could not reissue them despite my insistance that i'd hung around but only one had popped out. about 2h had since passed and semi-resigned to having to buy a new set, i checked at the information counter and ohmyword, some kind soul had returned them. all of them! you hear some horrible things about big cities, but this act of kindness made my week. i felt warm and fuzzy all the way to berwick and back :)

and another shot from a little closer to the bridge. if you're astute, you might recognise it from the skyfall train advertisement! 

the mister is a man of impeccable taste and discernment. he's the amazing ability to sniff out the best deals, and find the coolest places to stay. i mean, just take look at any of the trips he's planned. the few times i've booked accommodation, it's always fallen short. in athens, i accidentally booked us (and his parents) into a dodgy hotel in the red light district (yeah, think hotel 81 equivalent in the greek geylang...). it didn't even have an en suite bathroom! i'd come to the gloomy hallway to find poor FIL patiently accompanying MIL on multiple trips to the far flung loo. more recently, i even got the town wrong and booked us 30km away (with no car) from the roman wall. lost all faith in my planning ability yet? i sure have! so you can imagine my sheer joy and relief when what i booked (that had sounded good on paper!) was actually good in real life too. value is something i, well, value, and much as i enjoy the occasional splurge, it's also so important to live within our (single-income!) means. i'd booked us a room above the local chippy and was silently prepared to come out smelling of yesterday's dinner. little did i know that the room was a lovely roomy attic room (they almost never are!), perfectly appointed, spotless, fragrantly scented and with plenty of skylights to make the most of the autumn sunshine. even the mister was impressed! yay to the perks of high street living without the hefty price tag :)

traditions

i really don't mean to get so nostalgic but a friend just posted photos of the new beaujolais and i was thrown back in time to 2009 when i was at her beaujolais party. so beaujolais is a french wine with a marketing strategy that's better than their wine. every year, there's le beaujolais nouveau and people host parties to celebrate its release. that year, i was in stockholm on exchange - a period i remember too fondly. 

on the day of C's party, the mister had returned to singers in the afternoon (to sit the bar exam no less!*) and J, my lovely french friend, had invited me to join her at french-swedish C's wine party. we couldn't even find a bottle of le beaujolais nouveau 2009, having left it so late in the day, and ended up going with the previous years. party guest fail. four years on, C and her sambo (swedish term for unmarried partner) are proud parents to two adorable little boys, J has moved to sydney and is in a civil partnership with A, her aussie love from our time on exchange, and the mister and i are london-based and have been married for over a year. marriage is so culturally relative and it's nice how each of us has found love and expresses commitment our own way.

oh! but this was supposed to be about traditions. i don't have many and think it's high time the mister and i started coming up with some for our little family of two. what makes traditions hard, to me, is the reproducibility. last year, we had a christmas tree and the mister roasted a christmas goose. almost twelve months on, we are still impaling unsuspecting tootsies with needles from said tree. and goose? once was enough. beaujolais nouveau parties are a tradition i wish i could get into, but not being french, nor able to truly appreciate the wine, it borders on fraudulent to randomly throw one too.

and that's the thing about traditions! how do you take something and make it your own? i'm all for organic traditions but save for glorious weekend lie-ins and HIMYM marathons, we need something with a little more edge. routine is also something we're not big fans of, and routine just seems to be the uncool cousin of tradition. i've friends who take one occasion and make it their thing. like how someone always always hosts a new year's eye party, someone else has a themed birthday celebration every year, yet another person (non-american, too!) can be counted on to host a huge thanksgiving 'do... which's great! maybe a big part of that is not moving, about having a group of friends who count on you to do certain things. as relatively recent transplants to london, we're still getting to know people, compounded by the little inconvenient detail that it takes me twenty years to warm to someone (the mister is lucky, it only took me five years to fall for him). 

or maybe it takes having children to form a tradition, because you want to gift them with the security that mama and papa do as they say. haha. kids. there's still so much we want to see and do before starting a family, so maybe starting a tradition can wait till then, too.

*it's not fair! he spent the two weeks study leave with me in stockholm and sardinia, didn't open his books once, and still manages to come in top 20 out of 300 candidates.

autumn colours (with text this time!)

having grown up on the equator, i'm accustomed to a perennial summer. dislocating to the UK has been a lesson in the changing seasons, and that strange ambiguity as they merge from one into the other. it's my third autumn here (i hate the word 'fall'. so american and much less pretty...) and the colours never fail to amaze me. there's also that funky autumn smell that i'm less fond of, sort of like feet but no one else seems to think so. it's so british to be hung up on the weather, and i'll be the first to request rain over sunshine anytime, but on this one good saturday, it was me who lured the mister out with the prospect of massive burgers. having had more than enough of the grey muckiness, crisp autumn air, blue skies and unadulterated sunshine was reason to take the scenic route. we passed this gorgeous little bandstand en route, the mister was deliberately antagonistic by taking a waist-down photo when i deliberately requested one of the autumn colours. and he didn't even have the courtesy to tell me my waterproofs (you never know!) were half-off :( 

uncooperative photographer woes aside, we did eventually make it to the burger joint. because we'd dawdled through the park, we missed breakfast hour. boo. so much for planning to have a waffle / pancake starter and then burger / hotdog main. just as well! because the burger was big, and the tower of onion rings even bigger.

street side lunch

we've a uniquely singaporean habit of visiting stalls that come with complimentary newspaper reviews. visit any 'famous' hawker in singers and you'll see a stall front plastered with foodie articles, occasionally with grinning celebs embracing the hawker in question. it was comforting to observe that this practice might not be solely singaporean in nature, as when we were in jaipur, our guide brought us to this one lady surrounded by aluminium drums. she, too, was newspaper-famous. one look at our aghast faces (sigh, bad tourists) and the guide read our minds. "it's ok," he reassured us, "i bring my tourists here all the time and they don't get delhi belly after!" the mister is usually up for anything, but the thought of running to the loo for the duration of our return flight did not appeal to him. nor me. i did feel bad though! wouldn't the lady be insulted? but the guide was hungry and we were more than happy to buy a few helpings of the deep fried dough fritters swimming in a peppery water mix.

the taj

now no trip to india would be complete without a visit to the taj. truth be told, i wasn't too keen to jostle with the throngs of tourists. i mean, it's just a block of white marble. meh. but am i glad i was wrong, and glad for the mister who nudges me out of my crowd-averse comfort zone and gets me to face life head-on. the mister is resourceful and research showed that the taj was most impressive at dusk i.e. to watch the marble glow different colours in the setting sun. there is a certain beauty to the symmetry and i can almost imagine the bereaved maharajah deliriously in love building this mausoleum for his deceased wife.

speaking of marriage, i hadn't realised just how conservative india/indians were. every where we went, people (passport control / shop keepers / guides / museum ticket collectors etc) would ask if we were married and their attitude would visibly change once they learnt we were. it was after this happened a few times that i thought, "maybe they don't approve of unmarried couples traveling together". like when we were getting our visas on arrival, the immigration officer was quite stern until he learnt we were married. then his whole countenance softened and was all, "oh! but you married! stay long time no problem!" uh so if we were just dating, we would have to leave sooner? i also found that the men would bond based on the shared understanding of being married. the string of guides we had really warmed to the mister and would tell him about their wives and families. also, at one of the museums, an artist sketched a portrait on my postcard and asked for my name, adding the mister's name to the drawing only after confirming that we were married. how bizarre!

amber fort

the highlight of our time in jaipur was visiting the amber fort. i'm no history buff but it's got to do with the maharajah and his multiple wives and concubines. honestly, i was more intrigued by the elephant ride, and good to know i'm no longer allergic to indian elephants (long boring story of childhood atopy). i mean, rush hour jaipur stylez is kinda cool when you've a row of elephants as far as the eye can see. through it all, i kept thinking of that scene from the jungle book when the elephants were marching with mowgli at the end.

our guide for the day was a former lawyer with a masters in history (!!!) and the mister and i were discussing how when a tour guide earns more than a lawyer, something is seriously messed up with the country. don't get me wrong - not knocking tour guides at all, but our guide was telling us how when he qualified 13 years ago, he was expected to work for a year with no pay, irregardless of his performance. i was thinking of the S$500/month i received while taking the bar exam course but to be fair, considering how that's less than the minimum wage of filipino domestic help, it was more stipend than salary. so our guide switched to tourism and hasn't looked back.

oberoi rajvillas

what pricked my conscience even more in india was the stark contrast between where we stayed and what was beyond the compound walls. when i was in stockholm on exchange, my swedish law professor was quite candid about how she only went on holiday to first world countries with high standards of living like switzerland and france. at that time, i found it quite narrow-minded. just because you don't see poverty, doesn't mean it's not there. but when we visited india, i saw things from her perspective. knowing that there were children starving just 200m from where we were surrounded by opulence was hard to stomach. made me wonder if it'd be worth donating the money we spent on accommodation to a local charity we could trust, and staying at a guest house for a mere fraction of the hotel rate. after all, it's all about efficient allocation of resources, and the opportunity cost of staying at a fancy place, isn't it. couldn't help but wonder just how far my £30 (average cost of a meal inside the hotel) would go if i gave the money away and had crackers for dinner instead. 

what also surprised me was how quickly i was desensitised to the poverty. on the second day, i found it easier to ignore beggars, and felt less guilty about being relatively better off. that said, it's incredibly hard to be an entitled brat when you learn the value of money. it's hard to justify a lavish lifestyle on the basis of, 'i work hard, i deserve a break' because compared to the locals, no, i don't work hard. the going rate for a porter at the rail station was 50p per suitcase. i mean, like, dude, my suitcase is almost 30kg. and this old man is going to carry it (and more bags!) over 500m from the taxi to the baggage rail for less than cost of a candy bar. unreal. and then i end up giving the porter something ridiculous like 300% the agreed rate, and my packed lunch, just because i'm way too soft.

but i digress, and this post is really about the oberoi rajvillas. i don't often mention hotels by name because 1) name dropping isn't cool 2) the mister paid for the room, why advertise for free but occasionally we stay some where that leaves us really impressed. the service was impeccable and the absolute best we've ever experienced. i'm also partial to tents (not) and the mister made it look like glamping. for the first time, i slept in a "tent" with zero trepidation. the food was amazeballs - i'd thought i'd good indian food before but nothing came close to what the in-house restaurants served up. cheese and garlic naans on tap? yes please! the rooms (well, our tent) was super comfortable and the grounds so luxe it was unreal. i mean, the lawn was hand-manicured and while it did feel a bit like job creation, there was an army of gardeners pruning bushes by hand. the personable GM was warm and welcoming, and every member of staff we met had initiative in spades. it was almost like they could read our mind and conjure up whatever we wanted before we even asked for it. the mister and i are quite particular about food sources and the waiter picked up on that and smoothly reassured us that the fish was local and line-caught. they also had the best recommendations and seem to have mastered the knack of sharing their culture and customs with us without being patronising. 

we did make a pitstop at the oberoi in agra and while good, the oberoi rajvillas set the bar so high that oberoi agra paled in comparison. if you're ever in jaipur and have the chance to stay at the oberoi rajvillas, do go. it's hands down one of the best hotels we've ever stayed in and somewhere i'm keen to re-visit. 

 

jaipur

we landed bright and early in new delhi and left straight for jaipur. the five hour drive whizzed by, although i suspect we were asleep for a large part. hey, after a red eye plagued by screaming babies, what else were we to do? catching up on zz did feel like a waste though, because the sights we passed en route were nothing short of fantastical. i fell in love with the striking red turbans the men wore, and the contrast with their white outfit? defo hitting the right sartorial notes.

there were also many "heart pain" moments. i'm probably not the first visitor to be shocked by the chasm between the have and have nots. it was disconcerting and disturbing, when the street children were banging on the car windows for food, we just had to harden our hearts and turn away. of course we'd stockpile buns from the breakfast buffet the next few days to misappropriate on the drive, but it was more to assuage my own conscience than anything else. how do you help every hungry child? i used to be against pri*mark after the mister educated me on appalling child labour practices, but child labour versus begging / languishing in squalor? toughie. what really got to me was how everyone has hopes, dreams and aspirations. but why do some people (like me!) get to pursue and realise that dream, while others, by sheer accident of birth, don't. karma isn't something i believe in personally, but i can see why it's one of the few ways to make sense of the inequality out there. many people in india accept their lot and are motivated to do good works by the promise of being reborn into a better life. i wish i had better developed ideas, and a more sound understanding of philosophy and suffering. thank goodness for the mister who helps me articulate the existential rumblings, and works through one ethical conundrum after another with me.

the himalayas

i harbour no intentions to ever climb to base camp, much less conquer everest. but soaking up the himalayas from the plane window? spectacular. even more so when bathed in that dewy golden light of dawn. didn't hurt that breakfast was being served (doesn't a hot meal make everything even better?) and despite the screaming baby (AUGH i have a personal vendetta against parents who irresponsibly let their offspring yell away... -death glare-) the views were pretty darn awesome. oh my, parents. maybe it's just me but they can be so entitled and self-absorbed. i'm at the age where my fb newsfeed is flooded with baby photos and updates, to the point where i'm so glad for fb's block function. 

i really don't care if your kid produced a poop. or rolled over. or pulled gas-induced funny face. by the same token, people probably don't care about what the mister and i get up to in london, so i really shouldn't judge being similarly guilty of splashing a (small) part of our lives on fb. 

obnoxious parent rant aside, we bent our "go west" rule for india (and for the maldives in january) because the world is so big and there's so much we want to see. again, maximising being in london and trying to keep our travels west-ward or europe-bound, but occasionally the opportunity to fly east is too good to resist. doesn't hurt that the mister is ever-organised and ever-resourceful, making every holiday happen because i just follow for the ride (and photos, he doesn't take many photos). occasionally he's on my case for putting some of it on social media (his friends know exactly what he's up to despite him keeping a low profile) and i'm slowly figuring out what's kosher, or not. london's an amazing city and we're so grateful to be living here. but we do have our off days, more me than him, and occasionally get itchy feet desperately in need of a change of scenery. so tadaaa! mr. planner supreme throws a metaphorical dart at our equally metaphorical world map and it's off to more exotic climes. 

freeeedommmM!

p/s brief travelogue to follow in the next few days :)

p/p/s it's not our first foray to the subcontinent! if you'd like to see, we've visited in 2010 and i even did a piece on goa that the lovely lavishley was so kind as to publish.

some thoughts

was on the ITU today and to risk sounding cliche, it was an eye-opener. i suppose that's the point and the very reason we are put on wards, but i hadn't expected for it to have as big an impact on me as it did. we saw a patient with 70% burns, with mutilating but life-saving surgery. he was, literally, up to his eye balls in skin grafts. and we were told when they were changing his dressing yesterday, his lip fell off. as a medical student, you learn to steel your stomach. and in a way, i find it's mind over matter. i've no recollection of this but according to my mother, i was a steady little five year old eagerly helping out when my darling brother sliced his hand open on glass. i spent many saturdays volunteering at a hospice when i was a teen, assisting the nurses and emotionally detaching from patients on palliative care. and then i copped out and went to law, regressing into the most squeamish person on earth. but now i'm back to medicine, i like to think there's not much that fazes me. scapel, incisions, drains, needles, blood, poop - bring it! observed a tracheotomy (incision in the neck to insert a tube for ventilation into the windpipe) too but seeing the burns patient this afternoon was like a scene out of 'the mummy'. every inch was covered in bandages and when the consultant showed us part of his blistered skin, i felt so very sad. the rest of ITU wasn't exactly rainbows and unicorns either. there's a certain gallow humour on the ward, and apparently how long-term patients deal with the passing of another regular. i also saw first hand how "heart sink" administration can be, with patients wanting to die at home unwittingly held at hospital because of discharge bureaucracy.

before applying to university, i was fortunate to shadow an intensivist who warned me that what we see in hospitals is not representative of life outside. if you're an oncologist who only sees people with cancer, then you'd start to think that everyone is getting cancer. so while i recognise that most people aren't in hospital, i'm very conscious not to take health for granted. every day i leave the wards overwhelmed with gratitude that my husband and family are healthy. speaking of husband, my GP tutor told me yesterday that our life experiences shape our attitudes to patients and being married, i feel it more keenly every time someone is their spouse's carer. i can't help but wonder what it would be like if that were us and whether i could cope if i were ever in their position. it really gives weight to the traditional wedding vows, and just this afternoon one patient shared his near-death experience. he described drifting away, then hearing his wife say, "don't you dare leave me alone, you selfish (insert salty language)" and the next thing he knew, he'd woken up in ITU. we all had a good chuckle, but i couldn't help but surmise that people some times hang around for their spouse, and rightly so! 

the consultant we were shadowing taught me more about professionalism in one afternoon than years of lectures. what i respect was how he treated fellow consultants and the domestics alike. as we walked through the wards, he would be bantering with the theatre orderly, joking with a domestic about rounds at the local and taking the mickey out of the other consultants. social stratification is something i'm trying to blind myself to and i'm always so encouraged when people at the very top of their professional game treat those at the perceived 'bottom' with the respect they deserve. when i was a pupil, my pupil master was a high profile senior counsel. and one thing i'd observed and really liked about him was how on the way to court, he'd ride shotgun and talk football with the firm's driver. now we'd be on the way to massive trial and i'm sure he'd 1001 things on his mind. cross examination questions, strategy, client management, bench management etc but for those fifteen minutes, he'd banter with the driver.

it's a journey, isn't it. and along the way i'm glad to have positive role models, people who influence my world view and walk the talk.