An Arabian Tale. Well. Not exactly.

Well I'm still alive *amazingly* after the hellish week of work. And after surviving it, I'm ready for more to come. BRING IT ON!

Anyways, did something ultra-wrong last friday night / sat morning. Played MJ at Cindy's new place, totally lost control, and broke my promise not to play beyond 3am. The really saddening part was..... Clarisse was at my place in Hougang (where I was returning to that night / morning). She wanted to give me a surprise.

I returned home on Sat morning facing a teary-eyed Clarisse.

And that's just that.

Mah heart was shattered.

To top it all off, her cough, which took so long to heal, came back after that night of crying. Which is still ongoing right now, I'm back to cooking herbal concoctions and stuff.

No one's fault but my own.

So I decided to do something about my lack of control.

Period.

No excuses.

Anyway, that aside, Aug 14th was our 1.5 yr anniv, and 1 yr anniv of engagement, and so I bought us a gift.

Matching wallets.

Figured out that these are just symbolic, and I don't really need to splurge. My previous wallet, quite badly worn out, was a Braun Buffel bought for about 150. And it wore out just the same after a year and half of use. So this time, I bought nice and cheap wallets for us, at less than 30bucks each.

There I was thinking that Braun Buffel wallets would last a good 3 years, considering quality and reputation, but I was wrong. I guess everything on my hands must have their effective useful lives halved. So no more splurging on these things like I used to.

And yesterday, I saw with my own eyes a working iPhone on M1.

And so I went ahead to order some hardware off the net, and I'm gonna open up the iPhone package, hack it and unlock it, and sell it (or I might actually use it). Thereafter, sell the unlocking service at 300 apiece. Pretty confident I can do it, despite how little I know about hacking and shell access.

I will recover the cost once I sell the unlocking service to 4 customers.

All that aside, on Thurs, amidst my busy-as hell sched, I actually arrived at an appointment an hour early, and had some spare time.

Since I was around Arab Street, decided to walk around the area.

Malay Heritage Centre.

Concourse through an arch from the MHC.

Batik art by a Malay artist.

Another Batik piece.

Mangrove wood sculpture.

Parkview square alongside the Mosque.

Light shining through intricately-carved air vent.

Too bad that the carpet shop wasn't open, cos Carpetry is an art form that's fading away. There was once I almost bought one from Geylang Serai area out of impulse, but it's way too expensive; the good ones that is. The one I almost bought, was a Persian Cashmere carpet, the touch of it extremely exquisite and almost royal, and the carpet was completely hand-made.

That aside, there was a malay book store, Muslimedia. Quite funny play on the word "multimedia". They're actually quite advanced, selling muslim books and other stuff through a website, you can try muslimedia.com.sg.

Anyway, I lost my copy of the Koran some time back, left it in a cab by accident. And since I was at this shop, with a huge choice of translated Korans to choose from, I took some time to pick and choose a copy which I liked; with decent pages which are not wafer-thin, with words that I don't need to squint at (I had to do that with my previous copy), but the best one cost about 60+. So I went for the second choice, which was just 20-odd.

My new Koran.

And "Salamu Alaikum" to all my friends. It's the muslim greeting meaning "peace be upon you", parallel to instances in the bible as translated to "May peace be with you.". If you happen to be in any muslim middle-eastern country, this is a courteous greeting to locals, to which they would usually reply, "wa Alaikum As-Salam", which translates to " and on you be peace".

After the bookstore was my appointment.

And after my appointment, which lasted 2 full hours, I set off home. The crescent moon caught my eye, and I took a pic of it. Lights on right is Parkview Square, left is National Library

OK, I know the moon is damn bloody small! Just give me an SLR on my bday and I'll start taking better pix!


Anyway, post a vid I uploaded. It's taken by Clarisse during her Europe tour in June 05, and this shows a busking cellist playing just outside the Royal Palace in Vienna. Vienna, the musical capital, lives up to its name.