3 Years of Traveling

It’s now late at night. And I had nothing better to do.

So, instead of going to bed, I took out my passports (old and current) and started to flip it over to check out my new, spanking German visa for my upcoming trip later this week.

When I first got my passport (the old one) back in 2004, I thought that I would never utilize half of it, leave alone finishing all 32 pages of it. My mum once said that it’s a waste of money paying RM300 for a passport when you only stamp it once or twice in it’s entire 5 years of validity.

True to what she said, the only stamp I got was to Singapore.

That was before I started to work.

Little did I know that this would change until I landed my first job in mid 2005. Somehow, I managed to get not only half, but all 32 pages of this old passport filled up nicely and neatly in the next 2.5 years.

During the job interview, they told me to prepare myself to travel up to 75% of the time. Otherwise, it’s not advisable for me to accept the job offer as I would resign sooner or later.

Traveling and being away from Malaysia for long period is the challenge. Not the job itself.

But, they didn’t keep their promise.

I didn’t travel up to 75% for my entire time when I was there. When I flipped through my old passport, I realized that I only traveled 60% (18 out of 30 weeks) in 2005 and 71% (34 out of 48 weeks) in 2006

It looked something like this :

2005
China - 6 weeks
Indonesia - 5 weeks
Pakistan - 4 weeks
Sri Lanka - 3 weeks

2006
Sri Lanka - 3 weeks
Thailand - 28 weeks
Vietnam - 2 weeks
Indonesia - 1 week

Then I changed my job towards the end of 2006. Since I loved to travel in my previous company, I’d make sure that I’ll get to do the same in my new company. But, it wasn’t really heavy traveling back in 2007. It was only about 31% of the time (15 out of 52 weeks) that I was out of Malaysia.

This was how 2007 went by for myself.

2007
Bangladesh - 1 week
Finland - 6 weeks
Hong Kong - 1 week
India - 4 weeks
Germany - 1 week
Japan - 2 weeks
Singapore - 1 week

By the end of 2007, the passport I was holding was already fully stamped. There isn’t any more room for new stamps and I had to make a new one. This time, it’ll be 64 pages.

I know it would get full before it’s 5 years validity period ends.

I thought 2008 would be a year where I would be out of the country most of the time, and it happened to go this way. This is how 2008 will look like.

2008
Japan - 2 weeks
Egypt - 6 weeks
India - 9 weeks
Germany - 19 weeks

By the end of the year, I would have been out of the country for 70% (34 out of 52 weeks) of the time.

My next trip will take me to Germany and various parts of Europe for 19 weeks and it’ll last until next year at least.

So which is the best place that I’ve ever been to date?

A few, actually.

I’ll keep that for later and off to bed for now.

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August 19, 2008 | Filed Under Life, Travels | Leave a Comment

So Are You Lying?

I’ve wanted to write about this a few days ago after listening on Mix.fm’s Breakfast Show for the past few weeks since I’m back to Malaysia. If you listen to Mix.fm while driving to work in the morning like me, then you must have heard about their daily lie detector test every weekday morning.

It’s also called a polygraph test.

There were people who put their cheating spouse on the lie detector. A wife put her husband’s secretary to test to find out about their secret affair. A woman put her fiance to test to find out whether he cheats on her. A colleague put his senior who back stabbed him to obtain promotion. A son put his father to test to find out whether he still blames him for his divorce.

There are a lot more examples, but my memory is only that good that I only remember these above.

Having listen to this everyday for the past few weeks, it had me thinking; why not we put people like our PM, DPM, Home Minister, AG, IGP, RPK, Anwar and Saiful on the lie detector? That would certainly make the program MUCH more interesting rather than focusing petty petty issues like that we have now.

But, IF only it will ever happen.

Here in Malaysia, everyone is accusing everyone else of lying. Read the papers and you’ll know about it. The newspapers in the past few months has became more of a joke to me rather than serving it’s main purpose; to provide accurate information.

At least the sports section still provides accurate information.

So who’s lying and who’s not? No one will ever know except they themselves. Or will we get an answer if these people are put on to the lie detector?

There are certain cases where people are not only accusing each other. It goes as far as swearing, or even suing each other to prove their point.

After doing a quick lookup on Google, I’ve found out that the accuracy and reliability of the lie detector is somewhere 90-95%, which is quite high. However, this also depends on the person who’s asking the questions.

On the radio, it’s advertised that it’s 99% accurate.

If it’s that accurate, why not let these people take the tests?

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August 15, 2008 | Filed Under Opinions | 2 Comments

Meet Kimi!

Shih Tzu

That’s Kimi, our 6 weeks old little male Shih Tzu. Cute isn’t it? Here are more pics of Kimi in my flickr.

One of our friend’s pair of Shih Tzu gave birth to 2 puppies, and that’s how we ended up with Kimi. They have one happy Shih Tzu family at home; the father, mother and brother of Kimi.