How a Taitai Passes Time without Mahjong n Gossip Kaki

Many of you are curious about how I manage to pass time at home every day, without a job or friends. As you know, Ben works from 9am till midnight or 1am on most days. His weekly roster is usually made up of 1 or 2 early shifts (8am – 5pm), 1 or 2 late shifts (3pm – 1 or 2 am) and mostly split shifts (9am – 3pm, 6pm – 1 or 2am).

They usually work throughout their split shift, although once in a while, Ben uses that 3-hour break to go for driving lessons, and if he’s really tired then he comes home for a short rest. Recently, he’s also used this short break to come home to work out in the gym. Ben gets about 6 days off a month – 1 day off this week, 2 days off the next week, and so forth.

So anyway, here’s what I do on most days while the husband’s at work…

On ‘good’ days, I wake up some time between noon – 1pm. Some lazy or down days, I’m up at noon but continue lazing and daydreaming in bed till 3 - 5pm! I usually sleep at around 3am, and often also stay up till around 6am. And once in a while, I stay up till morning if I have an ‘outdoor-jalan-jalan’ day planned, and just zombie around on "low-batt" till evening.

So I’m up at noon most days, have my first cuppa and later have ‘breakfast’ – usually toast loaded with cold slabs of margarine, sometimes a banana and Herbalife Formula 1 with orange juice, if I’m a really good girl. Sometimes I skip ‘breakfast’ and have a plate of Indomie for lunch. Indomie Pedas is the only edible instant noodles here, and it’s pretty good.


I do the laundry at least 3 times a week. Ya, it’s unbelievable how we have so much laundry to be washed when I’m in my pajamas all day and night most of the time. But Ben wears a clean pair of pants or jeans every day, and there’s his pajamas, shirts, socks, towels, etc too. The floor has to be swept every 2 days because it gets dusty and my hair falls a lot more in this dry weather.

It doesn’t help that if I stay in all day, it means I’m living in an air-conditioned environment 24 hours a day, with no chance of fresh air… Not that the air outside is what one can call “fresh” or clean. Then there’s mopping to be done once a week, and washing the balcony, about twice a month.

I hardly watch TV during the day ‘cos you get a 2-minute portion of Oprah, followed by a 5-minute ad interval, then 2 minutes of Oprah again, then more ads… Other than Oprah, daytime TV is made up of other talk shows like Dr Phil, Rachel Ray, and soaps like Fashion House and The Bold & The Beautiful. Towards evening you get more interesting stuff on TV like The Tyra Banks Show, Pimp My Ride, a very censored screening of Desperate Housewives (1st season)…and they've just started showing Newlyweds! Like Hallo? They broke up dudes!

Later into the night we get some rather decent movies. I’m guessing people in the Middle East sleep at around 2 or 3am ‘cos the local English TV channels show good movies only at around 11pm or midnight. They provided me with 4 hours of Harry Potter fun, but the marathon started at 11pm so I was up till about 3am. Then they showed the Matrix trilogy, one installation a week, at 11pm. But even then, I don’t watch much TV ‘cos there are only three English channels (movies & sitcoms) and BBC World, to choose from the eight hundred plus free-to-air local (regional) channels (all Arabic).

So most of the time, I’m glued to my computer. If I’m online, I’d be reading/sending mail, uploading pics onto my Flickr album, updating my blog, checking out favourite sites like Wild Singapore, the Wildfilms & Reefwalk blogs, and other Singapore sites like Channel News Asia, and food stuff for Ben. Sometimes I get curious about something, it could be anything, like say… molecular gastronomy. So I surf all day gathering info about it. I’m at a loss without the internet for my daily dose of info and my virtual connection with the rest of the world, beyond the walls of this empty apartment in this distant and grey land.

But of course, I still can survive without the internet at home… for about one week till I can’t tahan and fork out lots of money at an internet café! I still do lots of stuff on my laptop without having to surf. True to typical Virgo attributes, I can spend hours making lists, organising stuff, planning, sorting, updating calendars and address books, designing stuff, and being an anal perfectionist when it comes to all the above.

I record our daily/monthly expenditures and amend our monthly/annual budgets accordingly. Come up with new stuff for my blog to entertain the rest of u :) If I have new photos from a recent trip out to the beach or town, etc, I can spend the entire day or days, just sorting and touching up photos, saving them into three different file sizes for archiving, blogging or uploading/emailing.

Then there's the stuff I do for Ben. If I download any info from the Net for him, I've gotta resize and re-layout the whole document, whether it's just one page or a hundred page document ('cos Ben falls asleep if reading stuff with a point size of less than 12). So this is really leceh if it's a PDF file 'cos then I've gotta cut & paste the text into Word, and edit each of the pictures in Photoshop 'cos they can't be exported directly into Word from Acrobat Reader. And I'm really anal about layout and type, so I have to make sure each sentence is double spaced, make sure the leading and kerning is just right, etc.

I've also just started the initial layout, designs and pics for Ben's website (akan datang...), so I've gotta figure out my way around Dreamweaver again and keep abreast with the latest internet tools and gadgets...

Some days I’m reading and completing assignments for my Diploma in Montessori Education which I have yet to complete after 3 years! I can’t sit for my Final Exam in Singapore till I’ve submitted all my assignments two months before the exam date, and they only inform students of the exam date about one month before. So even if I submitted all my assignments and projects now, I wouldn’t know when the final exam is until a month before, giving me just a month to prepare for it and plan a trip back. My Montessori diploma is turning out to be like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - something I look forward to attaining, but......

My parents are of course worried that I’ll waste it, just like how I got my Higher Diploma in Mass Communications but didn’t pursue a Degree after that or put it to good use. But I really do make full use of what I learnt every single day. I learned a great deal more about the world, society, culture, the media, government, etc and have honed my writing and analytical skills since graduating. This in turn has helped me a lot in my Montessori course ‘cos the readings and assignments are really ‘chim’ man, and it being a self-study course, I wouldn’t have been able to cope if I didn’t have my Mass Comm background.

So don’t worry, I’ll get my Montessori diploma (one day) and even if I don’t end up teaching, I’ll know a heck of a lot about child development & child psychology. So future kids in my family may be able to save on kindergarten fees... Or they’ll just be very afraid of psycho-anal-aunt Bernie.

BEN OR BERNIE’S RELATIVES OR FRIENDS
Let’s go to Uncle Ben’s & Aunty Bernie’s house for the holidays.

SFX: DARTH VADER’S ENTRANCE MARCH

KIDS
No-o-o-o-O-O-o-O!!!

Anyway, back to my taitai life. Once in a while, if I pick up a book and it’s good, I’ll be hooked on it for the next 2 or 3 days till it’s done. Sometimes if I’m really bored then I’ll pick up my crossword puzzle book and work on puzzles for a while… till I get bored again. About once a month, I meet Jana for coffee at a nearby mall. Jana lives in Gardens too, with Manfred, Ben’s colleague.

Once a month I usually look for a new place in Dubai to explore on my own too, so this gives me the opportunity to take more photos and come up with more interesting blog entries instead of what I do on a daily basis. Now that we have a gym on the 6th floor, I follow Ben to the gym once in a blue moon (he goes more often of course), but I spend not more than an hour in there.


By evening/night or the time I get hungry, I’ll cook dinner. Sometimes just something instant like noodles or porridge, and if I’m preparing it for Ben too, then something more elaborate like rice with dishes or one-dish meals like pasta, curry, stew or “deconstructed Sheperd’s Pie” (sautéed minced beef, peas, mashed potatoes & gravy, minus the hassle of actually baking the darn thing).


I’m not an expert in the kitchen like Ben or my Mom, so sometimes I take several hours or even half a day to prepare and cook a proper meal! Thanks to ready-made sauces from my Mom and Brahim’s, I don’t have to spend an entire day cooking, unless I’m attempting to make something complicated from scratch. If I’m in the mood, I bake cookies or brownies for Ben.


When drystores and fresh produce are running low, I head out to the mall to buy groceries (Ibn Battuta Mall is a 15-min brisk walk away, and the Geant Hypermarket another 15-min walk away at the far end of this huge mall). So sometimes I have dinner at the foodcourt in the mall, since I no longer cook supper for Ben n myself ‘cos we’re getting a little too chubby.


The hypermarkets in Dubai (Geant & Carrefour) are so huge, and with nowhere to rush to, I can spend up 3 to 4 hours just supermarket shopping.

Now you know how Ben developed such a sweet tooth since coming here. Supermarkets are stocked with chocolates, sweets, snacks and everything else, from all over the world.

Apart from groceries and household stuff, I hardly shop (for clothes, shoes, accessories, the usual ‘girlie’ things). But if I’m feeling particularly down, I conveniently forget it’s Ben’s money I’m spending and go ahead and spoil myself a little. Like recently, I spent 55 Dirhams on a book, The Green Guide to the Emirates, to help keep me sane because we didn’t have internet and TV in our new home yet.

When Ben’s off the next day, I usually call the DVD shop (back at Courtyard near Ewan) or take the shuttle bus to Ewan, and borrow 2 or 3 DVDs. On his days off, we either stay in watching TV and DVDs ‘cos there’s really nowhere to go in Dubai. Movies at the cinema are ridiculously expensive, not to mention outdated. But Ben enjoys window-shopping, so quite often we have to go to Mall of the Emirates or Ibn Battuta Mall for him to stretch his legs and ‘cuci mata’.

I’ve always been quite a hermit, opting to stay at home doing “my own stuff” rather than go out, unless it’s to a nature spot. There’s a Bird & Wildlife Sanctuary at the Dubai Creek/mangrove, but it’s not open to the public and you have to get special permission from authorities to visit. Then there are the beaches that are partially man-made on reclaimed land. So I’m quite starved for forests and bugs and rocky shores and slugs and such. When I go shopping or window-shopping, if ever, I usually like to go alone.

I’m not anti-social but I am a loner. Not narcissistic but enjoy spending time by myself, doing “my own stuff”. I don’t ‘party’, don’t drink, and got used to missing nights out at the mamak with friends when I lived in Singapore. So adapting to a quiet life here isn’t that difficult for someone like me as compared to your regular, city girl.

Then again, a ‘city girl’ might really like it here, what with all the big brands at the malls, the nightlife, and rather happening dating scene (Guys chat you up all the time - on the bus, at the mall, at nightspots, by the beach…). Conversations always begin with a stranger saying “ in a very gatal way and asking, "So you work here?" --- “Oh I don’t work. My husband works at the Burj Al Arab.” --- "Oh…" --- Silence. Most effective ‘lecher repellent’ so far.

So that’s about it lah. By the 3rd month I was here in Dubai, I did get really bored and depressed, what with no buddies, horrible housemates and the inefficient, incompetent service standards here. I even told Ben that if I didn’t get a decent job by early 2007, I’d move back to Singapore for good in May, ‘cos I was really unhappy here. Then we got the internet set up at home in November and I’ve been alright since!

When is enough ENOUGH?

The newspapers in Dubai are always full of typo errors, all the time. So when I read this article “More sharks than estimated killed for fin soup” in the Khaleej Times (October 28, 2006), I wasn’t sure if they got their figures right. Firstly it states that "up to four times more sharks than previously thought are being slaughtered to fill the increasing demand for shark fin soup".

According to this article, it’s estimated that anually, between 26 MILLION – 73 MILLION SHARKS, weighing up to 2.29 MILLION TONNES, are killed for their fins.

According to the Shark Alliance, sharks are among the ocean’s most threatened animals due to overfishing, and because they grow slowly, mature late and produce few young.

There are so many causes to fight for – the environment, poverty, AIDS, pink ribbon, yellow ribbon, blue this and green that… Even if we narrow it down to just marine conservation, there are still so many areas that need our attention. So many diferrent sea creatures and organisms and the ocean itself, needing a human voice to fight their cause.

We need more voices to speak up against pollution in our waters caused by dredging, reclamation, etc. Small voices, speaking up to corporate big wigs. Hard luck, but it’s a start.

We need more volunteers to help create awareness and educate the public about conserving our environment before it’s too late. To realise that serious damage has been done, and is still being done, and we won’t have anything left to conserve if we continue being selfish, taking from nature till there’s no more.

All these little voices that cry out, all these little hands that try to make a difference… Is anyone taking notice? Well some of us think, it’s small, but it’s a start. If you can influence one person out of ten, to stop collecting seashells or to say no to shark’s fin soup, it’s a start. You’ve made a difference.

But I say, it’s not enough. There’s a Malay saying that goes, “Sedikit-sedikit, lama-lama menjadi bukit” meaning, bit by bit, day by day, it will make a difference. But it’s not enough. There’s too little good being done to counter the bad. It’s like 1% conservation versus 99% destruction. We are taking too much, too soon, giving too little, too late.

We have organisations all over Singapore, and all over the world, fighting for all sorts of rights and causes. Blue Water Volunteers, Green Volunteers Network, Shark Alliance, UNESCO, Greenpeace… It’s not enough. We need more volunteers, plus support from the government and the media, to educate the masses.

Volunteering for a good cause is not easy in Singapore. Unless you are backed by big corporations or the government, with big funds, able to carry out big charity events filled with big celebrities. This is how you reach out to the masses, not bit by bit, day by day. How many times have you seen features on TV about dialysis, breast cancer, the yellow ribbon project, or even about dengue? Out of the millions who watch TV, how many take notice and make a difference? Now compare that with the difference volunteers make without much help from the media. It’s not much. It’s not enough.

The answer lies with the people. The future of Singapore’s environment lies with Singaporeans. Singaporeans who are ignorant or just plain selfish. The government, through the media, tells the people what they want to hear, or what they think they should hear. For example, The Yellow Ribbon Project. It’s a good cause, but what makes it more important than any of the other causes that don’t get airtime? Why no public awareness campaigns about the effects of dredging in Singapore waters? Why no campaigns against the sale of shark’s fin soup in restaurants throughout Singapore?

With campaigns like The Yellow Ribbon Project, the government wants the people to believe that everyone deserves a second chance, and eventually, Singaporeans will believe that the government is one that cares for them, giving everyone equal opportunity. So the selfish or ignorant Singaporean thinks, the government is working for me. So the people voice their concerns to the government, who will indeed help them. They complain about the hike in bus fares, MRT fares, taxi fares, complain that there’s no sheltered walkway at their HDB estate, complain, complain, complain. All about how the government can better improve the standard of living in Singapore.

Who’s gonna be crazy enough to go to his MP and say, “Mister MP Sir, we don’t mind paying more for MRT fares if this means it will make Singapore a cleaner place to live and breathe in.”

Or “Mister MP Sir, Singapore should say No to the import of shark’s fin because I’d rather have my future grandchildren visit Sentosa to see real sharks than to look at pictures of extinct sharks in history books”.

Your everyday selfish and ignorant Singaporean isn’t gonna do that.

It’s not easy for small groups of volunteers to reach out to the rest of selfish Singapore or the world. So do we go to the top? Do we speak to restaurant owners and show them horrid pictures of finned sharks left to bleed to death at the bottom of the ocean? [Read about ‘finning’ below] Do we hope it tickles their conscience that they have the blood of all these dead sharks on their hands just for a few bowls of soup?

That’s not gonna work either ‘cos the selfish and ignorant Singaporean is gonna walk in to that restaurant, look at the menu, and then complain to the manager and all his friends and maybe even Mister MP that “this restaurant supposed to be high class one… but got no shark’s fin leh”.

People demand, companies supply, the industry thrives, and another plant or animal is added to the endangered or extinct list.

And this is just the Shark Fin Cause. There are still so many other marine creatures, terrestrial animals, plants, trees, the air, the land, the ocean… all asking us to think less about our own selves, and to think about humanity and Earth as a whole. Just look at Earth’s timeline, from the Pre-Cambrian period, 3800 million years ago till now.

Life on Earth began in the Ocean. Sea sponges, sea lilies and corals existed since the Pre-Cambrian and Cambrian periods, more than 500 million years ago. From 245 million to 65 million years ago, dinosaurs walked the earth. 60 million years ago, Earth was flora and fauna paradise, with all sorts of plants and flowers, creatures big and small, thriving in a beautiful world.

Then came the time of man, just 200,000 years ago. In the few years that man has walked the earth, we have managed to wipe out most of what was naturally beautiful on Earth.

We are our worst enemy with an unquenchable appetite for destruction. Even creatures as big as dinosaurs could only have been wiped out by something huge like a giant meteorite or the Ice Age. With our greedy hands, narrow minds and selfish beings, we have resided on this beautiful planet for less than a day if compared to the BILLIONS of years the Earth has survived. And yet we have managed to cause so much destruction.

Some of us are doing something. But it’s not enough. The rest of us go through life like it’s one big buffet or warehouse sale, taking as much as we can, as quickly as possible, but it’s never enough.

26 to 73 MILLION sharks are killed annually for their fins. Do we really need that much soup to satisfy our appetite?

The Shark Fin Trade
Shark fishing is condoned because sharks are an important source of protein in certain parts of the world. However, it is the high value and demand for fins that endangers sharks, when finning is practised.

‘Finning’ refers to the practice of cutting off only the shark fins, usually while the sharks are still alive. Shark meat is too low in value so the sharks are thrown back into the ocean to conserve space on a fishing vessel. The fin-less sharks then drown or bleed to death. Divers have discovered hundreds of dead finned sharks at the bottom of the ocean in massive shark graveyards.

I love soups – Asian, Western, light, creamy… and I used to enjoy shark fin soup too, till I read an article in Fins magazine and saw pictures of the shark graveyards. Shark fin only provides gelatinous bulk in shark fin soup as it is tasteless. So if it’s the taste of shark fin soup that you enjoy, it’s actually just chicken or some sort of ‘superior’ stock.

Although shark fin is considered by the Chinese as a tonic, it has little nutritional value, and may even be harmful over the long term as shark fins contain high levels of mercury.

If you’re planning a Chinese banquet dinner, like say, for a wedding, please look at the pictures and think twice before planning the menu. Relatives can bitch all they want about not getting shark fin soup, but at least you’ll know that on this beautiful day, you’ve made a difference and saved a shark or two.