Here's My Story

As a result of this, I am now preparing for a backup plan that is quite risky and hence all the more important to get a hand of certain figures as much as possible.

I would like to find out the monthly/yearly budget for the following items in Malaysia (can just assume KL):
(1) Food
(2) Mobile phone
(3) Car maintenance
(4) Car petrol
(5) Motor insurance
(6) Broadband

Anything else I should be thinking off? There's no need to consider paying car loan, house loan, house rent or tax. I would appreciate any valuable input here. Thanks!

19 Nov 09 9.38pm update: Added broadband

I was in Canberra for 14 days and 14 nights. It was only on the 14th night I needed to take antacid (due to particularly spicy curry vegetables and ice cream that night). Otherwise, I neither ingested antacid nor omeprazole. This is despite having a slice of toasted bread with 100% natural peanute butter every night for 12 of those nights, with half glass of full cream milk, about 1-2 hours before sleep. This is in direct contradiction of the specialist's advice.

Yet, I felt so much better than I had been in recent months. No sorethroat from acid reflux either.

What does this tell me? I could only think of 2 things: either it was due to lack of stress from work (a very likely reason) or due to generally healthier main meals in Canberra (my sis is trying to inculcate healthy eating habits for her sons) or both.

This really got me thinking about alternatives to current job and I thought a lot about while waiting to board my plane back home. I may need help from you all to tell me certain figures for budgeting purpose.

Be careful of raining man? Errr into the sea?



40m-long taxi can be found on the right side.

My sis has some plants in her garden but not due to her own doing - they were planted by her in-laws. Apparently my sister (in her own words) is "hopeless" in looking after a garden (Me: Huh? But she planted vegetables!). Hence, they planted hardy plants and only asked her to occassionally water them.

The result is pretty good. Perhaps I should get some and see whether it can grow in the tough environment of my condo hehe.

There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.

- Anonymous (please let me know if you know who said this)

Apart from the bad stuff, there were some good ones although the spoilt zip tips the balance towards bad stuff and especially since some of the good ones turned out to be bad in the end. Oh well.

Anyway, some of the good things that happened are:

(1) I managed to leave office at about 4.15pm, collected my bags at home, checked in at Changi Airport and have time to eat Subway's Vege Delite (which I bought earlier near my office) and to have a short foot massage using OSIM's U-Squeeze (not as good as I thought but it was good enough).

(2) As usual I asked for aisle seat on the Singapore-KL flight at the check-in counter and was pleasantly surprised that they could also get me aisle seat on the KL-Melbourne flight (but turned out to be the seat beside the aisle seat, as blogged previously).

(3) The back of the seat on the MAS plane was a little puffed up and so provided better support to my back (but unfortunately still had sore tail-bone).

(4) The beef stew with potato and broccoli served for supper was rather delicious and better than expected.

(5) There were a couple of instances where the turbulence was so bad that the captain asked the cabin crew to go back to their seats in the midst of serving us drinks and food. Luckily there were no accidents and I'm still alive.

(6) Although I didn't manage to get the earlier flight to Canberra, this gave me time to get a Vodafone prepaid sim card and its recharge and a plug converter. This saved the hassle of getting them in Canberra and more time doing other stuff.

(7) Lastly, I have to mention that The Lounge at Melbourne Airport T3 was fantastic! My Priority Pass enables me to access plenty of airport lounges worldwide (the pass is complementary of my Citibank Premiermiless credit card) twice a year for free. The lounge was spacious and had ample seats and tables. I had shower there (towel, shampoo, conditioner were provided), breakfast, used my laptop awhile to update my budget and then registered the sim card.

Here are some pictures of The Lounge:

I was on a 15-hour journey, including transit time, on the route Singapore-KL-Melbourne-Canberra. I was on MAS for the route Singapore-KL-Melbourne and on Qantas on the route Melbourne-Canberra.

With 2 transit, a few things could go wrong. They did and they were:

(1) Although I asked and was supposedly given the aisle seat on the KL-Melbourne flight, it turned out to be the seat next to the aisle seat. I couldn't get up as often as I like to stretch which I usually do.

(2) My tail-bone was sore throughout the KL-Melbourne route and I couldn't get much relief due to (1) above. My sister attributed this to us being small people. Discriminatory seats. Bah.

(3) I slept a total of 2 hours during this entire 15-hour journey, mainly due to (2) above.

(4) The queue at the Melbourne airport immigration checkpoint was very long. I believed it took at least half an hour just to clear that.

(5) Although I indicated on the form I have nothing to declare, I was asked to join the queue (quite a long one...gah) to get my bags scanned instead of straight to exit. Note that my father's bags were not checked eventhough he declared a few times (my father was on the next day's flight).

After joining the queue, I had another opportunity to escape as there was another custom officer at the end of the queue deciding whether visitors could exit or have their bags scanned. I was asked to have my bags scanned.

As I was collecting my bag, suddenly one of the custom officers asked me to open one of my bags (omg when would this end??). In my haste, I spoiled the bag's zip :( Luckily there was another functioing zip there. As expected, there was nothing alarming in it. What a bloody waste of time, which did nothing but spoil my bag. Honey said I had hamsap look, which supposedly explain why they picked on me. I think not!

(6) Plane touched down just past 8am local time and by the time I cleared immigration and custom checkpoints, it was around 9am. Did I mention it was a waste of time?

My plane to Canberra was at 11.50am. Hence I asked whether I could take an earlier flight. The only earlier flight was at 10am and it was full. Now, instead of the usual service counter checking in, it is now self-check in for Qantas but still need to queue to drop the checked-in luggage, which was yet another long queue (did Melbourne import Singapore's trait or what??)