The water rides were perfect for a warm sunny Singaporean afternoon. K enjoyed the 'choo-choo train' whereas the kiddie roller coaster had him totally upset....Maybe he's too young to get the adrenalin rush?

About the small & petty things that accumulate everyday to make a lifetime.









Special thanks to our boat-man Biju who turned out to be a great cook & gave Kabeer a new career aspiration ("I want to be a boatman, mama"). He also rocked the lungi.




Some of the exhibits were beautiful - I loved the TV-painting in the second home with a lovely music installation in the background. And the paintaing of a team of gold-medallists was gorgeous.
The tiny cluttered rooms of HDB apartments may not be one's idea of a perfect art gallery (some were not even well lit), but I thought it worked. What did not work, was that the number of people who turned up for the walkabout were way more than what the HDB could cope with; making the whole walk a bit of a drag with a tour guide filling the empty waiting time with some simplistic observations about Marine Parade & the art!

The Palace in Rhodes was classical Greek. It was in this prestigious palace that Kabeer decided to start screaming, "Mama, poo-poo done" over & over again in a loop until we had to explain to total strangers that he was just in one of those moods and he in fact had not done any poo-poo!!!
The next port was Dubrovnik on the Croatian coast. By the time we reached Dubrovnik we had really had enough of history and medieval towns, but Dubrovnik literally pumped life back into the tourists in us!:) The Old Town - which has been restrored by UN after the Serbian shelling during the war in the 1990s - is breathtaking in its architecture, sculptures, old pharmacies and palaces. The antiqueness of the town really takes one back to the Middle Ages; and the natural green beauty of the port just completes its look. Couldn't get any prettier than this - Venice, you have been over-shadowed!


After Bari, we visited 4 Greek ports. The first among them was Katakolon which is the port closest to Olympia. We visited the ruins at the stadium of the ancient Olympics and marvelled at how advanced the ancient Greeks were.
The port of Katakolon was our first peek into the bluest blue of waters that we would see for the rest of the cruise!
The next two ports were the most famous of the cyclade islands in Greece - Mykonos & Santorini. Both of them were pretty, but Santorini's O'ia town with its postcard blue-n-white, cobblestone pathways, cliffs, pink flowers, waters and all the pretty things just took our breath away!

The sunset in Mykonos was our favourite moment on the trip!

But we were slightly disappointed with Venice. There were just so many tourists there (and we were there on a weekday too!) that it felt more like a flea-market than the romantic place we imagined it would be. Really, there was bumper-to-bumper human traffic on every bridge and every corner of the city and we couldn't soak in the beauty of the place as we would've liked to. The blazing sun and the infant in our arms* didn't make things easy either.
Next, we embarked on a cruise ship and started a cruise along the Adriatic Sea. But that deserves a separate (and long!) post.

This turned out to be a lovely movie. Phalke stumbled into a movie-tent and watched a silent English movie about 100 years ago and decided to make India's first motion picture. And the journey that followed was an inspiring, sensitive, humorous and passionate pursuit of one eccentric but visionary man's single-minded resolve.

You know, sometime you visit a place & find it too touristy or too commercialised .... that happened to us in Melaka. But somehow the touristy culture has added to the atmosphere in Melaka. There's this whole "bag-packer in Asia" vibe to the old city - the kind of cafes & flea markets on Jonker Street; the sort of people you meet; I can't put my finger on it but I thought it was young & adventurous; and a far-cry from the sleepy old town I expected it to be! The Cafe Geographer on Jonker Street felt like Cafe Leopold in Mumbai.