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Would it come as a surprise if I told people that I have high cholestrol at the advanced age of 25? Actually, I’ve had high cholestrol since my first cholestrol check two years ago, so I suppose I can say that I had high cholestrol since 23. My mum always blames it on the food I eat, but hey, she eats really healthy food, and she has almost as high cholestrol as I do! I tell people that for the extra 0.1 that my cholestrol is higher than hers, I enjoy my food so much more than she does.

It’s so hard to eat “healthily”, healthy food always tastes so blah. Oatmeal lowers cholestrol, oh yes, I would love to eat oatmeal compared to a nice cheesy pizza. Yeah, right! When my dinner finishes at 8pm, it’s so tempting to dip into the pint of ice cream sitting in my freezer at 11pm. Or the piles of chocolates in the office whenever someone comes back from a holiday.

On my dad’s friend’s advice, I’m now on medication for one month to lower my cholestrol. After that, it’ll be up to me to maintain it. It doesn’t come cheap either, at a price of RM144 for 30 tablets. That’s almost RM5 per tablet! If only my company’s benefits were better… I suppose if we were talking about “if onlys” there would be so much more to say. If only I exercised more. If only both my parents didn’t have high cholestrol, perhaps I wouldn’t have high cholestrol either. If only our insurance benefits were better…

Speaking of insurance, I met up with my insurance agent yesterday. She was refreshing my memory on my existing plan, and of course, trying to upsell me some new plans. I wonder though, why should I increase my coverage? Yes, if I were to die, my beneficiaries would get extra money, but I’m dead! I don’t have any children, nor am I married, so the person to benefit would be my brother. Hmm, maybe I should think again about it some more.

When you speak to an insurance agent, getting a critical injury / dying never seems so good before. “Oh, if you have a critical illness, you get X amount of money, and your premiums for the rest of your life will be FOC!” Sounds appealing, doesn’t it? Even losing a toe / finger would earn you some money. Anyone want to chop of one of my toes? That seems to be one of the least important limbs!

I’ve been back for almost a week now, and I figured that it was about time I posted about my recent holiday (prompted by seeing Tsin’s Tioman pictures. Since I’m somewhat motivated, I should do it now or else it’ll never get done! *Warning*: Picture intensive post!

We got the MAS RM0 flight to Manila, so the flight tickets came up to RM400+ for the taxes, whereas normally it would cost 2k? For that price, I figured it didn’t matter what the airplane food was like. :p Mine was plum sauce chicken, if you look really closely, you can see the rice at the top was all hardened.

Terence’s asam fish

When we landed at Manila, my friend’s driver came to pick us up. On the ride back to the apartment, I was looking out of the window. The traffic wasn’t much of a culture shock, I guess once you’ve experienced Hanoi, most places aren’t too bad! Once we dumped our luggage, our first destination was shopping We went to a nearby complex called Market Market. I was on the lookout for balut, I’m not sure whether I would have actually eaten one, but at least I wanted to see what it looked like before deciding. Unfortunately, the only balut I saw was already the cooked version, and looked a bit boring.

Our loot after two hours of shopping. Only the purple dress and the black one are mine, btw!

Shopping was really cheap there, of course, you need to go for the non-branded stuff! We were walking around the ‘fashion bazaar’, and a lot of the stuff there looks like clothes you can get from branded places here. Like my purple dress, I saw something really similar that was being sold at Zara. The difference? Probably a hundred dollars or so. Mine cost a grand total of RM20! We didn’t stay out long, as our flight the next day was at 6.30am.

The plane from Manila to Caticlan

Ferry from Caticlan to Boracay Island

The main transportation mode in Boracay

The hotel that we stayed at - WestCove

The view from our hotel room. Gorgeous, isn’t it? This is one of my fav pics, one person who saw it even said that it was so nice, it looked fake!

Our hotel

Main shopping / eating area of Boracay

At night, the restaurants will set up tables and chairs on the beach, so this is the view you get whilst having dinner

Went island hopping for one day + snorkeling. One of the boats was the one that we took. Look at how clear the water is!

One of the works of art. They build sand masterpieces like that, and charge people to take a picture with it! This was taken by me, sneakily, from the dinner table.

Back in Manila, and off to Krispy Kreme! That guy was taking two free donuts for us.

OK, that’s enough pictures for now. I didn’t put in that many of the beach, did I? Hmm..just one more then, so you get the idea of how nice it was!

Fun in the sun!

Last night, I went for the opening performance of Beauty & the Beast at Plenary Hall. Normally, I wouldn’t go for opening night, I always have this idea in my head that opening night is never as good as it could be, because there would be minor glitches here and there, which they need to iron out. However, this time, my dad was buying the tickets to celebrate his 70th birthday, and he wanted to go for the opening performance. His reasoning was that since it was the opening performance, there should be something “special”. Who was I to argue, after all, it was a free ticket!

We got there in plenty of time for the beginning. My dad was astonished that for a RM250 ticket, we were seated so far at the back! Such is the pricing of musicals over here… Anyway, they started late, about 8.20pm. At one stage, people started clapping to try and get them to start. I’ve never really experienced a musical like this starting late, I’m not sure whether it was of problems, or they were trying to start a bit later because the hall was quite empty, and people were still coming in.

When it started, I felt a sense of nostalgia. Beauty & the Beast was the first movie I watched in the cinemas with my mum ages ago. I’ve always loved the soundtrack, you can’t go wrong most of the time with Alan Menken and Tim Rice! The singers / actors that were particularly good were Belle, Gaston, and Lumiere (the candlestick). Belle’s acting wasn’t great, but I think her singing was really good. And Gaston was excellent, both acting and singing! Lumiere’s acting was really funny, he had a snooty French accent and he played his part to perfection.

One of the things that really spoilt the play was their sound system. There were static sounds most of the time, and at times, the mikes went off, so we were unable to hear them. Most noticeable was when Mrs Potts sang the theme song, and her mike went off, and we missed the first line and a half of it.

Towards the end, the tension was building up when the villagers + Gaston came beast-hunting. It was at the fight scene with Gaston and the Beast, and Gaston had just thrown the Beast off the railing, when the lights went dim. Then this voice came out…”Ladies & Gentleman, we are experiencing technical difficulties. Please bear with us, and we will try and resume as soon as possible.” ?!?!? What a mood breaker! I was already drafting out a letter to Yvents in my mind, saying things like “Pay for expensive tickets, get bad performance and disruptions”. Luckily, it resumed after about 5 - 10 minutes.

I feel for the performers, they did nothing wrong and they were really good, but people will have a bad impression of the musical because of the sound + disruption. My conclusion is that I will try never to go for opening night again!

My nice little comfort zone has just been shocked to it’s core! I was preparing myself for a nice quiet day at work in the office, I got in and started off my day by reading one of the online newspapers. The headline jumped out at me, ‘Price Watch: New subsidies only for poor‘. What did that mean?!? I quickly read the article, which can be found here.

In essence, Malaysians (except for the poor) will no longer have fuel subsidies. We’ve been enjoying quite a big subsidy, only paying less than RM2 (that’s less that USD 0.65) per litre so far. The most compelling statement in the article was this:

In effect, pump prices could be more than double the current subsidised prices.

I’m one of those people who are really blessed to not have to drive so much. OK, it’s also because I really detest driving! But my office is really near, and on weekends, BF drives. But even I can see the country-wide effect that this new ruling is going to have.

Fuel prices go up, EVERYTHING goes up, most importantly, prices of food. Prices go up, and I’m sure salaries aren’t going to go up. This probably will result in crime rates going up too! *sigh*

I’ve always said that people shouldn’t complain over the fuel rates whenever the government increases the price. After all, prices in all countries are going up, so why shouldn’t the government increase it? We’ve already been blessed because the fuel rates are one of the cheapest in all countries. So, whenever it goes up, I’m grateful that although it has gone up, we still have cheap fuel. Now…? What’s going to happen to our country?

My colleagues and I were discussing it already, saying how food, airflight prices and everything is going to increase. Car pooling will come into effect more than ever before. One idea thrown around was that this is a ’scare’ tactic by the government. Right now, they’ll say that subsidies will be scrapped, causing a huge uproar in the country. Later on, they’ll say that they will continue the subsidies, but perhaps at a much lower subsidy than before. And everyone will be so thankful, that they won’t complain at the large price hike for fuel. I’m crossing my fingers that this is the case!

I know I said that I’d review the games I’ve played, but haven’t done so recently. The stack of game titles that I’ve played has been growing, I’ll have to start a list in case I forget which ones I’ve played already. Let’s see, these are what I’ve played over the past few weeks:

• Bomberman Land Touch 1 & 2
• Professor Layton and the Curious Village
• Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker
• Tetris DS
• X-Men
• CSI
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
• Trauma Center: Under The Knife (currently playing this)

Don’t worry, you won’t be getting long long reviews for each game, in fact, some barely even warrant one paragraph! Anyway, today’s post is about Children of Mana. The reason I chose this game was because I played a Mana game on my PS last time, I think it was called Tree of Mana, and I really enjoyed it. This one? Well, read on for my review.

Children of Mana
Genre: RPG
My rating: 4.5/10

When you start, you can choose between a few different characters, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I never enjoy defending or casting magic spells, so I always choose the characters with a strong attack power. Of course, as in the case with most RPGs, there’s evil around, you need to defeat it, blah blah blah..

The game consists mainly of several dungeons. In each dungeon, there are a certain number of levels that you need to complete before you face the boss of the dungeon. In order to complete a level, you need to find a gleamdrop (which functions as a key), and a gleamwell (which functions like a teleporter). There are a few ways to do so, it will be displayed on the screen. You either have to defeat a certain enemy, defeat all enemies, or it could be hidden by pots / bushes, etc. During the dungeon crawling, if you are defeating in the middle, you will be teleported back to your village, and you will have to start all over again, which can be a major pain if you’re up to Level 11 out of 19!

Really, that’s the only main thing to do in this game. You can take up sidequests like searching for an item, or clearing areas of enemies, but to do that, you will need to go through the same dungeons all over again. There is a side area, where you can collect these crystals to enhance your stats / give you special abilities. How do you get these crystals? Well, you can either buy them, or get them as rewards from your sidequests, again…dungeon crawling!

One thing I found really annoying was a part of the battle system. You have several weapons you can use, swords, bows, whips, and a hammer. I like using whips, because they can hit many enemies at one go. Anyway, when you fight, you can knock back your enemies a few steps. If they are near the wall, they will ricochet off the wall, and whack into you. If you so happen to be standing near thorns, or areas that can hurt you, well, you will end up getting hurt!

It was quite enjoyable for the first few hours, after awhile it got really monotonous. Of course, me being me, I had to finish up the game. I generally will finish a game unless it’s so bad that I really can’t stand it. I suppose you could call it perseverance!

It’s almost 10pm, and I haven’t eaten dinner yet. Right now, I’m ‘watching’ the F1 race in Monte Carlo, whilst waiting for T to come back from shopping so that we can go out for dinner. Weird, isn’t it? The girl watching F1, and the guy out shopping. But that’s how our relationship works.

The last few laps have been pretty boring, Nico Rosberg just had a pretty major accident, so the cars have been behind the safety car for quite awhile. I love the Monte Carlo race because it’s so different compared to any other race. It’s a street race, and the rich and famous always flock to this race. You can see people watching from the yachts and from the hotels. Wow, the race just resumed, and Raikkonen’s already banged into Sutil’s Force India car! Poor Sutil, he was in 5th place and was going to get points which was amazing for the Force India team, and his hopes have just been crushed by Raikkonen. Rainy races sure make for interesting races!

So, today, T asked me whether I was interested in going to Manila and Boracay Island. We’ve got a friend based in Manila for the next couple of months, so accommodation in Manila would be free. Added to that, there’s some sort of promotion for flights right now, so supposedly the flight to Manila would be almost free, except for the airport taxes. All in all, the budget would be something like RM1.5k to RM2k. I just don’t know…that’s a lot of money! Although it would be a good opportunity since the Manila accommodation would be free.

Boracay’s an island near the Philippines, and is supposed to be absolutely gorgeous. Here are some pictures, stolen shamelessly from Wikipedia!

One of the reasons that there is a promotion is because at that time, it’s the start of the monsoon season. T seems to think that since it’s only the start, the weather shouldn’t be to bad, but our friend is going to double check with a travel agent. So, to go, or not to go?

It seems like such a lousy time to be going on holiday, with the prices of everything going up. I had breakfast at Village Park in Uptown yesterday (the best nasi lemak around!), and the price has gone up from RM6 to RM6.50. The prices of everything is going up everywhere, and I’m sure it will only go up more, with the prices of oil in the US reaching record levels. I can’t imagine how the lower-income groups are surviving, even I’m starting to get worried about inflation, and I’m sure I’m earning more than they are. Added to that, the fact that my office is only about ten minutes away from my house, my petrol expenditure is really low. Plus, I still live with my parents, so I don’t pay rent, nor do I pay for groceries! OK, I do help out with some bills, but I’m sure that’s nowhere near what I would be paying if I lived on my own. How do people do it!

I find myself constantly thinking nowadays about ways to make more money, other than from my normal 9 - 6 job. If only it were so easy to think of money-making ideas, isn’t it? If only I were really good at some form of sports, I could be making lots of money. Of course, not badminton. :p Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Pete Sampras…think of the bucket-loads of money they’ve made during the course of their career!

I suppose that in the end, I will be making the trip if the price is right, since T really wants to go. With this trip in July, Bali in August, and hopefully Egypt in November, I’d better get my brains cracking if I want to earn some extra side money.

PS: The race just finished, it was cut short because it reached the maximum 2 hours. Hamilton won, followed by Kubica and Massa.