Keropok!!!

I have actually been craving for some proper keropok for the last few weeks. My wish came true when out of the blue, one of my patient from Terengganu brought me some authentic keropok from her home.

I got Puan Anita to fry some o then straight away when I reached home. Verdict? Heavenly! Bon appetit.

Bad Start

I had a better sleep last night compared to the evening before. Woke up in time for a morning read of the news, shower and breakfast before starting the car up. Pop came the warning. Coolant level low …… Hmm! Since I would be going to ParkCity this morning, better not risk it. The car needs to go to the workshop. And I will be driving the MPV for today!

Hopefully the rest of the day pans out better ……

And the Editing

On my count, I snapped around 800 frames during the four days I was in Kyoto. I decided to only bring the X100, and I think it was the better choice.

Before anybody argue that the level of the snaps won't be of dSLR quality, you'd better think again. The jpg coming out of the camera were things of beauty, and combined that with the size of the body, it made for a great little travel camera.

Good thing that I brought the charger along since I had to charge the batteries twice. Reaching home, there was the little matter of sifting through the whole collection and doing some post-editing. I only managed to rummage through half of them so far. I've already geotagged and added the keywords onto the metadata. Next would be the grading and selecting which ones should be picked for post-editing, the actual editing itself, captioning then exporting into jpg with watermarking. Then came the uploading to my SmugMug server and Flickr. And of course at some stage, Facebook.

That would take me to the weekend I thought at the rate I was going. So, for the moment, Happy Editing!

Hotel Heian no Mori

We stayed a pretty basic hotel on the East side of Kyoto called Heian No Mori Hotel. A 70's affair and friendly staff, it was more than adequate. The only problem was it was 10 minutes away from the nearest Subway station. Therefore, we had to rely on either taxi or minibus to get us around.

My room was simple but neat. Fairly big after hearing stories from my colleagues who had been to Japan before, mainly about how small the hotel rooms were. I had a couple of beds, with ample room to move around. The bathroom was also more than big enough with a strong, hot shower. But no English TV channels though. Definitely no football. It didn't appear that football was big in this place despite hosting the World Cup only 10 years ago.

The main lobbyThe room came with breakfast each morning, served at the diner by the lobby. Although the items were al Japanese, I do not mind as they were seafood and vegetables selection aplenty. In fact, the miso soup was among the most delicious I had ever tasted.

For a place to stay short term while attending a conference, I certainly have no complaints. Although honestly, I would've preferred a central, more connected place. But with the company I was with, I was pretty happy. One of my colleague said that there were plenty to see and photographs if I was willing to walk around the hotels. There were a couple of shrines and if we walked a couple of blocks down, you would reach the the famed "Philosopher's Route". 15 minutes on the other direction would have taken us to the edge of Gion district, where the Geishas stayed. But I didn't have much time to explore the area unfortunately.

More on the Kyoto trip here.

Wide Awake

I had a touch of the insomnia last night. Not sure why. I wasn't planning to watch the Manchester derby - which United lost I might add. I just couldn't go to sleep. And the thing that stuck to my mind was one of my senior colleague who had a heart ailment which came out of the blue.

The gentleman would be having some procedures on Tuesday morning, and I'm praying that things would work out OK. I was yet to receive any update at the moment.