Fun Farewells

He came, he saw, but never conquered. Instead he fished, golfed, went for English class (and learned to say "No thank you", downed insane amounts of beer and sang at  karaoke lounges when he felt like it. After almost three years of living the good life here in Malaysia, TY, our foreign adviser bid us adieu last week in a small farewell dinner *organised by my department.

If we had judged the night by the food alone, it would have been pretty mediocre to say the least. Some of us had planned to get there, eat, maybe take a photo or two for posterity and say goodbye to spend the rest of the night in more pleasant ways. Turns out that wasn't meant to be the moment a live band turned up and started tuning their musical instruments.

Arofsky went and checked with them, and yes, they did play songs from any language, which was the happiest news TY received that day. His eyes lit up when he and the band belted out Sukiyaki, Nagasaki and some other song which I can't recall. They were wonderfully entertaining! Surprisingly, the band seemed to love our crowd as much as we loved them, and they hung around our table offering to play us more songs. And somehow, we ourselves got a bit too excited and started singing along with them, with sounds like frogs and all. Yes, it was raining outside by the time we left.

I did take some lousy videos - lousy because they were taken with my mobile phone and lack clarity (which is good for the sake of the anonymity of the people in it, I guess), but I can't put them up now due to an unusually sluggish internet connection. I suspect I've overstepped the limits of my bandwith with some intense internet movie watching over the past few weeks. But I shall attempt putting them up once the new month starts  - after the 11th.

Right now, I'm totally in love with the sounds made by an instrument called the Double Bass (using the Pizzicato method) It would be awesome to learn to play it, although lugging it around for my **one woman band show would be unimaginably inconvenient.

* Yeah, right. It involved the steno calling up the hotel and booking places for X number of people for their buffet dinner

** Imaginary one woman band

PS: I'm so sorry that I haven't replied to some of the comments or commented on some of your blogs either. It's been a bit crazy hereabouts. I will explain in another post.