Remembering

I'd always suspected I was a sentimental fool but now I know for sure.

I'm not exactly a hoarder, but I like keeping stuff, especially things which remind me of my travels. A few days ago I found receipts for dinners I had in Rotorua, Bali and Moscow, business cards from carpet shops in Istanbul and a ticket stub for a movie I watched four years ago with someone I used to have a crush on. 

The list goes on. Ticket stubs for museums, heritage sites, you name it. I have them.

A receipt from Planeta Sushi in Moscow took me back to October 2007. That was the day we walked for hours to look for food. I also found a handwritten bill dated February 2008 from Luang Prabang. Breakfast- one pain au chocolat and Lao coffee, strong and black. 

One piece of paper stood out, though- a faded, seven-year-old receipt with Chinese characters. It was from 'Soxworld' for a pair of socks I bought in Xian in February 2005. I remember that day because it was -3 degrees Celcius and my feet were absolutely frozen. I thought Beijing in winter was cold, but this was ridiculous.

The Soxworld receipt also made me remember the following day. The day after I bought the socks was pretty special. The sun came out and it was 5 degrees. Not exactly tropical, but at least it was above freezing. I got excited when I saw the weather forecast on television, the only thing on TV I could understand. There was a little yellow sun beneath the characters for Xian and the number 5 in bright red. Excited because it was 5 degrees? Yes, I know. Cold weather makes you go a little crazy.

I walked to the Drum Tower Square to find it full of people. Someone had brought a radio and music was playing. Children were running around with their kites, vendors were selling noisy wind-up toys and couples were holding hands. I celebrated with a McDonald's sundae with extra chocolate topping.

My room is a little neater now but I've still got those dinner receipts and museum tickets with me. I'm going to hold on to them for a while. I'll sort them out one day eventually, but for the moment they're in my room, ready to be re-discovered two years from now.

The Best of 2011

Every Friday, the travel community on Twitter holds #FriFotos and this week, the theme is 'Best of 2011'. The past 12 months were pretty quiet for me but I've started to make plans for next year, which I'm really looking forward to. 

Until I pack my rucksack again for 2012, here are my favourite photos of 2011:

The Blue Mosque, Istanbul

 Nazar boncuğu, or evil eye amulets hanging on a tree near Nevşehir, Turkey

Cappadocia

The Celcius Library, Ephesus

Cute kid waving at passengers on the North Borneo Express, Sabah

River in Donggongon, Sabah

Mural on the Malacca River 

Binthabat: Giving alms in Luang Prabang

If you're in Luang Prabang and giving too much love to your Beerlao, try to wake up early one morning for a different kind of ritual.

Every day, Buddhist monks walk along the streets of this little town and receive alms from the public. This is the Binthabat, an alms-giving ceremony where food such as rice is offered. This practice has deep religious meaning for Buddhists as they believe feeding and giving sustenance to monks will give them religious merit.

The ceremony takes place at 5.30am, a little on the 'too early' side for some, but well worth witnessing.

I was in Laos to attend a wedding and Claire and Elise, two French girls I met there, told me about Binthabat. I don't remember what time it was exactly but it was still dark when we parked ourselves on one of Luang Prabang's streets two days later. We thought we were early but a few locals were already there, sitting on the pavement with their pots of rice.

When the monks finally appeared, they brought a lovely splash of colour to the morning:

Most of the monks were young boys and appeared to be novice monks. The ceremony itself is very straightforward. Those performing the ritual will wait for the monks to reach them, after which they'll make their offering.

The ceremony is also performed with great reverence- we saw this lady offering rice without making eye contact from where we sat on the opposite side of the road:

Unfortunately, Binthabat turned into somewhat of a tourist attraction that day. A lot of foreigners went right up to the monks to take photographs. We were even approached a couple of times by traders selling rice and bananas to give to the monks, something which locals frown upon.

If you prefer not to allow these vendors to make money off Binthabat, ask your hotel to set aside a little pot of rice for you. I can't imagine local hotels not willing to do that since they'll be cooking rice anyway.

If you're interested in taking photographs, remember that it's a religious ceremony, so keep your distance and make full use of that zoom lens.

Malacca

When my grandfather went into a coma in November 2002, one of my first thoughts was that he would still be able to hear me. That's what people say about someone in a coma, I told myself, he can still hear us and might just wake up.

So for the next four months, I spoke to my grandad while he slept. I told him I was tired of my job and that I wanted to leave. I told him I planned to take a few months off to travel but that I would come back when he woke up.

I also read to him while he slept. My grandad was and still is, the most well-read person I've ever known. He was always reading something- TIME, National Geographic, anything. He always amazed us kids with what he knew. Every morning, we would hear his slippers shuffling all the way from his room to the breakfast table. After he plonked himself down on his chair, he would look at us and say, "Do you know that they found some new dinosaur bones in the Gobi Desert? I read about it last night. Do you know where the Gobi desert is?" and we would wait for him to tell us, because we wouldn't know. If he wasn't talking to us about dinosaur bones, it would be something else, something scientific. My grandad was a doctor and even after he stopped working, he was always interested in finding out about new discoveries and new medicines.

My dear old grandad was reading right up to the moment he got his stroke. When we cleared his room after the ambulance took him to the hospital, his copy of 'Frankenstein' was on his bed, next to the space where he should have been laying.

I visited my grandad's grave in Malacca a few days ago. His grave lies under a tree which has white flowers if you visit at the right time of the year. When I saw his grave, it looked like that of a much shorter man. My grandad was tall, definitely a six-footer. But it was more than just his height. When I was in school, I didn't look up to him just in the physical sense, I looked up to him in every sense of the word. Or maybe he just seemed tall, like all grown-ups do when you're just a child. I tried to think of my grandad, my tears falling as I picked up the dried leaves and twigs on his grave. Am I not remembering him correctly? If he was so tall, why is his grave so short? I couldn't understand it.

When I look at the rows of unread books in my room- I have a habit of buying books when I see ones that I like, not necessarily when I've run out of reading material- I think of my grandad's old house in Malacca. I think of the hundreds of TIME, LIFE, National Geographic and Reader's Digest magazines dating from the 1960s which my mum, aunt and uncles had to clear up before they renovated the house.

We drove past the house before visiting the grave that day. It's now a private school with a white signboard and pretty little flags on the outside, ready to welcome the children who would soon sit in its classrooms.

When I said goodbye to my grandad before we left, I told him how his house had become a school. "It looks very pretty, Atok. The house will be full of books for children to read. You would like it."