Pyramid Hunting

Our apologies for not blogging as much as we’d like. We’ve come to realize that our style of travelling in a general direction necessitates much last-minute sourcing of transport links and accommodation, and that sucks up time when we use a computer. That’s why we value books quite a bit – those thick ones that you can digest on long train rides, and inevitably, make our bagpacks look ridiculously big.

Based on some local advice, we headed out of Sarajevo to the little town of Visoko where some disputed pyramids lay. We’re certainly not experts in archeology. Merely curious tourists looking entirely foreign (being Asian/Chinese) in a small town where the pyramid saga seemed out of fashion, as evidenced by their incredulous looks and the bus conductor leading the chorus of laughter about 2 silly Asian tourists coming halfway round the world to see a slanty hill (we think).

The hillock looked nothing special. Just pretty pyramid-like from a distant and from satellite close-ups. Some excavations have revealed tunnel entrances and concrete-like slabs of stuff, but we’re not blogging about this. Check out this link to read more. What made our day a misadventure was how this stupid sign turned our 200m walk into a 1hr+ cruel uphill trek to the top of the pyramid only to find some obscure castle ruins and woolly sheep. But despite shivering in the wind, we were thankful how God kept the thunderclouds in the distant from pouring on us or sending us some sizzling bolts at the top.

Quite a bit of exercise we weren’t ready for, we confess. And by the time we descended and got redirected uphill again to the correct excavation site, it wasn’t so fun anymore. It’s like a slab of abandoned concrete left there by Stalin or Slobodan Milosevic when they left in a hurry. However we sought comfort in oddly witnessing a peacock displaying all its feathers near the road, and having a super nice security guard bring us through the underground tunnels connecting the pyramids, amidst a surreal landscape of grimy sheared sheep wool scattered on the grounds of abandoned factories.

Anyway please never come to Bosnia simply to visit these pyramids. It’s a beautiful yet recently wounded country that can offer so much more. We’ve also uploaded more pictures of Bosnia and Croatia on Facebook whenever we have more pictures to share, instead of stories. Please pray for us in our week ahead, as we head out to the countryside of Romania trying to be helpful in building a campsite for the orphans here.

Hungary Hot Springs

We’re loving the hot spring experience in Hungary, a country supposedly covering an deep underground reservoir of hot water. Similar to Japan, the locals have been enjoying the springs for centuries for their supposed curative aspects and spa towns dot the map in Eastern Europe. Not too sure about the health benefits, the closest thing we’ve experienced is sunburn (the weather’s been wonderful lately)


Right now staying in a tiny spa village called Heviz. The whole development is based around ‘the largest biologically active, natural, peat-mud thermal lake of volcanic origin in the world’ (I don’t understand all of that so though I better quote it.) (I heard its mildly radioactive as well) Anyway, it’s a relatively enormous 4.4ha pond 38meters deep that’s warm summer and winter (though winter can’t be much fun – its only the temperature of a swimming pool in Singapore, not at all like a hot bath.) It is tremendous fun though, its like getting good exercise while having soak. Because if you don’t swim you would drown or get too cold.

Budapest (we love that city!) is also full of hot springs and there are thermal baths spread throughout the city. Went to a famous one which had more pools than we could count, indoor and outdoor, all ranging from 16 deg to 38 deg (Celcius), and numerous saunas- wet, dry, hot, hotter, and with strange coloured lights. No slides and stuff, but a few bubble jet sprays and a whirlpool.

Differences from Japan: no one soaks in temperatures of 45-50degrees here, all the bathers wear swimsuits, and the spas are big institutional facilities (from communist times) with people in white coats and medical apparatus. Inside comment to my family (Sharon’s): I learnt that ‘Therme’ is a legitimate word and basically means hot spring. I think its Te-ru-me that actually has no meaning!!

Seven Days Of Work

A quick closure of our WWOOFing experience for this entry, as we’ll be loading more pictures on Facebook soon.

Firstly, to properly introduce our hosts. Lukas and Klara Hadasovi had come a long way since their urbanite lifestyles in Prague, to their current ideal of a mostly self-sustaining 20-hectare farm in a rural part of Czech Republic, near the Polish border. A non-commercial outfit, their 3 dairy cows and 8 chickens produce enough to feed their family of six. You can say they’re dreamers. But certainly not a dream for everyone, lovely as it sounds, beautiful are their fields and 4 children. Took them many years of musing solitude before they painstakingly self-learnt how to run a farm, and much trial and error before their homemade food taste scrumptious.

There’s not much of a routine here except to milk the cows, feed hay to the 2 horses, and for Klara to home-school her kids for one fidgety hour. So our work gets pretty varied – Chopping/burning fir-wood, fixing up fences, transplanting seed(lings), shoveling compost, attempting to help with cooking or babysitting etc. Gets tough sometimes but certainly good exercise for us both!

We learnt quite a fair bit too from our daily interaction with the Hadasovis. Like the rest of the ex-communist satellite countries, nobody in Czech Republic likes Russia. Parenting also seem to be a common thread running through our travels as people have been talking to us about a variety of parenting issues. In this farm with 4 children under the age of ten, the discussion centered on freedom and space for children to play, including ideals on safety (like internalizing in children awareness through experience for heights, hot surfaces, sharp objects etc and thereby allowing the parents to trust and leave them largely unattended), training them not to seek attention cry over cuts and bruises (We were very impressed), spending family time, etc.

We also really enjoyed listening from them about nutrition (on natural versus chemical laden), ecological sustainability, and how slower is better than faster, handmade is better than factory produced, poorer is better than richer – it was definitely a refreshing change from urban life. The Hadasovis aim to be fully self sustaining rather than selling their organic products or having a small homespun businesses to make money. We thought that was an interesting paradigm shift.

Besides the philosophy discussions, we learned the multiple uses of milk including butter, cheese (in 7 days Sharon saw Feta, Mozarella, yogurt cheese, cottage cheese, hard cheese, and cheese steaks being made!), curd, yogurt, and cream. We ground raw wheat for bread, pasta, dumplings, pancakes. We made mayonnaise. Klara makes supermarket bought ingredients look like instant food: before use, raw wheat needs to be ground and sifted. Milk needs to be born, fed, de-cowed (‘milked’), filtered, and pasteurized to 65 degrees. Somewhat similar process for eggs. Butter needs to go through the ‘milk’ process then go through several further steps. Tea is gathered, dried and steeped in boiling water. One gets the idea. We do some of these steps while actually preparing meals.

So all these and much more, as we venture towards our travelling phase based on volunteering opportunities around. :)

Hadasovi Farm

Such surreal experiences we are having WWOOF-ing here at Hadasovi Farm in Czech Republic! Just a quick blog on this as we should get to work soon:


- Sleeping in a firelit teepee under the moonlight out in the open
- Eating homemade organic food everyday like cheese, bread, mayo, tea and various other dairy products
- Trying unsuccessfully to be a farmer like helping out to chop firewood, milk the cows, transplanting seedlings etc
- Learning about the Czech way of life. politics, history, and snippets of parenting from the Hadasovis who let their 4 children run all over the farm and playing with the 3 cows, 2 horses and various animals.

Well just 2 pictures to show it all first, will upload more next time! Meantime read more about their farm at this link.

GeoCaching & Taxi Strike

What an excellent game Uncle Alan introduced to us recently! It’s called Geocaching, involving enthusiasts using GPS coordinates to track down concealed boxes of little treasures hidden by other Geocachers. It really puts in some wee-fun into simply hiking or a walk in the numerous parks around UK.

Some Geocaches are even brazenly placed in public areas such as train stations hidden from the prying eyes of “muggles” – non-Geocachers”, using techniques such as magnets behind phone booths. This necessarily involves a security risk though, for Geocaches in such locations as be easily mistaken for bombs. Anyway I’m inspired enough to consider getting a GPS device and jump on the bandwagon!

In other news, we encountered our first union strike in Europe. Thank goodness the whole of Dublin didn’t shutdown. We simply found the taxi stand deserted as most taxi drivers went on strike, campaigning for a cap on issued taxi licenses that had flooded the city, and eating into their earnings. We were lucky enough to source a vehicle eventually through the good people at the airport customer service.

This is apparently a non-official strike which isn’t synchronized between the 3 taxi unions, and not all taxi drivers are obligated to participate in. That’s what we learnt from our driver when we met him at the customer service counter. I wonder if he’ll get mobbed by other tourists or heckled by fellow striking taxi drivers if we met him at the taxi stand instead. So from a pragmatic point of view, it’s probably not such a bad thing that our unions are Singapore are pretty much toothless. But then again, if you really need to fight for fair wages if you’re exploited, who can you actually turn to?

Community Engagement

For someone like me involved in the community sector, it's been a real inspiration witnessing how the Western societies engage their citizens and implement everyday social policies.


Learnt yesterday in Belfast that they have a coastal rescue team comprised entirely of volunteers responding to emergency distress calls. That's a tough job, running out to sea in the middle of the freezing night if it happens so, hauling people or vessels to safety. Then during church service today, noticed an interpreter standing in front of the congregation using sign language to translate the whole sermon for some hearing-impaired attendees. Fair-trade products also dot the landscape as choices open up for the everyday consumer to choose products that give a fair return to third-world producers.

We've also been real blessed experiencing excellent hospitality during our stay with the Dormans here in Belfast. And you somehow pick up snippets of local civic consciousness from everyday conversations. Like Uncle Alan casually mentioning about "too much carbon emissions" when someone else was rattling about flying around in airplanes. And how it seems instinctive to bring out a plastic bag and pick up your dog's poo when we walk around with Dusty the lovely madcap dog. Certainly helps that there're countless bins in the parks designated for dog poo too.

Recently in Vilnius, Lithuania, came across some sturdy recycling bins designed to prevent pilferage. I've learnt it's a problem plaguing Singapore as the 'recycling aunties' tend to break the locks and dig out aluminum cans/paper from the badly-secured recycling bins put up by NEA and SembCorp, even as it's not feasible prosecuting them since it's about their economic survival.

It's thus with both admiration and humility that I realise how much more Singapore can improve in terms of community engagement, social policies, and even simple graciousness to our neighbours, as we clamour to be the top dog only in the usual measures of worldly success. It'll be lovely to imagine the day when foreigners visit our country and "world-conscious citizens" is the first impression they have of Singaporeans.

Learning About Charity

I'm different from my wife when it comes to being charitable. Knowledge and some experience of syndicated begging in India had instilled a certain prudent consideration in me before giving. If in doubt, always try to verify. And if possible, give to organisations that can better channel the funds to worthy programmes, rather than to individuals.

The people asking for money outside the Orthodox churches in Russia was my first lesson. As of most things/people in Russia, I was wary of them. But my wife's simple logic won me over - they indeed look somewhat homeless, destitute and harmless. As there's no easy way of verifying if they're bona fide, why not just give openly, trusting that they'll put the money to good use?

So when Sasha approached us in Vilnius, Lithuania, 2 days back, my second lesson commenced. In a slightly pained and hysterical manner bordering on tears, the young man from Kalinigrad, Russia, implored us for some money to get his leg fixed at the hospital. While he declined our invitation to join us for dinner, he proceeded to show us his malady - a dark-looking patch of scaly skin that hints of clogged blood vessels. Truly not something you apply lotion on and hope it'll dissipate. Especially in freezing winter.

So we prayed for him and gave him a bunch of roubles we still had, supposedly sufficient to his asking. But some questions still bugged me thereafter. What is he doing here in Lithuania and why did he run out of money? Why does he insist on visiting a particular hospital somewhere else but not here in Vilnius, even as we offered to? These questions went unanswered during our brief encounter with Sasha. Indeed we wish him well and will continue to pray for his well-being. For God knows the heart of each man including mine, and it's better to be a generous fool rather than a miserly sage. Like faith, charity can be more easily observed by acting upon it rather than musing.