Rainy days

Red flowers, I like

It has been raining almost every day for the past one month. With the rain, the market is in red since the beginning of November.

Speaking of things being red, our plumeria (frangipani) tree is now in full bloom with red flowers. We waited one whole year to find out the colour of its flowers as it did not have any flowers when we first got the tree from the nursery and even the gardener at the nursery did not know the colour of its flower. We thought it has pink flowers so we were pleasantly surprise to see red flowers which is the colour that we wanted. Red is also my favourite colour but I don't like to see the market in red.

Unforgettable Tour?

I spent nearly my whole weekend reading up on nuclear energy, its discovery and current status. It all started after I watched "Decontamination: Losing the Sheltering Trees" - a NHK documentary about decontamination work in areas around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear event and how it has affected the communities there. 

The Fukushima event is one of only two nuclear events classified as a level 7 event (highest level - most serious) on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The other being the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. So that got me wondering about the current state of Chernobyl.

From my online search, I found out that work to build a new containment called "New Safe Confinement" to cover the old leaking sarcophagus (a huge concrete structure built in 1986 enveloping the destroyed Reactor 4) has started in 2012 and is expected to be completed in 2015. Now, I know that "clean-up workers" at the area are known as liquidators.

More interestingly, I read that since 2002, there were guided tours to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone which includes the ghost town of Pripyat but now the itinerary has been altered to exclude visits to the Rossokha village and the military machines graveyard as prohibited by the government.

Who would want to pay to visit this place, I asked so I looked for more information about the tour, read many articles written by people who went on this tour and browsed through their photos. Some descriptions about the tour:

- dreamlike
- eerie silence
- haunting
- unforgettable
- attracts people who like lonely, abandoned and deserted places

So would you consider going on this tour?

Home again

A big thank you to everyone who left me comments in my previous post. I have been back for some time, 10 days to be exact. Sorry for not writing a post earlier. I was busy sorting out things that were left undone while I was away.

No, I did not go adventuring to a mysterious remote place with no access to the internet. Just that I did not bring a personal device to go online while I was there. The place that I visited has this building:

Night view - all lit up

It was a short 9 days trip to visit my 96 years old grandmother. This trip is a treat for my mother and I from my sister who paid for all expenses. She also requested that I let it be known here that she also prepared many pieces of newspaper cuttings of sudoku and slitherlink puzzles for me to work on if ever I am bored during the trip. For the record, I completed 5 sudoku puzzles and 5 slitherlink puzzles during the 9 days.

Grandma and ma. In the foreground is the back of my head.

Basically, we walked, talked a lot and ate loads of good food. The best thing is seeing grandma and the bad thing is I gained weight. All in all, a short, sweet and sour trip.