Friday With The Rockstars In Penang

This is half a Friday linkie post because last time I totally nixed Fridays while traveling some people got disappointed… 

1) Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri! Can’t wait to see my old high school best friend again, she’s off visiting. Meantime, Ramadan Around The World.

My parents brought us to The Hakka Tree; being Hakka Kings’ verdict was it’s “not very Hakka” but we, esp my parents, still thought it was quite nice. Especially the crispy fried bean curd skin. Only tofu Rockstar’s eaten. And I totally embarrassed myself by hemming and hawing in Hokkien before reverting to Cantonese to ask “How do you say lai cha in Hokkien?” (Belatedly I remembered it’s Teh Si, right? Well at least I can say paisay 😀)

 

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2) Man tries to smuggle turtle on a plane in KFC burger. Technically this is more than a week old but it’s South China Morning Post and I was just expounding the virtues of Ah Wo whom we met at The Peak because Rockstar dug up the old video on my phone to show my mum. Not… that I’m dissing her dog-keeping, she would probably ultra-spoil a turtle too. She is just an insane spoiler of animals, I still remember her feeding the house cicaks warm rice.

3) Stunning before and after by makeup artist Vadim Andreev

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Around extended family times on our first Grandparent Tour since Little Miss was born, Kings nips in and out of business meetings or is often on the phone. Besides the “usual” Singapore, Jakarta, Bangkok, Sydney, he’s been flying to various parts of Malaysia quite a bit. In the past months Malaysia has scored most popular among the various investment properties locations by a big margin, of all the places Asia Bankers Club members have viewed/bought.

As a generalization, I’d say one wants “cheap-and-good-everything” and it ain’t just the cliche – “expensive and good” is of no use unless it has the potential to get expensive-r, as I tell Rockstar, in answer to his “How do you make money?”) What you need is for the market to move “unexpectedly” further in your favor from where you bought into. You can buy a derivative investment that looks like it has a very nice coupon payment and it can still be horribly “expensive” because said upside is already completely priced in. Just like buying the gorgeous little town house at the high.

Anyway. Properties Malaysian. I find their popularity interesting, because while the most people we know identified opportunity here, it’s not like you can easily rent out your investment as a holiday stay place like we love to seek out whenever we are in Australia. I mean technically you could, but I think there is the fear of your beloved property just getting trashed. (In Hong Kong, you can’t easily do that either, though not because someone will trash your place but because people want to lock in against crazy movements due to a certain type of speculator the government keeps introducing New Buzz Off Speculators Financing Rules for, so you generally have to do the 1-2 year rentals.)

With a Voice of Almost-Experience…… many years ago my parents bought a holiday apartment along the popular Batu Feringgi beach tourist belt and chose not to rent it out to holiday-goers too. Their entire floor of Singaporean, British and Other European Country They Have Yet To Ascertain But The Hi-Byes Have Gone On So Long It’s Almost Awkward To Ask Now neighbors in this apartment development chose to do the same. It’s basically everyone beli buatan Malaysia (buying Malaysian) for capital appreciation, forgoing potential rental income because fixing up a trashed apartment costs more.

Was just thinking, while you dabble in cold hard probability while weighing an investment, the “emotional element,” or human nature and the understanding of, can tell you something a lot more. For e.g., deciding whether to remove a “safety” option feature from a derivative investment product. We once looked at one with a “safety” option that cost only about USD 25 cents for every USD 100 invested – because the market priced in a very low chance the equity index would tank (stock market super bullish the – we all know how that turned out ultimately… in the end the cheap “safety” was what really saved the entire thing – from a truly blessed decision several years ago that the “just-in-case insurance” was worth far more than the numbers told – in this case, a very cheap buy that became invaluable). Back when I was a newbie they had me cut my teeth on a default probability software calculator – interestingly, when you inputted also a publicly traded stock price, as opposed to only the company’s financial statements, you could get a very different default probability number. (That IS interesting right, what does the stock market/ all-too-human traders and investors think is going to happen to the company, that financial statements themselves don’t foresee?)

Okok sorry, got carried away. Basically my parents and their neighbors had all figured the probability of getting a holiday goer who trashed their place plus the monetary and the emotional cost of seeing their beloved holiday home treated disrespectfully is too much, thank you very much. But that even without the rental income, capital appreciation in itself was more than worth it.

4) So anyway is it a little funny I went yarning off as a lead to 17 Most Amazing Treehouses?

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5) “Busy streets, walking/talking robots and sumo wrestlers are just some of the things you will find in the world’s most technologically advanced city…” 

Ok, sumo wrestlers probably gave it away, but I betcha you still wouldn’t be able to guess that is the opener on Hotel Club’s pet friendly Tokyo hotels page (ok, they have like a gadzillion other things on but my mum is a crazy pet person so I searched the pet hotels to entertain her). Then I thought the “walking/talking robots and sumo wrestlers” was funny because obviously pets would be taken by this. So then I went to their Sydney hotels pet friendly page as well, and read, “Sydney is famous for its sun, sea and surf and does a rather cool job of looking after pets of its visitors.” But where are the super-cute pet pictures? 

That’s when I poked around and found CNN’s 12 of The World’s Dog-Friendliest Hotels.

So, good vacation stay listings should come with many pictures <imagine own dog there>.

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6) Guess what Rockstars Time is going to look like this week?

This Rockstars Inna Holiday Home (yes, we hung out in my parents’ holiday apartment today – the jam was sooo bad coming back down from Batu Feringgi and by the time we fed and settled everyone I think I missed Friday by like a minute)

Good weekend, one and all!

19 years ago I had a very memorable sleepover (like Amy Chua’s kids, I didn’t get many) here with a few of my friends from neighborhood secondary school SM Hamid Khan (most of whom were on the taekwondo team) – I didn’t tell them it was my parents’ place cos I felt self-conscious being from a slightly more well-to-do home than the rest; I think they guessed my awkwardness because they then didn’t tell me they knew my parents owned the place til some time later… One of em had observed the furniture was different in a rented unit he’d been in… (Wasn’t that easy to tell back then ok, my parents hadn’t added the birds yet.) 

I shared a room with another girl back then and today we’re mum friends, those are her gorgeous boys in some of the pictures.

Here’s to old friendships. 3 mergers, 7 bank employers – as many as 5 different reporting lines in 3 years with a single employer alone, I love old friends even more. I didn’t get to dig em all up, what with going batshit crazy with the second baby on occasion, I’ve got to try. It was some of these guys who taught me a few things about being a friend.