Skip to main content

Fortunes, families and futures

It is Chinese New Year. The event is celebrated with family with an eye to good fortune in the coming year. The celebrations usually last a couple of weeks or so around the event and our upcoming trip to Malaysia (days away now!) was to include dinners with friends and family of B. Sadly, the plans have been thrown into disarray by a stroke of ill fortune.

One of B's uncles in Kuala Lumpur was found dead in his house. Now our holiday has turned into a funeral trip and happy times with relatives maybe replaced by meals with squabbling and interfering Aunts. Thankfully our time in KL was mostly unplanned, just finding good food, a little shopping and enjoying the city, so the disruptions should be few so long as we can still make Thailand. I'm not looking forward to packing funeral clothes though. Especially for too-humid Malaysia.

There was some good fortune for us this week, at least when it came to saving a fortune. We attended yet another Flight Centre Travel Expo and bought cheap tickets on Korean Air to Prague and returning via Amsterdam late this year. I did feel like flying with Qantas via SE Asia or JAL via Japan, but it was just too expensive. But I don't mind seeing Seoul again, even if it is only briefly (we couldn't get a longer stopover).

We have also been assisting members of my family with overseas travel. My sister departed for a year's working visa trip to the Netherlands, staying with her boyfriend's family. Her passport and visa were delayed in the mail so she came down to Sydney to reapply. Once she obtained the necessary documents I quickly booked her a next day ticket with Cathay Pacific, but she almost didn't go after some disagreement with her host family. It was all sorted out in the end and she took her first overseas flight.

My Mum is also planning her very first overseas trip for later this year, to Europe. We helped her explore the travel gear and camping shops in Sydney, with bother Mum and B buying Pacsafe mini bags, like the one that served me well in China.

Only days to go now. Despite the unfortunate turn of events, I'm excited!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My first overseas trip: Singapore and Malaysia

I've always loved to travel. My first memory is of sitting in a an aircraft, aged 18 months or so. Yet I never believed that I could travel overseas. To me, it seemed like something you did when you retired, or if you were rich. That all changed when I met B. She had not only travelled overseas, she was from overseas . B was born in Malaysia and arrived in Australia, with her family, in 1988. She still had relatives and friends in Malaysia and Singapore and she, along with the remainder of her family, planned to return for a visit during the Australian summer of 1995. At the time I was staying in B's mother's house while we were studying at university. After B's father passed away the year before I was the nominal "man" of the house and its high maintenance garden; her brother Michael was studying up in Queensland. B and I were quite inseparable and her mother kindly offered to pay for me to join them on their vacation. So it was that I obtained my very firs...
Post a Comment
Read more

One night in Canberra

It's the April school holidays and we are too busy to have a break but need one because of that. And because it's the Easter weekend the options are limited, so we just drive down to Canberra for the night. No, this isn't our first trip for 2023. I wrote about Japan on another site .  I refuse to wake up early so we depart after 8.30 AM. There is not much to say about the drive except that the clouds seem so low and Lake George is very full. We stop at a rest area and at the lookout up the hill to take it all in. Everyone is hungry so we first stop in Dickson and then can't think of anything to eat, so I drive us to Civic, where we can't decide and end up eating at the Singaporean Killiney Kopitiam branch.  The Canberra Centre has nice shops. I dream of getting an iPad from the Apple Store, we buy a blanket and toothbrushes from Muji and wish that Lego wasn't so expensive. Nothing we can't get in Sydney, but then we rarely go out shopping in the city. It...
Post a Comment
Read more