Sadananda Gopalan is woken up from his sleep. News reporters are waiting to talk to him. He rubs his bleary eyes and looks up at the bright lights. He then gets out of his bed, washes his face and gets ready to relate once again the story of his life.

Sadananda Gopalan was barely 3 years old when the Tsunami hit the village where he lived with his family. He hasn’t seen or heard from them ever again. Father, mother, two sisters and a young baby brother - they were all lost to the fury of the sea. After nearly a year of wandering around in the camps and barely managing to survive, he met Sarada, a woman who had lost her infant and her husband to the tsunami. Instinctively, he felt an affection towards her. His survival instincts told him to stick by her. Several weeks later, Sarada started to notice a young boy who always seemed to be around her. She decided he will be like the son that the black water had taken away from her. She drew him close and hugged him.

Sadananda Gopalan smiled his innocent smile. There might be no food, no water, no place for him to sleep - but a warm hug was as much a rarity too. He felt the lights blinking. The TV cameras had somehow spotted him - an innocent boy who seemed to have the courage to smile even amidst all the dismal conditions around him. The reporters asked him a flurry of questions, to which he smiled again. The local translator asked Sarada some questions and she mumbled some answers. The cameras remained fixed on the boy. His was a story of human triumph in a sea of desperation. Sadananda Gopalan provided to viewers the world over a ray of hope. An ointment to ease their guilt. An affirmation that things may be getting better.

Years have passed. The smiles have slowly faded. Sadananda Gopalan started to go to a makeshift school, where a room enough to fit 10 students was packed with 40. No one had books or pens. Yet they repeated the words after the teacher and sang the songs she asked them to. If it rains, the classroom flooded and there would be no more classes. Sadananda Gopalan didn’t mind - he didn’t really know what he was studying for. The teacher told them that many good people have given them money to rebuild the houses. He will go back to living a nice house with a hard roof, as he once used to. Some of his classmates seemed to get better rooms. But it never seemed to be his turn. The teacher told him that one day, all of them would have food to eat every day. But that was a few years back. Now, the teacher doesn’t say anything. The hope seems to have died from her eyes. She teaches the same things all over again. Yet, the students keep coming back - a roof above their head and a dry floor to sit on is not something you pass up.

Sadananda Gopalan is woken up from his thoughts by the sudden blink of cameras. There seems to be many more of them than the last few years. Someone tells him that it has been 10 years since the Tsunami had killed his parents. Does he miss them? Does he have food everyday? Does he feel resentment and anger when the officials pass up his family every year when it comes to allocating the newly rebuilt houses?

Would he like a chocolate? He dips into the bowl of candies and smiles his famous smile. The smile to erase the guilt of the millions.

He smiled. This must be the Santa Claus his teacher had told him about - they come in the day after Christmas and then promptly disappear for one year, till it’s time to bring candies again.

Sadananda Gopalan smiled. Santa Claus didn’t forget him this year too.


Desipundit has a post on Disaster Remembrance Week and list of charities you can contribute to.

Dutch Diary wishes all its readers a Merry Christmas, with lots of good food, many wonderful gifts and fabulous time with your families.

We are spending Christmas in neighbouring Germany, and below is a picture of the nativity scene, handcrafted by an artisan at the Christmas market.

Christmas Markets are a favourite part of Christmas for me. And nowhere does it get any better than in Germany.

For the uninitiated, Christmas markets here start from the First Advent (the first Sunday after Nov 26) and last till Dec 23. If you thought consumerism was a new addition to Christmas, you would be surprised to find that Christmas markets date back to the 15th century. The first Christmas market was in Dresden in 1434, where they started with selling Striezel (now known as Stollen), a kind of fruitcake. Then it grew to accommodate villagers who found it a good way to sell their Christmas wares. Soon, artisans and craftsmen joined in the Christmas market frenzy and they are all now are an integral part of the markets. Over the centuries, this tradition has survived as it brings together people in a joyous celebration and adds colour and warmth to the dreary winter nights.

Christmas markets in Germany have an indescribable charm of their own. Standing under the starlight, munching on Cinnamon stars and watching the artisans work, you might be forgiven for wondering if you have timetravelled to medieval times. Christmas markets don’t just amaze you with the beautiful sights, but the wonderful smells can blow your “nose” away - the warm smell of baked gingerbread (Magenbrot and Lebkuchen) and the traditional Chrisstollen (the cake that started it all), the aroma of freshly fried nuts of varied kinds, and the unmistakable faint fruity scent of the slowly mulled Glühwein all add to a glorious olfactory experience. Throw in some festive music and the occasional marching bands of Santa Claus, and you have an exhilarating all-round Christmas experience, not to be missed.

The annoying thing about those really cheap deals that you see advertised on the travel agents offices is that more often than not, they are geared towards the lazy traveller. No offence meant here, it’s just that the best deals are to one location, often to a 4 or 5 star hotel which is in a nice suburb, where you will stay put the next 7 days, wallowing in the beautiful jacuzzi and the green hotel surroundings, basking in the pampering of the hotel staff. Now this is perfect if that’s all you are looking for - but if you are looking for some adventure, to get a sense of the real culture of the places you visit, understand the locals a little bit more than the stereotypes you have read about them, and travel to possibly more than one city in a country - we think alike! And here are just some things which I wish someone had told me before I learned them the hard way or after much effort. (This post might be more relevant for travel within or to Europe, though some general stuff may be true for all budget travellers.)

- Choose your time of travel carefully. It is best to choose the fringes of the peak season for your travels. Avoid the winter, because it’s just too cold, a lot of attractions may be closed and you may not have enough daylight to maximise your visit. In most countries in Central and Western Europe, the high tourist season tends to be June-August, which will of course be the best times in terms of weather, but the cons are that everything tends to be a lot more expensive, you will meet more tourists than locals and its hard to find good accommodation unless you plan very well in advance. So, the months of April, May, Sep and Oct tend to be a better choice.

- There are several backpacker inns, where you can get cheap bunk beds. A good place to look for them is gomio. If you are travelling as a less than 4 person group and you need to share the room with strangers, dont rely on the goodness of people - ask for a locker (a lot of the places have free lockers) to keep your valuables when you go gallivanting. And valuables on a backpacking trip are not just those that are expensive, but anything, if lost, would make the next legs of your journey miserable. However, if you are travelling as a couple, some of the low-end and mid-range hotels, can offer you a ’small’ double, which may be cheaper than two beds in a youth hostel. This is especially true in the off-season, because the youth hostel prices don’t vary too much across the seasons, but the hotel tariffs do. But that said, you meet less colourful people at hotels as compared to backpacker inns. You often get the best travel tips, adventure stories and fun times at these places - so make your own trade off.

- In many European countries, special fares are available for those below 26. This is true for trains, museum entries, hostel stays and so on. Ask for them, because even if you look your age, the person at the counter may just be absent-minded and forgetful. On some train routes (esp. Thalys and Deutsche Bahn), even if you won’t get a cheaper fare, you may get upgraded to first class for a marginally higher fare - and thats really worth it too.

- If you are from outside Europe, the easiest way to get around, is often to get a rail pass, available at Eurail . But if you reside anywhere in EU, you can’t buy that, and you have to resort to Interrail. But make sure you travel enough to make it worth it. I can’t say one is better than the other because it depends on individual itineraries. But in the last two trips we planned, it turned out to be cheaper to buy train tickets separately. This is especially the case if you are planning on night trains (not all night train routes are served by rail passes) and if you are planning to go off the beaten path (often the train routes in the places less travelled to tend to be sparse and infrequent), making it a convenient option to go by buses or to rent a car.

- Make the effort to learn a few words in the language of the place you are visiting. Even if the only words you can mutter are ‘Sie’, ‘Merci’, ‘Guten Tag’, and you come off as linguistically-challenged tourist, your efforts will be appreciated and you will be better off than a linguistically-indifferent tourist. And you never know when you will be in a place where you absolutely have no way out without some local language and some words are better than no words.

- Eat heavy breakfasts and lunches and save on dinner. May be this one is really for the shoe string traveller, but I firmly believe that the less I spend on a particular trip, the more places I can cover with my fixed travel budget and so every penny counts. Bed & breakfast places tend to be good value for money, with a decent (don’t expect the impressive breakfast spreads like they have in most Asian hotels) breakfast of breads, cold meats and dairy products. Most cities have good lunch menus which are filling and cheap. And dinners are just over the top! So, get to the local supermarket and buy a loaf of bread or some soup to keep yourself satiated till morning. And if you are a real foodie, a little research beforehand will ensure you find the best of any city’s cuisine.

- When you are booking hotels, first try the ‘aggregator’ sites that search several hotels. Good ones are allukhotels, activehotels , hotel.com. There are several others specific to regions or countries, which can easily found by a google search. Not only do they save you time, but also they tend to offer slightly cheaper deals than booking directly at the hotels. Internet booking usually tends to be cheaper, but there are sometimes hidden gems in most cities that have no online presence and hence can be known only through word of mouth. Best places to find them - backpackers’ travelogues and travel forums.

This post has turned out to be much longer than I intended. Am too tired to go back and edit. But if you are still reading, I hope you could find at least one little tip to make all that reading worth your while!

I finally got around to writing the customary “About Me” page. It’s here.

A lovely post about Amsterdam by Shoe Fiend. For someone who walked through Ams for five hours, its remarkably insightful and cuts through the usual touristy impressions.

Amsterdam doesn’t overwhelm you as Paris does with its grand buildings and boulevards. It isn’t as large and impersonal as London can be. It doesn’t make your head spin as Rome does with fountains, obelisks and stunning chapels on every street corner. Amsterdam is lovely in a quiet but quirky way. Unassuming but certainly not unprepossessing. It makes you feel welcome, at ease and at home. It allows you to soak up its ambience at your own pace.

In the interests of disclosure, I admit I am a biased judge.

The first leg of my Amsterdam living, is to find an apartment. And that’s where I have been the last week - house hunting in the Venice of the North. Before I got there, I had all these dreams of sitting in a nice balcony on a sunday morning, sipping coffee and gazing dreamily towards a beautiful canal. But guess what! unless, I suddenly discovered a rich aunt, that was going to be highly improbable. Even if I had the money to pay for it, getting an apartment that overlooks a canal, WITH a parking space where I don’t have to walk a mile to get to my place - that’s just plain impossible! Yes, apparently, people here don’t think much about paying 300 Euros for a garage space that is about 10 minutes walk to your place. And I wanted to live in a place that was 10 minutes walk to my work! Ah! The naiveté of foreigners!

The first two days of our apartment hunting was just d-e-p-r-e-s-s-i-n-g! The best I could have said about those two days was that I must have lost at least a kilo! Haven’t you heard about Dutch stairs? They are steep, almost vertical and seem to go on forever. And at the end of this Himalayan climb, you get to see an apartment, which is well, ancient! Just because the apartment building was built in the 1800s, doesn’t mean the furniture can’t be new! That’s the sad part, most apartments here come furnished. Looking for an unfurnished apartment here significantly reduces the options. And it’s not like these places come cheap. Furniture or no furniture, the price remains the same.

Anyways, on day 3, we gave up our dreams of apartments with canal views and decided to also see apartments with furniture (let me not think of the selling spree I will have to go through, to get rid of our existing furniture!). The day started well, coz we found our dream house - the very first one we saw on Wednesday - both of us loved it the moment we stepped in and we knew that this was it! Ok, it was slightly beyond our budgets and what we could reasonably afford, but oh what the heck! Budgets are meant to be readjusted! A lovely two bedroom place in shiki miki Old South! They say the best way to assess a neighbourhood is to check out the parked cars - I have feeling that the car I hope to get is gonna significantly reduce the glam of our Oud Zuid neigbhourhood. It was just as well that we saw this dream-apartment, coz after that we were again subjected to depressing apartment after another, and stairs followed by more stairs. But I couldn’t care less!

So, for anyone looking for a place in Amsterdam, heres a few tips:
1) Get a makelaar (agent), if you are a foreigner. It’s just easier. Give them clear instructions on what you need, and they will arrange a day of house viewings for you. And the going rate for commissions is one month’s rent+19% VAT.
2) If you want to save that one month’s rent and you have the luxury of time, try and find a makelaar who gets commission from the landlord. In many cases, apartments are listed with several agencies. If you go through the agency where the landlord pays the commission, you save on that.
3) Know what you want, or you will end up wasting precious time. So, here’s some info:

RENT:
Some average prices (based purely on my experience), for a good location:
A one-bedroom (about 60 sqm) will set you back by about EUR 1200-1500 a month and a small two bedroom (less than 80 sqm, where the 2nd room is more of a study than an actual bedroom) will be between EUR 1400-1700 a month. A larger two bedroom (80 - 110sqm) will be between EUR 1500 - 2000 per month.

PARKING:
If you don’t need parking, prices might be slightly less than above. If you need parking, remember to specify that - waiting lists to get a parking permit in the city centre is about 3 to 4 years. And a private garage (which may or may not be near your home) could cost an additional EUR 200-400 a month.

LOCATIONS:
Centrum and Oud Zuid (Old South) are great places to live. Centre, because it’s full of life and you might get a place on a gracht, overlooking one of the canals. But parking is a nightmare. Even if you somehow manage to get past the 3 year parking permit queue, finding a spot everyday might turn out to be difficult. Oud Zuid - well, we are gonna live there. So, hopefully it’s nice. Or, so I am told. You will hear more about it in the coming months.

Pijp (which, btw, is slang for Penis in Dutch) is an upcoming area in Amsterdam. As are the islands, which are not really islands anymore, because now there are good roads that connect them to the rest of Amsterdam. Apparently, a lot of young urban folks are moving there. But somehow, the houses don’t look very Amsterdamish - they are not a few centuries old, with high ceilings that have delicate, albeit broken, decorative work on the ceilings, and super narrow vertical stairs. Pijp has parking problems, though. The island has a character of its own, and even though the prices are lower, it just seemed far away because it’s on an island. In real driving distance, I don’t think it’s too far from the center - and I could have got a water taxi everyday to work!To each his own.

Of course, if you want to live in the suburbs, there must be a lot of options, of which I know nothing. The farthest we got to was Amstelveen and even that seemed far away!

4) Almost everything is negotiable. The owner might just surprise you by knocking off EUR 300 from the asking price, though EUR 100 is more the norm. Point is, don’t forget to ask - the worst he can say is no!

More about apartment hunting in Amsterdam in this article, which says:

In short, deciding to live in Amsterdam – or indeed, any place in the world that so many people find so charming – is not for the faint of heart, and not for the casual visitor.

At least, its not just me!

In the Netherlands, you can go scot-free if you are a terrorist, but not really good at what you do.

Check out this interesting piece from Expatica:

Back in 2003 A. was a schoolboy with a burning ambition. He set off with a friend for Chechnya to fight for the Jihad against the Russian occupiers. Showing more enthusiasm than forward planning the two guys left in January without heavy clothing or passports.Russian border guards sent them back to the Netherlands.

Prosecutors were convinced the sketches of Schiphol Airport, the Dutch Parliament, the headquarters of the security service AIVD and the nuclear power plant in Borssele proved A. was plotting terrorist attacks.

The trial court didn’t agree with the prosecution.

..A.’s plans were so “inept and clumsy” he couldn’t have made good on his intentions to carry out attacks.

Imagine that Mohamed Atta al-Sayed and his 19 associates were arrested before they boarded the planes on September 11. Would they have been acquitted by a US court because only amateur terrorists would attempt to hijack a plane armed with Box-cutter knives?

Apparently, judges don’t just evaluate whether you had intended to do the crime, but also whether you were “good” enough to carry out the crime.

I couldn’t have imagined that my little unknown corner of the Internet will receive 845 visitors (it may not be a big number for a lot of you, but for me it sure is) in a day (still a few hours left), based on a single post! I am overwhelmed (in a happy way) - I am taking my time to enjoy the moment, for soon DD will be back to normal.

A Big Thanks to all those who linked to the post: Tomorrow, DesiPundit, From a Singapore Angle, Blowin’ in the wind, Memory and Desire, Diodati, Mysterialite, Gordee, Global Voices Online, Singapore Classics , Untitled, And Sparkle Too.

Update: its 1343 over two days!..:-)

Nguyen Tuong Van will be hanged tomorrow. In Singapore. Because he was trafficking heroin. It makes me sad - this is in a world where terrorists go scot-free. Even people who had run concentration camps have had lesser sentences. I am against capital punishment, except perhaps in cases of the most heinous crimes. And in my books, drug trafficking just isn’t one of them. Much has been talked about Nguyen Tuong Van’s death sentence. I have nothing new to add, so I will just say “Peace be to all”.

But the incident has made me of think of Singapore today and put me in a melancholic mood. Its probably not the best time to talk well of Singapore. Yet, I feel like writing about Singapore, as I knew it.

Every once in a while friends and acquaintances, often those who haven’t stepped outside of Changi airport, decide to tell me their views on Singapore. Sometimes, they tell me it is such a beautiful efficiently run city. Some others just can’t believe how people can live in a place that has such a stifling government and care about nothing else, but their materialistic needs.

I don’t usually bother to argue. At the end of the day, its not my home country and my feelings of loyalty are, at best, stretched. But I can’t help but feel that Singapore is misunderstood. Singapore is the quiet girl in the class who gets straight As in the exams, but is never really popular in school because she is such a prude. Yet she tries really really hard to be the cool-kid. Her parents tell her that she should “seriously” have fun! Yet, they tell her that grades are all that really matters. The poor prude girl is really confused. Could anyone have known that beneath the pristine doll-like image, there is a silently troubled child, with a complicated and sullied inside, every bit as human as anyone can be.

People don’t see the real Singapore - the real Singapore doesn’t exist in the tall financial centers or the huge malls or the parliament buildings, where they make us believe democracy has some role to play. Singapore is not limited to the yuppies who aspire to buy the latest Porsche or the Armani-aspiring corporate mogul-wanna-be who couldn’t care less about what happens around them, as long as they get their 5 (or is it more now? )Cs. Thats just what is presented to the outside world. In fact, even many Singaporeans see themselves through those tinted shades.

If you want to see the heart and soul of Singapore, wander not through Millenia walk or Suntec city, but through the narrow roads of China Town or Little India or Arab street, or even the little parks around Bishan or Ang Mo Kio. The fat lady who sells you the Char Kway Teow or the little girl who brings you the ice kacang at the hawker centers, has a story to tell, if only if you had the time to listen. Singapore is not a land of boring, law-abiding people who don’t think and who work and walk like machines - its a place with as much life and emotion as any other, if only you would look beyond the surface.

If the heart of India is in her villages, the heart of Singapore is in her HDB flats. Thats where the dreams are dreamt and tears are wept. If the Singapore government doesn’t hear the collective sigh of the heartlands, they would miss out on reaching out to the real Singapore. And if they don’t let us see the real Singapore, we will all go back with our own false images. If Singapore seems to you like a land straight out of Pleasantville, its only because someone has put a thick filter which blocks out all the colours, somewhere between your eyes and the reality. And you know who that someone is. It is often one’s flaws that makes us human, and thus beautiful. As you desperately try to hide your flaws, you also hide yourself. Singapore, isn’t it about time that you let us see the real you?

The next time someone talks to me about Singapore, I just wish they would talk about not just the concrete buildings or the super clean streets or the democracy that doesn’t seem to be, but something less superficial. Lets talk about the heart of Singapore, shall we?