I’m off to Haaaahng Kaaaahng! Again. Though the last time I went was only less than half a year ago, I didn’t have enough time time to explore a lot of the destinations save for the obvious ones we picked off a brochure at the airport. This time, I’ll have till Sunday, so you can be sure I’ll be going to the other obvious destinations on the brochures.

I also received several lists of food places to go to. Unfortunately, George is afraid of The Big Bad Bird Flu, so many of the places will have to be struck out. The good news is, I can absolutely gorge myself silly on pork, pork and more pork. Char siew and sweet and sour pork are your friends. And we will get even better acquainted in the next week.

I’m bringing my digital SLR this time, because I think my stubborn attempts to keep to purist film snobbery resulted in a rather soulcrushing moment when I realised, on the way back from Taiwan, that I had packed my film into my check-in luggage. The x-rays that are used for check-in baggage are a quadrillion times stronger (slight exaggeration possible here) and will almost absolutely fog your film. And in my case, my undeveloped film.

Ironically, the chances of my dropping my DSLR or memory card are far lower than packing film into my baggage.

Lots of pictures to come, I expect, and all the holiday weight I tried to lose shall be back with a vengeance. (But totally worth it for char siew.)

I know, when you call helplines, there is a certain level of low expectations to be had. You know you’re going to be:

a) put on hold. Sometimes indefinitely.
b) asked a number of inane questions so that they can understand you so that you can understand them so that they can understand you.
c) transferred to multiple people so that you can go through a) and b) over and over again.
d) asked to be called back because they don’t have the answers immediately on-hand.
e) never be called back.

But you don’t expect this from the Corporate Communications department of a government statutory board who is presumably rich enough to hire good corp-comms staff, having recently blessed the nation’s digitally creative with half a billion dollars with which to play.

For every question I asked, the girl on the other line covered the mouthpiece to relay my question to someone else who must have been brilliant but communicating exclusively in sign language or had taken an oath of silence, because why didn’t she just pass the bleeping phone to her, instead?

And, I’m sorry to tell you all, she had what sounded like sticky hands. Or a sticky handset. Because each time she covered and uncovered the mouthpiece, you got a loud schhhhlp ringing in your ears, before her next word.

Finally, she too grew tired of the message-passing, decided to take all my questions down and promised to call me back. Which, naturally, she didn’t.

Though I must say, I thought her last answer to my final question was the most logical I’ve yet to hear from her: “Acherly right, you can googer the answer,” she said.

Of course. Googer. I should’ve gone with that, rather than ask a highly-paid, hopefully well-qualified corporate communications manager of a government agency what it was her agency did. Why do it the hard way, after all?