Andrews Sofa Art

We bought the boys a black board today and Andrew decided that drawing on the sofa was a better idea. Here he is at work.

At Home in Singapore

The Family is settling into Singapore, Samuel got a new Paddington bear that straps onto his back. He was very proudly walking around with Paddington the other day.
Normally camera shy, Mingyu was caught in this picture after covering his face.
The lads in a rare moment together, side by side, normally a close encounter would results in a wrestle or a crash.
Andrew loves books and Samuel usually pokes his head in for a quick look.
Feeding Andrew is a combination of distractions from the actual food. Sometimes he eats a lot and other times he just zips his lips.

Dia wee Aah

How do you follow a blog with such nice family photos and good memories of fun times in Singapore with Grandma and the kids ?..... Bodily functions you say ...??

Bodily functions usually are a more grounding sort of discussion point and so it is that we can dive into the bodily function of urinating. So lets get down to earth and share a little bit of our recent experience.

Samuel Stress test the Set Top Box
The cable TV man had just been to our apartment the day before and we decide to have two set top boxes installed, one in the living area and one in a small family room linking all the bedrooms.
This little family room is a convenient place to change the kids nappies without disturbing or offending anyone else and we leave the change mat and spare diaper or two there for changes.

It was on this Sunday after the installation that Samuel and I were in the family room part way through a diaper change and Samuel (hates diapers) wanted some free ballin time. So I let him walk around for a bit and soon he became curious about the new set top box sitting on the floor so he stood on it and proceeded to take a leak. After which he stepped down and nonchalently moved on.

I threw a diaper onto the machine to try and save it, turned it off and left it to dry. A few hours later Mingyu and I tried to restart the setop box, but to no avail.. then thankflly a few days later Mingyu managed to get it going again.

Dehli Bladder
I was in India last week and visited Chennai and Dehli, I had stuck to my friends advice to eat local food and not to go for the Western food. Everything went well, the curries , dosa and other treats were great. But after two days and then arriving in Dehli it was like there was a large amount of water that could not be held back any longer . Every 2-3 hours I was in need of relief ans exposed to some of the worlds less glamourous toileting facilities. Thank goodness it wasnt the full blown Dehli belly.... just dia wee aah.
After flying back to Singapore it was all clear and back to normal.. may have been something I drank.

Grandma in Singers II

Sunny had been planning the family photo shoot ever since the boys turned one in Switzerland but we never got the chance until mum came to Singapore. We went out to the Korean photographers house near Changi and did a photo shoot in thepark near the house and back inside the house. Here are some of the results...

Grandma in Singers

Here we are in Newton Circus after a big feed of tiger prawns, squid and chilli crab.

Singapore food courts

Singapore is full of hidden secrets, some of them are the topic of todays blogs. On the fourth floor of Wisma Atria in Orchard Road and in the basement of numerous other shopping centres lies the secret to sustainability in Singapore. The food court, where nationalities meet and unite in the common cause for gastronomic satisfaction.

There are food stalls with cuisine from all over Asia, North to Japan and South to Vietnam and India. You wont find any Danish dishes here, nor will you find any Euro cheese, wine and biscuits. But who needs that when you have this plethora of aromas and flavours at your feet.

For around 3-7 bucks singers will get you a feed of decent proportion and full of flavour. Char Siew a Cantonese marinated pork with rice and green veg starts at around $3.80 up to the Korean Bulgogi beef with rice will set you back around 7 bucks.

For those with kids, there is the relatively guilt free prospect that the cleaners will not care that the babies have left a trial of rice and veggies behind them. This is a main reason why we have not yet taken the kids to a more formal restaurant. While their manners are getting better, even now they leave food scattered in a one metre radius on the best of days.

These establishments are pretty busy and difficult to find a high chair but so far we managed to try the following food courts

Suntec City - nice juices, lai cha (tea)

Kopitiam -

Singapura plaza - Nice Korean bib bim bap and japanese chicken curry

Tanglin - noodles

Vivo City - Korean and Cantonese Char Siu

Takashimaya - egg tarts and Dairy bell soft serve ice creams in a cone

Good eating !

Singers here we come !

What a week ! It started with a Sunday night flight to Denmark, a 2.5 hr drive across to Lem and Ringobing and back. Packing up the house in Cham on Wed and Thursday with two nights in Lucerne and up early on Good Friday for the flight to Singapore.

It took two days to pack up the house and put it in a 40 foot container. I was surprised to learn we still had a bit of room left. We should have bought some more groceries from Switzerland to take back.

It was hot weather for Switzerland at around 22-25 degrees, unseasonably warm for early April. After the packers left each day Sunny and I would get out the paint brushes and start touching up the pain marks on the walls. On the Wednesday night we didnt finish until late but on Thursday we finished the paint and dumped the leftover rubbish before walking down to the train station and heading to Lucerne for dinner with Jinsu and the kids.

Funnily enough Sunny had a craving for Korean food so we went to the Korea town restaurant, on entry we were very suspicious that the food was actually chines but after meeting the Korean lady who owned the place we settled in. The kids had fun and we enjoyed the kimchi chigae, Bulgogi, ori (duck) and mandu (dumplings).

It was a warm evening so we strolled back past the cool bars and hotels in Lucerne. One place called the Hotel had giant portraits over the walls and ceiling in each room. We always find the cool stuff just before leaving. It was a similar experience in HK when we discovered the Top of the Town bar and restaurant with harbor views at 39th floor of the excelsior hotel in Causeway bay. Outside the music hall in Lucerne there were lots of people sitting in front of the fountain on the waterfront playing music, drinking and chatting. It was great and the view over the lake and the classical buildings of the casino, Montana hotel and Gutsch on the hill was spectacular.

We will have good memories of Switzerland

Friday morning

The taxi took quite a while to pack and we had over 150 kg of luggage including three strollers, 3 boxes and four suitcases. five of us sat in three seats while the luggage and driver took the remainder. We had priority checkin but it didn't help, the checkin took over one hour because Samuel had his own seat on a separate booking so they couldn't fix it on the system so they wrote out the boarding passes by hand, told us to take the rest of the baggage to bulky items and get to the gate asap. We rushed our goodbye with jinsu and pointed her in the direction of the lufthansa checkin as we raced for the passport control.

When we finally got to the gate we were the last to board and the attendant had the cheek to tell us to board immediately before getting our boarding passes back.

The flight was pretty long and the boys were totally out of their daily rhythm and slept all through the day we arrived and were awake all last night.

This afternoon I took them down to the pool for a swim and we had a lot of fun splashing about and floating around in the blow up toys boat. This seems to have tired them earlier so hopefully we can get a reasonable night sleep tonight.

A few days in Venice

It was to be my final gig with Siemens, to present at the Global Management Conference for the Building Automation business unit. Location was Venice and we decided it was an opportunity to good to refuse, so we packed the whole family and Sunnys sister Jinsoo and made the drive down to Venice for a few days.

The Hotel was the Hilton Stucky, a recently renovated industrial building on the canal facing Venice. It was one water bus stop away from the car park. Of course there are no cars in Venice so once the mode of transport is water bus and eater taxi and of course the gondola.

The boys were fascinated by the view of the canal and water traffic from the hotel window.

We had a chance to go to St Marco square and walk through the tiny alleys, past the shops to the Rialto bridge. Andrew loved the bridge and especially the feel of the old worn marble hand railing.

After the Venice trip we overnighted in Milano before heading up to the outlet shopping in Fox town, I bought clothes for Mingyu and the girls bought prada purse and feraggamo shoes.

Last Day at the office in Zug

The year went by at the speed of light, action packed the whole time. From getting married on 1 Feb 08 to having twins sons twelve days later, a few weeks after that moving the family to Switzerland with new job in a new country.

Yesterday was my last working day at Siemens, not only am I leaving Switzerland but I have hung up the boots with Siemens to be closer to families in Asia. The last 9-10 years with them have been an amazing run. When I joined in December 99 in Melbourne I was the only employee in my department, and my job was to start up an energy efficiency business which I did successfully before moving to Korea in 2003. The North Asian culture was fascinating and the work and living environment challenging. The long hours spent over nearly 3 years in taking the business from a basket case to global benchmark was a satisfying achievement. In Korea I was lucky enough to meet my lovely wife and we had some great time together exploring Seoul and korea. At the end of my contract I was interested to remain in Asia, despite being requested to move to the Swiss HQ.

I was lucky enough to land a job in Hong Kong and carry out a similar turnaround in the business in HK. Once again this was hard work but rewarding and satisfying and we received several regional and global awards from Siemens for the outstanding business performance and customer focus in HK. Living in HK was a buzz and through our friends we were able to enjoy the city, countryside, beaches and waterways.

So after two short years in HK the pull from HQ was getting stronger and the position on offer too good to refuse. It was the Global Head of Solutions (Projects) a business responsibility of a billion euro and over 8000 people. Again it was an interesting challenge, the work environment was so different from the megacities I spent the previous 5 years living and working in. Zug has 25 000 population and although small it has a phenomenal amount of offices and businesses. The transport and infrastructure around Zug is incredible, not surprising for one of the richest kantons in the country. Things happen at a different pace in the HQ, the discussion is always protracted and at an academic level, decisions strangely enough often made with insufficient information (ie from powerpoint) and hastily, depending on who shouts the loudest. We had a record profit year in my department in 2008 and we achieved a number of improvements on the HQ operations.

From a family point of view , Sunny had done an amazing job with the boys, most of it single handedly. I had also spent 6-7 weeks away from home in that time making it even tougher for her. Our lifestyle has adapted somewhat to the Swiss, for example we now eat lots of bread, cheese, cold meat and chocolate (at least no chocolate for me). We drink loads of bottled mineral water and an occasional glass of vino when the opportunity arises.

My final duty with Siemens will be to handover my job to an interim and long term successors in Venice on 19th March. We will use the chance to stay in venice for a couple of days and drive back to Zug after a stop and shop at the outlet shopping centre near Milano.

Next week I start my new job and attend their management meeting in Barcelona, after that I will have three weeks of introduction meetings in Denmark. During that time Sunnys sister Jinsu will come to Switzerland and help out with the kids. We then plan to leave Switzerland on the 10th April for our new home in Singapore.

Net stop for us is Singapore, almost half way between Korea and Australia. I will have a new role with a wind energy business that will include responsibility for Korea, North Asia, ASEAN, Australia, India and South Africa. They even have projects in Tasmania, so there will be more chances to get back to Tassie from time to time.

Fassnacht in Zug

Switzerland fires up for Fassnacht each year in February when the locals come out of hibernation, forget their rules on cleanliness and whoop it up in a weeklong celebration. Mums, dads, kids, teens all get involved in fancy dress, playing music and preparing for the big street parades.

Mingyu joined the parade in Cham with his schoolmates to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the school.

Samuel, Samuel, Samuel

At around 10.30pm we heard Samuel crying, Sunny went to the bedroom to check and I started to make a bottle, in case he was hungry. Sunny called out for me to come, I went into the bedroom with the light out so couldn't see what was wrong. Sunny was leaning over the cot trying to hold Samuel. Still too dark, I put my hands into the cot and could only feel his legs and couldn't find his head. I quickly turned on the light to see Samuel had split the material on the side wall of the cot and had his head and shoulders hanging out of the hole in the cot material. He was stuck and we had to lift him back into the cot backwards to get him out of the predicament.  After a short grizzle he was ok and came to bed with us, but not for long. We quickly understood why he had split the cot material, from his constant rolling and kicking. 

Oh well off to get the cloth tape to fix the cot now..

Madness in Milano

We went for an overnight trip to Milan on Saturday. That morning we left Cham, it was snowing heavily and traffic was slow. But after going throught he Gotthard tunnel the otherside was bright sunny and well, relatively warm. Thes pics are taken from our walk from the hotel to the Duomo. On the way we stopped at a local restaurant and they were really nice to us and we loved the food, we had spaghetti Vongole (with mussels and pippis) scampi risotto and a thin crust pizza with spinach and ricotta yummo.

The Duomo was spectacular and there were Baci promoters handing out  chocolates.  After the Duomo we walked up to the high fashio street Via Montnapoleon and checked out the Zegna, cartier and few other stores. That night I had booked  a baby sitter so Sunny and I could go out on a date. The hotel had lost the booking and there were no baby sitters, bummer. So we had a rather ordinary dinner in the hotel.The next day we drove back and stopped at Foxtown an outlet shopping mall inside the swiss border. Sunny and I had lots of fun in the ferragamo , Cerruti and Reebok stores. 

Birthday part 2 - sledding

How cool is it to have a first birthday party and step outside the back door and go sledding. Andrew and Samuel were waving their arms with delight as soon as we stepped outside. The snow had been falling ll morning and the sky had cleared long enough to give us a chance to jump on the sled and have some fun.

The next door neighbors saw us and got their sleds too and joined for a sledding party.  Andrew had a ride on the sled with young Angela....

Happy Birthday Boys!

The party started around 1pm with balloon chasing and bursting and then went to the sit down affair. Almost sit down,that is,  until Andrew saw the birthday cake and couldn't help himself to stand up in his high chair and take a handful of cake. The cake was yummy creamy sponge with strawberries inside and a marzipan top coat for the face (phil thought you might be interested to see the swiss cake decorating techniques!).

PS the boys were born in the chinese year of the mouse hence the mouse cake and the swarovski crystal mice!

After the party we took the boys sledding.....