Weather Update

Here is an updated weather report. Interestingly enough, we have had 70% of our January average in 24 hours! It will be interesting to see what the January totals are. Weather Update For Brunei Darussalam Brunei Darussalam which is currently in the Northeast Monsoon period, has been experiencing very active weather condition for the last few days with significant increase in the rainfall activities. The active weather condition was triggered by the strong Northeasterly surges that transport moisture to our region. Northeast Monsoon period starts from December to March and highest rainfall activities normally occurred in December and January. For the last 24 hours, continuous rain, heavy at times, had been affecting the whole nation, which had caused widespread of flash floods and flooding, especially over the low-lying and flood prone areas. Meanwhile, the amount of rainfall recorded over the Meteorological Observation Station, Brunei International Airport for the last 24 hours was188.4 mm, which was around 70% of the long term (1979-2008) average for month of January (i.e. 271.0 mm). According to the latest ensemble rainfall forecast for Brunei Darussalam, there will be a break in the active weather pattern in the next few days. Nonetheless rainfall activities are still expected towards the end of January, but with less amount of rainfall. However, the general public, motorists, and mariners are advised to take necessary precautions, especially during the active weather conditions to ensure safety and the prevention of undesirable incidents. Brunei Darussalam Meteorological Department shall continue to monitor the weather conditions closely, and will issue appropriate weather advisory or warnings, as and when necessary. For the latest weather update, the public can contact the Duty Meteorological Forecaster at the Forecast Office, Weather Services Division, Brunei International Airport through Weather Line 114 or 2345567, or visit the department's website at www.met.gov.bn. Prepared by: Weather Services Division Brunei Darussalam Meteorological Department Ministry of Communications 21 Rabiulawal 1435, 22nd January 2014

Cuteness

Does Coco really know how cute he is??

Jim has a conference of some sort in Kuala Lumpur this week. He left on Sunday afternoon. Why is it when Jim is not here that the weather goes downhill? Really downhill! And the power goes off for 3 hours.... in the evening. Is this a test? It started raining about 7 PM on Sunday, and the skies just kind of opened up..... completely! Wow! In all my days in Louisiana, I have never seen it rain so hard and fast. We got about a foot of rain in 24 hours. I guess that has something do to with the street flooding. Hmmm.... We lost power about 6 PM and I could tell that it was not just my house! I went on FaceBook, and many people were posting about how they were out of power. As a matter of fact, the entire town of Kuala Belait was very dark. After about two hours a friend sent me a text that we would probably get power soon. She lives around the corner from me. I spent most of the time knitting by candlelight. It's not like I could go anywhere. The gate is electric and it doesn't work when the power is out. We do have a walk out gate, but where am I going to want to walk to? Things that happen in places like this, you just can't make up. Here is an example of one of those. This happened to my friend, Beth. This is what she posted on her FaceBook page.... "New life experience # I've lost count: having to climb your fence, in the rain, in a skirt, while the men at the staff house next door watch you b/c your electricity is out and your gate won't open. I broke the plastic trash can I was using as a step & it thanked me by holding my flip flop hostage." Another thing to know about Beth is that she always wears dresses or skirts. There is a reason for this. She says that when she is out, she never know when you will get one of those stoop only toilets. They can be kind of tricky when you have shorts on. And who wants to have their shorts all wet from the bathroom floor! Here is some photos of our flooded street:

Jim wants me to start making his favorite foods and freezing them into individual serving sizes for use while I am away in the States. So on Tuesday, I made some Louisiana gumbo. Fortunately, I had bought all the vegetable that go in it at the market on Saturday.I invited my friend Antje and her husband, Benny for dinner. That was the eve of my birthday. It was delicious food and good company. Antje is from Germany and Benny is from Switzerland and both are pretty adventurous with food. I pretty much knew that the weather this week was going to suck. There were reports that the monsoon was headed our way from the Philippines. The weather forecaster here says this is the wettest rainy season Brunei has had since 1966. Lovely! Does it really need to do this the first year we move here. It has definitely made life here interesting. The mozzies are horrific! On Wednesday, my birthday, the street was flooded when I got up in the morning and pretty much stayed that way all day. I cancelled my Physio appointment and later the lunch plans. It was a very quiet day, but I did get quite a bit of knitting done. I did reschedule my birthday lunch with Antje to today. We went to my favorite restaurant Kaizen Sushi. As usual, it was very delicious!

It was interesting driving around today. I was driving on a main road between the two expat towns of Kuala Belait and Seria. There is still a lot of water standing on the roadway, and some roads are still under water. I sure am glad that we do not live in the Brunei Shell camp. They can't flush their toilets and some of them have sewer that is backing up in their sinks. In some of the areas of the camp there is still water standing almost to the threshold. They have had a real problem with mozzies, and now they are just breeding by the millions in all that standing water. Now it is Thursday evening, and the rain is starting again. I'm glad our house is on high ground....

Market Day

Market day is always interesting. Not just because of the variety of the foods, but the variety of people both work and not working. Rain tends to make things not work for this event. When it rains, the vendors do the typical Bruneian thing, and sleep in and show up late, or not at all. Here are some photos from my last trip, which was a little rainy. Sometimes you see yummy things like this guy preparing a pineapple.....

Small corner view of the market.

....and then sometimes I see things like this, which are delicious on my plate after they are cooked: Random Ki Jang that I saw at the market. It's been well used....

More Mangrove photos

Here are some more photos from our Brunei Bay Mangrove Trip. The guide took these photos. This is a mud skipper.

An eagle of some kind....

Antje and I on the boat.

A beautiful Kingfisher...

Singing Bird

As I was exiting the grocery store this afternoon, I noticed some waves on the beach and stopped and took some photos.

As I was returning to my car from the beach, I heard this little guy in a tree singing his little heart out.

Go to this link to hear the bird sing! http://youtu.be/uHyTKs36t8Y

Water Village

Here is a video that I took while on the Mangrove trip. This is the water village, which is almost next to the mangroves.

Here is a better video of this area that I took: http://youtu.be/hyylFGGGt0c

Mangrove Trip

Last Thursday I took a break from unpacking and organized a trip to the mangroves in Brunei. Antje and I left Kuala Belait at about 8:30 AM to drive the 1-1/2 hours to Bandar to meet our Bruneian guide, Shavez for a boat trip through the mangroves at 10AM. It was a bit of a challenge meeting up with him, as he did not give me an exact location. We waited by the bay for the boatman that he hired for the 3-hour trip. Shavez is a student doing research in this area, and because he is a poor student he does these tour to earn money. No tour companies go there. The boat ride is to the second largest island of Brunei. But I don't remember its name. It is evident that it has been mostly undiscovered. There is lots of wildlife that live only in that part of Brunei, but it was difficult to see a lot of it because of the motor noise. When the animals hear the boat motor, they run. We did see some of the Proboscis monkeys, but not very close up. There were lots of mud skippers. Shavez told us that there is another student that is doing a report on them soon. He told us how we could sign up for an environmental group, which would let us go and listen to some of the reports done by university students. Here are some of the photos I took. I am still waiting for Shavez to send me some photos that he took. First photo is the children's school, and the boat is the bus that the children ride to school. After those is the oldest petrol station in Brunei!

Here is a better video of the water village. http://youtu.be/hyylFGGGt0c

Life is good

Life has changed a bit since my last post. That is a good thing! Living in a hotel is just not fun. The cats moved into our new house on December 20th. There is a few pieces of furniture that belongs to the owner, so they are very happy to be free! This house is about the same as the villa in Doha. We hired an Amah, named Joy to clean for the weekend. She and I worked very hard to get the house as clean as possible. Joy worked a total of 10 hours cleaning! The few things that need to be repaired, the owner, Wai Ling had a plumber in working on leaky faucets. He had an a/c guy in doing maintenance on all the eight a/c's in the house. He also had him install a new a/c in the kitchen. He had a cabinet maker come in and measure one of the cabinets in the hallway that needs replacing, which will be installed in January. He had internet/phone installing new lines. The satellite TV will be installed after the TV is unpacked. Christmas eve the moving company delivered our shipment. What a wonderful Christmas gift! Christmas morning we had lots of boxes to open! .....and we are still opening them. All the stuff looks very familiar, thank heavens! Little by little we are getting them all unpacked. We still have boxes in the study, art room, guest room and in the hallway downstairs, which will go in the storage under the stairs. The guest room is full of stuff from the storage room at our old house. Most of that will go in the Amah quarters after the owner moves his furniture into a storage container in February. The main thing that was damaged in the shipment is my antique dining room table. When they packed it in the container it was standing on two legs on it's side. With all the bumping around, these two legs were stretched further than they should. It is still sitting on the floor in the dining room waiting for estimates, so that we can have it repaired. I not sure where to start to get three estimates! It is not so easy in a small country like this. We in the part of the rainy season where it rains every night. New Year's eve it rained so hard that all the streets were flooded, even though there is a drainage ditch on both sides of all the roads that is about a foot deep. I don't think I have ever seen it rain that hard before. Our house didn't come near to having any water in it, but there was a lot of flooding around Brunei. Since it was so rainy on New Year's eve, there were not many fireworks.