My brother and sister in law with their family, who are stationed in Shanghai, are back in Singapore for their summer vacation. Before coming to Singapore, my brother called and asked if it is all right for him to bring the Nitendo Wii to Singapore so that his kids can play when they are bored and of course, I said Yes.

I have always been enjoying playing console games until my endeavor into my part time business where I felt that playing games was a waste of time because it will not help me to achieve my goals sooner. Therefore, it has been more than a couple of years that I had actually sat down and enjoy playing games.

When the Nitendo Wii was fixed up on Sunday, I had my first share of playing together with my wife and I felt really relaxed. It was really a nice feeling and ever since then, I decided to set aside about half an hour each weekday to play the Nitendo Wii to relax a little.

Sometimes, you cannot help but to admit that every thing happens for a reason.

I was invited to attend a Success Permission Seminar preview by Dr. Sundardas 2 days ago and Dr. Sundardas was talking about Childhood Programming. One of the questions was “I am often described as a serious person and I have difficulty enjoying life” and my answer to that question was Yes.

The missing permission for this statement was “The Permission To Be A Child” and guess what, I seem to have my real life issues of being too tensed and too serious, having imbalance in my life of focusing too much on work and not relaxing enough that may be causing me not to achieve my goals in life sooner.

Everything in life has to be balanced!

Now that I know what I am missing and with just setting aside half an hour each weekday to play the Nitendo Wii, I know I am heading in the right direction of having a great balance in my life.

What about you? Are you working too much without play or are you playing too much without work? Either one is bad because that means you are not having a balance in your life and when that happens, the one that is overly deprived will one day sabotaged you!

Starting doing something now before it is too late.

All the best!

Eugene Goh

I was with my colleagues in China in end June and we were near the North Korea border during one of the trip. In my previous post, I had written that I had my first walk in Hunchun and Hunchun is the city that is nearest to North Korea in China.

On the Sunday when were about to leave Hunchun for Yanji to catch a flight to Changchun, we stopped by a place called the broken bridge and that is the closest where I got to North Korea. We could hear the radio playing Korean songs and with Korean commentary and surprisingly there was no border police on both ends but we did not dare to go near as we were fearful of getting shot.

I took a picture of North Korea from the Chinese border and that is the closest I would want to be near to North Korea because up till this point in time, North Korea is a mystery to me.

I made my first visit to Vietnam a couple of days ago together with my colleague and we flew straight from Singapore to Hanoi.

I have never known what Vietnam is like and always have good impression of it because I felt that it is the country that is developing very well among the rest of the South East Asia countries. As a matter of fact, my colleague and I were actually looking forward to this Vietnam trip because it will be our first time to Hanoi.

Traveling around the world has certainly give us some decent exposure to what the world is like and throughout my past 14 years of working life, I have been to Austria, China, Denmark, Germany, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, US and now Vietnam.

Of all the countries that I have visited, even how bad or poor the country is, I always find something good or even likable in the country but I think I have to go to Vietnam a few more times to discover what is it that I like about Vietnam. Food is good and cheap but I think there should be more exciting things in Vietnam.

Let’s see what is coming out and perhaps we will visit Vietnam in the near future but if you have any exciting things to share about Vietnam, please drop me a comment.

Eugene Goh

Having travlled to Thailand since 12 years ago in 1996, I knew that I had to learned how to speak Thai or at least learned how to order food so that I will not go hungry when I am stuck in a restaurant that doesn’t have an English menu.

All these years I have been lucky and conservative too because I always had my friends with me when we are out for dinner and he will normally place the order with the waitresses in the small restaurants, which we go to regularly.

If I am not having dinner with my friends, I would normally eat in the hotel as I fear of the unknown when I step out of the hotel or would have difficulties ordering food.

Last week when I was in Ayutthaya, my friend had something on and couldn’t join me for dinner and I had to eat alone. I had also decided that I would not eat in the hotel because I know that the small restaurants served nicer and tastier food that the hotel’s coffee garden.

I am glad I had learned the ordering of food in Thai 12 years ago as I managed to order something I had wanted to eat and it really tasted real good.

Well, if learning language is something you liked, then maybe starting with the ordering of food in a foreign language could serve you well? At least you won’t go hungry, hehehe….

I was travelling with my colleagues within China to visit the various customers and my boss suggested that we go for a morning walk the next morning at a place called Hunchun.

Hunchun is located in the north eastern part of China where it is very close to North Korea and Russia. I must say that I am really surprised to see all the developments in Hunchun because previously, it always look very grim to me.

Maybe it is also because of the morning walk that has allowed me to see Hunchun from a different perspective and it also teaches me to look at things from different view.

When we were about to leave Hunchun for another city, we stopped by a place where they called it the “Broken Bridge” and that is the closest a person can get to North Korea. We were walking halfway through the bridge and did not want to cross further for fear of the North Korea soldiers shooting at us.

It was a pleasant experience for this trip to Hunchun.