Royal Caribbean Asia has just launched their Dreamship Campaign where participants can create cruise ships using an array of fun and unique elements. You can visit the site and start building your craziest, most innovative and unique ship. The challenge lies in how different and creative you can be… come try, it’s not as easy as it seems.

And while you’re at it, please vote for my Rally of the Seas! the top 3 ships with the most votes win cruise packages for 2 on Legend of the Seas.

Some other interesting dreamships spotted…

Someone from Royal Caribbean should give this entry a thumbs up for branding

and i love this one for its creativity

In conjunction with their FW09 collection, DKNY JEANS has just launched a contest called Break the Rules. Why this name? Because FW09 is inspired by contrast and contradiction in the materials, styles and silhouettes used.

For example, soft satin paired with hard grungy stonewashed jeans.

So i’m no fashion guru but you can visit their inspiration page to check out what i mean. I think this season looks great, but i’m just partial towards tights, boots and trench coats.

Back to the contest, it’s a simple mechanism – submit your coolest look that you deem “breaking the rules” and get others to vote for you. highest voted looks get to win US$2,000 cash! not too shabby eh. voters also stand a chance to win US$300. contest ends 16 Oct – join now!

Break the Rules >>

One last shot of Orange:

Photocredit: Shivy, who blogs at dancingwiththelight.wordpress.com

See Orange Play with Fish!

The answer – we’re consuming more than ever before. We’re making more stuff, we’re spending more time making money to buy more stuff, all these to “keep the economy going” so we can – you’ve got it – make and buy more stuff. And along the way, we’re exploiting workers, ruining the environment and exhausting our planet of its resources.

Annie Leonard’s illuminating video highlights the linkages and the faultlines in our economy, culture and civilisation with enormous clarity. Here’s a teaser:

Like what you saw? Go to the official site for the full video. Watch it, share it, spread the word!

We felt incredibly sorry for it and took the kitten home. We fed it milk and gave it some old rags to play with. We named it Orange.

Unfortunately, we’ve got allergies and can’t keep the kitten permanently. But we know there are cat lovers out there who would love to care for this:

Anyone who’s interested in adopting Orange should contact qiu.yingxiang@gmail.com for enquiries. We’re willing to share the cost of sterilising and vaccinating the kitten.

In the meantime, some more heartbreaking kitten porn:

Terrified Orange

This was Orange when we found her

Cuddly Orange

More cuddly Orange

A less terrified Orange

Who can resist Orange?

A parting shot...

Photo credits: Shivy, who blogs at http://dancingwiththelight.wordpress.com/

We didn’t know what to expect when we arrived in Hotan. From the little we knew, Hotan has been famous for its jade for thousands of years. Today, Hotan’s jade trade continues to be an important part of its economy, albeit much less prolific than before. We checked into the budget wing of the one of the few hotels opened to foreigners in town in the evening, weary and dusty from our 400 kilometre journey from Kashgar. After that, we went for a stroll along the main street . It seemed like just another Chinese city – pedestrian paths laid with red, white and brown bricks, bicycles and motocycles tooting their horns and vendors plying their wares. We decided to stop for dinner at a small Han-Chinese operated diner by the road.

This far south and deep in the desert, even thickly brewed tea was astringent with a bitter, salty aftertaste. We had a simple meal of fish soup, vegetables and stir-fried meat. Then we went back to our hotel where I had a quick shower in a dimly lit bathroom, eyes tightly shut against a flotilla of mysterious objects bobbing around on the flooded floor.

I returned to my dorm room to find that I had a roommate. A lady in her mid-thirties, dressed in a flowered nightie and hanging out her washing on the lampshade, the back of the chair and on a string suspended from the window to the picture hook on her floor. I smiled at her in greeting and asked where she came from. The lady replied that she was a farmer’s-wife-slash-business woman from the Northeast.  Why, I asked, did she travel so far west for?

The lady explained that she had travelled to Hotan to purchase goods for her business in her village. In the villages of China today, she said, it wasn’t possible to survive on income from farming alone. Her only son was away in the city working as a labourer. Her husband and in-laws tended the fields, and she had started her own trading business. The lady was curious about me.

I told her that I had recently graduated from university and was travelling around Xinjiang with my friends. She wanted to know how old I was; I told her that I was almost 23. The lady smiled and said wanely that if I were living in her village, I would be married by now with a child. I told her that where I come from, most people only marry when they are about 28, when they’ve saved some money and established their own careers. She nodded and said that times were changing, who knew what life in her village would be like in a couple of years’ time. We chatted briefly, the farmer-entrepreneur combing her hair and me cleaning up my belongings after my shower.

The next day I woke up to find that my roommate had packed up her belongings and was assembling her purchases into heavy bundles. She was going to take a bus back to the Northeastern province she came from, a journey that would take days. I brushed my teeth, washed my face and hauled my backpack onto my shoulder and bade her good bye. My travelling companions and I boarded our jeep and we were off to the bazaar.

And what a bazaar! From the moment we stepped out of our jeep, it felt as if we had stepped onto the set of a movie set for 101 Arabian nights.  The first thing that got my attention was the the bazaar’s aural tapestry. There was the shrill whining of machinery as craftsmen made large, colourful, ornate metal doors; the rumble of cars and motorcycle engines and the ringing of bicyle bells and the tooting of horns; the bleating of lambs and sheep; chickens clucking; hawkers shouting and yelling for business; customers bargaining and above all that, a group of street buskers playing lively, exotic tunes.

And then there was the smell. Eau de Hotan Bazaar was a complex layering of fine desert sand, car exhaust, unidentifiable smells from various milling farm animals, and a lingering bouquet of food. The food! There were huge woks of rice pilaf glistening with oil and generous hunks of mutton, fragrant barbequed meats-on-sticks infused with chilli and exotic spices, mysterious piles of liang mian (cold noodles), various stir-fries, mountains of shaved ice dripping with goat’s milk, freshly baked naans and fried dough stacked into aromatic pyramids…

We wandered the bazaar in a daze, our sensory faculties overwhelmed by the sights, sounds and smells emanating from all directions. It was a glorious chaos. There were women in headscarves selling seeds and grain, colourful stores laden with silk scarves fluttering in the wind, a store selling traditional Uigher hats brightly embroidered in sequins, beads and lace. There was a man selling bronzed musical instruments – horns, pipahs, qins. People were exchanging greetings, shouting, bargaining, buying, selling, engaging in a commerce that must have been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years.

We made our way through the throng of people and turned a corner to find ourselves among the jade-sellers. These were mostly men hunkering around in dusty shirts and pants, their hands fingering stones and jades buried deep within their pockets. Once in a while, one man would approach a potential buyer and give a nudge. The other would turn around and peer at pieces of jade proffered from the depths of a pocket or in open palms. There would be a short conference, before complicated handshakes were executed and money and jade changed hands.

Some of the jade sellers set up stalls along the road. They exhibited their wares on stripped blankets. Huge chunks of emerald rocks polished to a high shine, greenish-black boulders with wavy, dark green and brown lines, smaller piles of light green and speckled stone. All purportedly highest quality Hotan jade. Once or twice, we were approached by jade sellers encouraging us to buy their wares. Mostly, we were met with curious stares and friendly smiles as we pulled out our cameras and took snapshots of the people milling around in the bazaar.

We wandered around for a while more,absorbing and keeping in our mind’s eyes  as much as we could the bazaar’s remarkable, exotic, mesmerizing and absolutely foreign bustle. When the clock struck 12 the vendors and hawkers started to pack up to leave. We too, left with our purchases (scarves, hats and naans for the day’s journey ahead) and boarded our jeep, bading a reluctant farewell to what must have been the most colourful and engaging experience of our Odyssey so far. The next leg of our journey would be a long and adventurous one -  driving the Desert Highway through the great Thaklamakan Desert.

Venue: Seah Im Hawker Centre, just beside Harbour Front MRT

Price: $2

You can see the National Library in front, Hotel Intercontinental on the right.

If only I can have a view like that every single day!

P/S: I LURVE the view from my office.