British National Museum at the National Museum of Singapore Part II

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My sister and I didn’t finish the guided tour of the British Museum exhibit because we thought we were already running out of time and we still had to get to the Singapore exhibit and get our money’s worth.

Sadly, it wasn’t worth it. Just had a photo op just for the sake of it.

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So we went back to the British Museum exhibit and lingered. Check out these artifacts from Central and South American civilizations.

This one, i believe is Aztech. Celebrates the corn. Yes, the corn. Staple food.

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The guy on the right is a rain god (I think still Aztech). He carries on his back a container for water and that long thing protruding from his back is the spout. When called upon, the rain god waters the earth from that pack.

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Mayan pictograms

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African civilization

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This creepy guy is some kind of a god. People with disputes stick nails into his body and apparently this guy tells who is the liar between the warring parties. It allegedly sends out vibes through the arbiter.

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This shield-like thing is installed at the front door of a house. I didn’t get to hear the story. too bad.

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And I went back for more ancient Egypt. This one I think is a cat and cats are worshipped in ancient Egypt. It’s a tiny thing so I had to stoop and do a close up but it’s too dark to make out the rest of this artifact.

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And this guy is not some royalty. A middle class Egyptian who had his likeness engraved on stone (can’t remember if it was on a tomb). The guide said physically this pose is impossible to do but Egyptians believe that it’s better to strike a pose that is flattering, to display your asset. In this case, the guy’s asset is his profile, i.e. the nose. so his face is facing right but his torso is facing the front. Then his knees are again facing the right.

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to be continued

British National Museum at the National Museum of Singapore

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I’ve been visiting Singapore every now and then (at least twice a year) and I haven’t been to any of its museums or galleries. I always told myself I will check them out once I get back but somehow I never found the time. You see, I always visit a museum of the country I’m visiting but for some reason I always skipped Singapore’s.

So last weekend, my sister and I went to the National Museum of Singapore. And to our surprise, some of the British Museum‘s treasures were on loan that time. Yowza! Two exhibits in one place. To see the British Museum’s Treasures of the World, you have to pay SGD 20 and another SGD 20 for Singapore’s own exhibit. I wasn’t that hot about the Singapore part since I thought I can read about its history in books and its history isn’t that long and winding as that of let’s say the Philippines. But my sister wanted to go so I went along so I won’t be called a killjoy. They have a promo that if you pay using your HSBC credit card, you’ll only pay SGD 10 for each. *clap clap*

This is the best part of the exhibit. The mummy. Although it’s not a mummy of some royalty like King Tut, it’s still a mummy. This teenage boy was already mummified during the Roman occupation of Egypt, hence, the “life-like” art/mask on the mummy.

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Even if they already adopted the art style of their conquerors, the Egyptians still maintained their traditional art. The teenage boy’s mummy cover was made according to tradition.

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The jars used for storing internal organs

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This is Sekhmet, the Egyptian war goddess.

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Ancient tablet writings found in…oh gosh I forgot where. Somewhere in greater Mesopotamia.

Assyrian, if I remember it right.

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And another one, from the same region.

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From present-day Afghanistan. Sadly, the Taliban and now the ISIS may have destroyed the bigger versions of this.

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I don’t remember exactly where these came from because I get mixed up. This one, if I remember it right, came from Syria.

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to be continued

THE CHANGING TIDES

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photo courtesy of lunarland.com

I’ve been having this work-related conversation with a friend who is having a hard time motivating himself after not getting the expected rewards for hard work the past year. I told him that I remember my older sister telling me this: in the workplace (this particular workplace that I was supposed to go to) bawal maging bibo (don’t show you’re smart). Why? Either they will 1) dump more work on you; 2) idiots will feel threatened by you and sabotage your work and reputation; or 3) completely ignore you and not reward you for your hardwork and sacrifices. Better just as do what is expected of you; nothing less, nothing more.

I know it’s really a bad principle to adopt but it really makes a lot of sense. That is the reality and have seen it several times in my career. It’s idealistic to expect that the company will value you as you think it should but that is not always (or never) the case. It’s normally how you project yourself (face value/packaging), connections, and how thick your skin is that gets you the prize. Sadly, I’ve seen that several times over the 16 years of my professional life.

So what did I tell my friend? You can seethe and rant all you want and your only recourse now is to resign OR scale back on the work load and take it easy. Perform and do what is expected of you but don’t overdo it again. Save your hide. No point in giving your soul. (Another friend ranted to me one time “Ano pa ba ang gusto nila eh nakuha na nila kaluluwa ko?!” But that friend had a happier ending than this first friend of mine since he got a high double-digit raise.)

So why did I say “changing tides?” Well, I heard a number of people in the company where my friend works are now looking for other jobs. One even had four job interviews in one week. That’s how bad things are, how badly managed the company is. They don’t know how to value people.

I’ve read an article somewhere that people leave because of bad managers. True. I stayed with a job before despite the crappy pay and all because I had a good boss/mentor. In the case of my stark raving mad friend, the company is badly managing people and is rewarding the wrong people (the deadwoods).

If the Facebook memes are to be believed, it was Sir Richard Branson who said that companies should value its workers first before customers. Pay attention to your own people before chasing the profits. Sadly, only a few do. (On a related note, read “Can Small Businesses Afford To Adopt Sir Richard Branson’s Approach to Employee Benefits?”)

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So what are we to do? We should work for ourselves then. But that route is not for everybody.

ADULTING part 2

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photo courtesy of alliancecoffeeandtea.com

I’ve had a working-chatting session with a colleague in a tea shop somewhere in QC this afternoon and our conversations in between rushing to meet deadlines went from closures and moving on, to people who are not sensitive towards other people’s plights (or those who exhibit sociopathic tendencies), to investments and estate planning. All in one afternoon.

She is a couple of years younger than I am; she just entered the big 3-0 while I am inching closer to the big 4-0. We’re both at the stage where we find it exhausting just thinking about spending our Friday nights getting wasted like when we were in our 20s (she spent Friday night with our much younger colleagues who imbibed alcohol like it’s going out of fashion and they went to work today nursing a nasty headache or fighting off flu). She said she now feels like spending evenings or days off like this–just drinking coffee or tea and talking with people who are worth talking to. We both feel that socializing should not often involve alcohol. I can still drink like a man but that does not mean I should.

What have we become, L, I asked? I also answered my own question: We have become adults.

But adulting is very hard, no? When we were kids, we thought that adults knew what they were doing. We were so eager to become adults. Now that we are adults, we just discovered that everybody else was just winging it. Some are still clueless, some are just feeling their way.

We talked about lessons learned from what we witnessed from our elders–our aunts and uncles, the titos and titas who behaved abominably towards each other because of some petty things such as inheritance of inconsequential stuff like dinnerware sets, a ring, or a clock. From bad money management by some relatives or family friends. By spoiling rotten siblings or aunts and uncles who never fully made it into adulthood and feel that the world owes them a lot due to circumstances of their own making and because they were raised to be self-centered monsters.

We were talking about how long can we still do what we do. About how do we see our lives in the next five years. Next 10 years. Can we live alone during our twilight years, when our children would not or could not take us in under their roofs? L and I both agreed that we should prepare financially and mentally for the event that we have to live on our own without help from our children. We must not rely on them to take care of us since they have their lives of their own. It’s painful to see a relative being passed from one offspring to another because they could not take care of their mother/father due to financial constraints or just plain they do not care.

I do not want to be in that sad position.

While I do not expect my children to carry the burden of taking care of me or their father when we’re old, I at least expect that they would be caring enough to check up on us, visit us or see if we’re still alive.

And that boils down to how I raise my girls. Which is a different topic.

Hard to raise little human beings while you yourself still have some growing up to do.

MIRAGE

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photo courtesy of wikimedia.org

photo courtesy of wikimedia.org

When you’re in dire straits and in desperate need, you tend to imagine things that aren’t really there. And then when you reach what you thought was an oasis, reality suddenly slaps you that your mind was just playing a cruel trick on you. That there was nothing there really–just endless sand. Then you laugh hysterically at yourself for being such a fool.