Tags
Bank Negara Malaysia, Budweiser, currency, DaveSaves, finance, friends, girl friend, Kuala Lumpur, Lat, Manchester United, museum, RMB, The Beer Factory, world history
In the early hours of February 2016, I texted my former girl best friend. It had already been a year since we last interacted, I had a dream featuring her a few weeks back, I had been seeing tagged pics of her on instagram, & I felt assured enough to send her a text (young urban working adult maturity perhaps). She texted me in return (cue the adrenaline) and disclosed that she’d been thinking of texting me for a week. It turns out she was reminiscing about our friendship too (I’m her guy best friend) and it doesn’t come as a surprise that we were missing each other. I shared a dream friendship with her prior to our conflict – we explored KL when we were college students, watched movies together, worked together in auditing for a brief period – and I am really happy that we’re talking again. Now that we’re both young working adults, we can begin to enjoy our friendship (and the city) in a different way. For starters, we’re both very much into finance – she’s a good financial talent – so it’ll be fun to exchange thoughts/ideas with one another. I think we can get back to being close as before and I hope we do, because it was a dream friendship, the relationship we had before.
- The Modern World – I enrolled in Part One (Global History from 1760 to 1910) of this world history MOOC. It is delivered by Professor Philip Zelikow (my dad has a book at home co-authored by him) and it follows a conversational format, focusing on the what’s/how’s & why’s of key historical events. Cool bits: fiscal-military state, sugar production in the Caribbean, Mughal Empire & Safavid empire
- Finance e-learning – At work, I did a couple of online modules on RMB Internationalisation & The Volcker Rule (I’ve already forgotten the latter).
- Bank Negara Malaysia Museum & Art Gallery – Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) is the central bank of Malaysia and I paid the museum & art gallery a visit over the weekend. I spent hours inside the nautilus-shaped building and it made for a satisfying first visit. Highlights: seeing the RM2 and RM1000 bank notes, the Yap Stone (largest pieces of money in the world), reading up about economic crises over the decades (including how Malaysia navigated its way out of the Asian Financial Crisis), getting to know the BNM governors over the years, looking at BNM’s first cheque, creating my own replica suftaja, viewing Lat’s Buku Wang Saku covers, checking out ‘Art of ASEAN: Our Exhibition’, glancing at the evolution of Malaysia’s numismatics (from the early days of the ingots & cowrie shells right up to the present series of bank notes), an checking out the Euro, GBP & Brazilian Real currency notes.
- The Beer Factory – I went out to the bar/pub with my boys and sister to watch the Chelsea-Man Utd match. I ordered a Budweiser (my first) and here’s a UK throwback: the Budweiser TV adverts featuring the croaking bullfrogs (Bud-Weis-Er) and the crocodile (Say Ooh, La Laa, Say Ooh, Come On Come On). Anyway, it was an entertaining match and some of the ‘Dave Saves’ was world-class. The 1-1 result was fair, but we (Man Utd) should have won it. After the match, the 4 of us sat around the table chatting about relationships, sex, physical intimacy, marriage, fun, polyamory, playboy lifestyle, Indian & Asian culture, etc.