Taiwan

Easy Card 

You can buy easy card for 100 TWD from machine near the bus departure terminals easily. After you purchase the card you have to put some credit on it.

The Legend is back !!!!

If i say you guess the phone, and give you three hints

1) Long battery life
2) Snake
3) Grande Valse

It will not take you long to guess the phone. Yes, i am talking about Nokia 3310. This phone took the world by storm 17 years ago. Nokia sold over 125 million handsets. HMD Global has been making headlines for there attempts in bringing back the glory of Nokia. There has been rumors for sometime about the re launch of Nokia phones, today HMD Global finally announced the relaunch of Nokia phones, and what could have been a better choice to start with the legend "Nokia 3310" itself.

While breaking the news about relaunch of Nokia 3310, Arto Nummela, CEO of HMD Global only said this

 Its battery lasts a month, it has Snake, and it has the Nokia ringtone

4 Color variants of Nokia 3310, Photo :Nokia.com

Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, February 26, 2017
Photo:Reuters

The Nokia 3310 is going to have following features

-It is going to be thin and light and of course hard to break.
-Its battery life is going to be 22-hour talk-time and 30 days on stand-by, 51 hours of MP3 playback time.
-It will be available in four colors. Yellow, Warm Red, Dark Blue and Grey.
-The price will be 49 euros.
-LED flash 2 megapixel camera
-2.4 inch,240x320 screen
-It comes with a basic web browser.
-FM Radio and mp3 music player
-16 MB Storage plus MicroSD card slot with support up to 32 GB.

The phone is still purpose built, its not smart phone and as its main purpose remains the same, calls and text messages. There is still a big market for feature phones, i am not sure if they are again gonna sell million units, but i do believe its going to give a serious competition.

The spot fixing

I am disappointed, angry and to say it very best, "in a state of disbelief" . Pakistan cricket team has been performing quite poorly recently, but that's normal. That's not something shocking or something which needs to be worried about. What is shocking is allegations on Sharjeel Khan and Khalid Lateef.

Picture taken from PTV Sports

I could hear the echoes of spot fixing scandal from Lords 2010. I still can not believe it that these players are involved in spot fixing. I am still hoping, in fact praying that these allegations are just allegations. But it seems like they have really done it. Once again they have brought shame to Pakistan, once again they have reminded the world about label which keeps haunting Pakistan cricket, the label of "match fixers".

One thing i can not comprehend is, why they do this ? Take that out of the equation that they were unaware. To me it seems the only motive was quick money. I just did a quick google search and i got to know that Sharjeel Khan was on central contract earning 20000 PKRs . Apart from that he was in Diamond class players category in PSL and was suppose to recieved US$70,000 for playing PSL. Add to it the match fees which is around 125000PKRs for T20I , 250000PKRs for ODI and 400000PKRs for Test match. I have not written here the performance related bonuses and the earnings from sponsorship.  Now do your math and tell me did he really needed to do that spot fixing ? I still hope that he didnt...


Still can not find the answer, why they did it...

I was always against giving a second chance to the sport fixers from Lords episode. Pakistan cricket surely could do without those players. Mohammad Amir is an example of that, he is not anymore the special talent he was 7 years ago. He has performed either on average or below average since his re inclusion. He should have been banned for life along with others. If they were banned for life, it would served as deterrent against any future spot fixing.

The players are ambassadors of a country, they are always under the microscope. They have to be responsible because they carry the responsibility of representing a whole nation. Unfortunately time and again we had players for whom national pride was less valuable than few dollars.

I still hope that these players will be proven not guilty. I still hope that allegations will turn out to be false. But if God forbid, they turn out to be true, than these players must be banned for life. They should be put in jail for corrupting against the name of country. They should not be treated with any sympathy.

Online Renewal of Pakistani Passport

Online Renewal of Pakistani Passport 

The moment was approaching which i was dreading for a while...my Pakistani passport which had validity of 5 years was expiring and i had to get it renewed. 5 years ago when i renewed it i had to go to Pakistan embassy in Frankfurt, Germany. Which not only costed me considerable amount of money but also time. At that time they were issuing Passports for only 5 years.

This time around i called Pakistani embassy in Prague to inquire if they are making the passports here already. I was told that they are still not making it and that i can go to either Frankfurt or Berlin for getting my passport renewed.  After that phone call i started planning my trip. This time i choose to go to Berlin, as it was near and i could go there by bus. Around that time a friend of mine shared a post from a blog on Facebook that Pakistan has started online service of renewing of passports for overseas Pakistanis.

This was indeed a pleasant surprise for me as it meant i will not have to go to Berlin do all the travelling,taking days off from work and the paperwork. I tried to ask around my friends, if anyone of them have used this service but couldn't find anyone who used online service for renewal of the passport.

So i decided to go for the online renewal. I got hold of a place where i could scan,print and upload documents. According to the website of  Directorate General Immigration and Passports, the estimated time to make application is given to be 16.5 minutes. In actual it took me close to 2 and half hours... if i take out my struggles with trying to get my finger prints with help of ink and struggles with convincing the website that my eyes do exist. Keep reading the post to know what it means ;)

The steps of making your account and going through the application are very well defined on the website. So i did not had any trouble or confusion during that process. However when i reached the part where i had to upload my photo. It was quite a struggle. I took my multiple pictures with my mobile phone and uploaded one of them. Before uploading i made sure that i have it in correct format and measurements as given on the website. However i kept on getting the message "Eyes not detected" , i tried with different sizes and different pictures but nothing worked. I almost gave up on uploading a photo, but than i decided to upload the picture without any corping or resizing. Guess what ? the website accepted my photo which i uploaded without any modifications.

After uploading the photo, next difficult process was taking my finger prints. I would say it was my mistake that i tried taking my finger prints with normal ink rather than buying a proper stamp pad. So a tip here, just buy a stamp pad for taking finger prints, it will be much more easy and stress free.

The process of making payment was quite standard like any other e payment so i did not had any issues there. The issue came when i had to give delivery address of my passport. Here i was not sure if i could give my home address because i was not willing to take risk . So i chose the option of personal collection.

Somehow the Pakistan Embassy Prague was not included in the list from where i could pick my passport, so i had to give Vienna, which is same distance as Prague but practically it is a different country.  So imagine, me Pakistani  applying online for renewal of passport from Czech Republic and than having it delivered to Vienna, Austria.  There is never a dull moment in a Pakistanis life, isn't it ? :)

After you are done with all those steps, here what you see.

I took this screen shot today and it is 2nd February. I have already got my new passport and apparently they have not updated the status of application. After i submitted the application, i received an email as confirmation of my application, and after 12 days i got another email saying that
Your e-Services Portal application with tracking ID: xxxxxxxx, has been accepted and sent for further necessary processing.

After this email, i did not received any more information either by email or by phone. I waited approximately one month and than i decided to contact NADRA. I sent them my inquiry via online contact form on their website, but i did not received any response on that. I also tried to call the phone number but not a single time i was able to connect. So i decided to call Pakistan Embassy Vienna, where i was suppose to receive my passport. When i called them they told me that they have received my passport and i can come and collect it.

I did not wanted to ask them over the phone, that why i was not informed when my passport was ready. So i went to the Embassy and after receiving my passport i asked them about not contacting me. The gentleman sitting there told me that we got no information related to this passport that we should contact someone, we received this passport among other passports. Well anyways, i got my passport with 10 year validity so now i can relax another 10 years :D .

I have to admit that it is a brilliant service from Govt. of Pakistan. Very few countries in the world offer the service of renewal of passport online. The website is very user friendly. However there are still some things which needs improvement. But i am sure with time they will improve also.

If you have gone through this whole story, i want to thank you also :) . Please share with me if you have experience with online renewal of passport also. Feel free to ask me questions, if you have any regarding this :)

Mission Passport Vienna

I am planning to do a detailed post on my experience of renewing my Pakistani passport online so i will not talk about that at the moment. What i am going to write about is the trip i made to receive my passport.

Yes that totally makes sense, me from Pakistan, applying online for passport renewal in Czech Republic and than travelling to Vienna, Austria to receive it. There is not a dull day in Pakistani's life , right ? ;)

This year has been extra ordinarily cold. So cold that the lake on Brno dam is frozen for few weeks now. I am not big fan of winters, specially Czech dry winters. I checked the forecast and it was showing that it is going to be -8 and sunny during the day. So i thought that i could survive that. So i wrapped myself in all possible layers i could and than started my mission.

I took student agency bus from Brno to Vienna and reached Vienna at 9:10. The embassy opens at 10:00. So i thought i have enough time to reach the embassy by public transport. I had already bought valid daily ticket for Vienna through the mobile app.

While choosing the daily ticket for Vienna public transport, i was a quite confused mainly because of different kind of tickets on offer.

Here is the website of Vienna public transport where you can can find all information about the tickets, route planning, and different ways of purchasing tickets.

http://www.wienerlinien.at/eportal3/


What suited me best was ticket called "Daily ticket" which costs 5.50 euros and is valid from the day of purchase until next day 1:00 AM . For buying this ticket you have to download app . Step by step information is given in the website i mentioned above.




So i excitedly 

Super foods

You might have heard this term "Superfood" a number of times and specially in recent years when focus is increasing on healthy life style and healthy eating. But what exactly is "Super food" ?
There is no exact or concrete meaning of super food but i will try to explain it here for your better understanding. So the Oxford Dictionary describes "Superfood" as

"A nutrient-rich food considered to be especially beneficial for health and well-being"

It do not say much , is it ? So lets talk in layman's language "Superfood" is any food which is packed with large amount of nutrients which can help your body in not only fight the diseases but also help you live a longer and healthier life.

Before i go any deeper into the topic, i would like to mention that its best to not to rely on just on superfood. Its the combination which is helpful for the body. Also processed foods even if they are vegetables and fruits which you buy from super markets might be less rich in nutrients. 

The lucky thing for humans is, most of these superfoods are not expensive, you would be surprised to find them already lying around in your kitchen. So read the below list and start searching your kitchen ;)

1)

Ginger

I will start with one of the most basic root vegetables found in almost every kitchen.Also its one of the oldest spice medicine used by humans for thousands of years. Its versatile in use, you can have it raw, dry it, cook it, make a tea of it, squeeze for its juice.  Its used heavily in Asian cuisine.

Free images

Here are the links from where you can download images legally which do not have any copy rights. 

1) https://stocksnap.io/    (my personal best, very fast )

2) http://all-free-download.com/free-photos/

New Year

2017 

The change of a date which changes every day means nothing special. Not in the means of it meant for a lot of people. The wild parties and celebrations for new year..

Another loss another heart break

I dont even remember since what age i have been following cricket. The earliest memory i could think of is probably when i was 8-9 years old and seen my father watching test match on TV with some of his friends at home. 

The only thing i could remember is that there was red ball, a guy was coming having it in his hand and than throwing it at the guy in front of him standing with full protection on his head, arms, hands. I remember the guy with full protection would hit the this red ball and some guys dressed in white would run behind it. But they would stop running if the ball would reach a rope. 

Since that day i started asking questions from my father about this strange game called "Cricket". So my love and hate relationship with Cricket has continued ever since.

I probably will do another post to shed some more light on this relationship, but what i want to write about here today is the Test match which Pakistan lost today to Austrlia. It always hurts when Pakistan loses. But it hurts even more when they lose from positions where no one else could lose. 

Today's match was the 2nd in 3 test match series. Pakistan has already lost the first one. Although they got alot of praise the way they battled in that match. 

Forest walk

Forest walk

During winter most of the trees shed there leaves and there is nothing left but the naked branches. So i went for walk in forest and i came across this branch. This small black berries are called "Elder berries". They look very delicious but when i searched about them on internet i came to know that they are not edible, not at least in raw form. 

Its not the berries which are widely used, but its the flower which is used for making syrup. There are some medical uses of this but that are not very known and not much research is done to prove its effectivity.

Anyways, i took this picture just because it looked really nice. The background is fence of garden and the plant was growing next to it. 

Snow White

Walk in fairy tale 

Its been 6 years since i moved to Czech Republic. After spending 4 years in Finland, where having snow for few months is totally normal thing. If i would say not having sun light for few months would not be wrong either... 

However Czech Republic has a quite different weather than Finland. In the winter months from October to February snow is falling time to time. However its very rare that everything becomes covered in snow and than it stays white.

This year it was that rare moment when snow came and it covered everything. It just fell heavily on one day and still it was enough. If you have ever experienced snow you would know about this magic, but if you have not, than let me tell you. Its like suddenly everything becomes white. 

When you get out of the house after this heavy snow fall, the first difference you notice is that there is much more light and your eyes take few minutes to get use to it. As you recover from light in your eyes, you see that the blanket of snow has covered everything. The roads are white, the parked cars are white, the roof tops are white, whole park full of trees is white basically everything you can see becomes more or less white with snow.

So it was 24th December , Christmas eve as you may know it.  Normally there are 3 days off i.e 24,25 and 26th December. Since it was Saturday on 24th December so it was off anyways. From 24th life seems to comes to a halt. City becomes very quite as most of the student and people living here for jobs go back to there native towns for Christmas. Luckily enough for me, the ever so wonderful and efficient public transport MHD of Brno was still operating in full swing on 24th December.

aik baat kahoon agar suntay ho!

aik baat kahoon agar suntay ho! 

tum mujh ko achay lagtay ho 

kuch chanchal say kuch chup chup say 

kuch pagal pagal lagtay ho 

hain cahnay walay aur buhut 

per tum main hay aik baat buhut 

tum apnay apnay lagtay ho 

aik baat kahon ager suntay ho 

tum mujh ko achay lagtay ho 

yeh baat baat pay kho jana 

kuch kehtay kehtay ruk jana 

yeh kis uljhan main rehtay ho 

kia baat hay hum say keh dalo 

aik baat kahoon ager euntay ho 

tum mujh ko achay lagtay ho

Test your knowledge

Ok so how much you know about science ? Why dont you try this basic test developed by The Pew Research Center . 

Quiz