Where else in the world would you get a brutal sunburn in the winter heat of November? Brunei, of course! We went to Tutong Beach today and spent a wonderful day with the Serikandi family. The fun actually started yesterday when we went to Bandar Seri Begawan (the capital city, BSB for short). Noura and I went to eat lunch with Marcelo & Cynthia. Then we shopped around a bit and made a stop at Ridwan Sbaynati’s popular Arabic restaurant, Sugar & Spice, on the water. It was of course delicious to the last pita bread morsel. We had some mazzeh appetizers and made our way over to meet Azmi & Rose Serikandi at a Thai restaurant in town.

After a quick bite, we experienced the Empire Country Club‘s premiere cinema… and let me tell you it was a gorgeous venue to watch the movie 2012. The movie was horrible, but the cinema had the coolest electronic seat chooser ever!

We crashed at a horrible hotel, whose name I will spare. After a water pipe leak and no warm water in the showers (and non-noteworthy breakfast at the hotel), we hiked out and saved our morning by having a lovely traditional Malay breakfast with Roti.

We then made our way to Tutong Beach where we met about 50 zillion Serikandis which was, as always, a pleasant surprise. We ate some marvelous food and soaked in the generosity while having fun and talking about everything from “How to Make a Great Cappuccino” to moving to Bangkok and starting a new life…

So for the play-by-play, let’s go over what we did today at the beach:

• Ate a lot of food…grilled vegetables
• Skidded around in ATVs
• Played beach soccer…fun!
• Ate a lot of food…fried Jackfruit, yummy
• Prayed together
• Uppercut tall waves
• Ate a lot of food…sweet ayam
• Had fun & cracked jokes
• Ate a lot of food…top class lamb
• Snapped great photos…learned how to shoot manual

[youtube]5DfRYprsOg4[/youtube]Speaking of which, Fadilah Ahmad Alhijazi (Señor Pablo) took some amazing pictures of us. It’s this man starting off the Youtube video here. Pablo is a philosopher, an artist, great baker, an adventurer, and a foreign diplomat. My wife and I agree he was the inspiration of the day. Take a hop over to Señor Pablo‘s blog. Can’t wait to meet again.

It was loads of fun. I have to go to bed now because I’m dead tired.