my day has been uninspiring. i feel kinda bored. i feel like i have been sitting down for too long.
and i am restless! i wanna go everywhere – amsterdam, new york, paris, melbourne, bali… i wanna leave desperately. but i don’t know where. or why.
sometimes when i feel like i’m the only person in this world who is alone. isolated from the whole wide world. like being trapped in a tiny bubble.
and sometimes i feel like i have the most sensitive heart. i laugh and i cry. forever.
.
Hiya, I hope you’re still around :)
Here are some of things I did during the past 7 weeks :)
I spent some time with my family visiting from KL.
I had them say hello to me :)
We went to the botanical garden in Göteborg and took pictures of pretty flowers.
My mom (and papa too!) loved the cherry blossom trees.
We drove past Varberg on the way back and I was glad we did!
We found a door leading to Narnia, of course…
Oh and we were also in Örebro and took the obligatory photo of the Örebro Castle.
I got married once more there, too.
Just in case.
Hugs.
like when we found our twins!
so happy to find my twin i couldn’t sleep that night.
hehehe
love parties.
love party twins.
xoxoxoxx
ps. thanks lisa for the photos!
we call him sengkuku.
sengkuku is my mother’s younger brother. he is really the best and the sweetest uncle one can ever ask for. that is a fact. really. he is a little eccentric and he is often obsessed with things. he is an artist you see *w*
he likes telling stories, he likes plants like cattails (i love them too!) and water lilies and i have a feeling that he likes ferns too. he collects things like wooden furniture and he likes to decorate his place with cats and owls.
when i was younger, we used to visit sengkuku quite a lot. one time, i remembered admiring his collection of what seemed like thousands of glass containers and bottles of all kinds at his house at jalan tempinis, bangsar.
it has sort of stuck in my mind since then. i still have a thing for any jar or bottle made of glass. i clean the jam jars so i can use it for other stuff like storing cutips and makeup remover pads and cleaning my art brushes. i buy marmalade because of i adore the jars.
another thing that stuck in my mind when i think of sengkuku is a brown envelope he showed me once. he used to collect cutouts from magazines and newspapers with ads which he loves and put them in that worn brown envelope. On the envelope, handwritten using a regular black pen, it read “Great ads”.
my brown envelope is still empty. i hope i will be able to show my envelope and its contents to my niece or nephew one day and they will remember it like the way i remember sengkuku’s brown envelope.
sengkuku is one of the most inspiring persons i know and he inspires me to think and be creative at everything i do in countless many ways which make me the person i am today.
and he has just started a “blog“.
i think everyone should have a sengkuku in their life.
hugs.
the ingredients:
- pasta sheets
- bolognese sauce (minced meat and tomato)
- ricotta mixed with sun-dried tomatoes
- spinach
- béchamel sauce (basic white sauce)
- some grated parmesan cheese
- salt and peppar
i’m not sure how they make the “real” lasagne, but i think we can all be a little creative sometimes. so do alternate layers of these ingredients (pick your favourites or use them all!), bake in the oven for 30 minutes at 200°C, and you’ll have your very own lasagne! :)
so good you wanna eat it again and again.
here’s mine:
ta daa…
ciao :)
söder (which literally means south) where i live has always got a bit of a bad reputation in helsingborg. they say it’s the wrong side of the city. life is rougher, tougher and wilder here than the other side. all bad things happen on this side.
most people i know living on the north side have never been to any restaurants or shops in söder besides max hamburgare which is the swedish mcdonalds and the cinema. that is as far as people seem to get in söder.
people always look a bit surprised whenever i tell them about the nice restaurant called shiraz that serves the best bakad potatis med skagenröra (baked potato with creamy prawn thingy) in the whole wide world. or about the best pizza restaurant in helsingborg called choice. well, i would say the only decent pizza restaurant in sweden really.
it’s a bit sad. i mean the people. the fact that söder has got a bit of a bad reputation. not the pizza *s* hmm. maybe the pizza, too.
the thing is i love söder. one day i went out because the sun was shining and i only saw the söder i loved.
it looks a bit like these…
hugs.
Picture from here
Today I woke up feeling funny in my head.
It feels light. But it also feels… powerful. Strange. But good. Really good feeling.
And I have the urge to write about it and tell it to the world. To you.
Yesterday I stayed up late because I wanted to finish an oil painting – a study of a self-portrait by Van Gogh. It is one of the blue ones with really nice pink and yellow shades all over. I hesitated before I started because I did not think I could paint that well.
And then somewhere amidst the brush strokes, I felt my hand took over. I stopped thinking. I stopped planning the space for lighter and darker colours on my palette. I just painted.
I felt effortlessly in control.
I felt alive… and excited.
I forgot the time and I forgot to eat my dinner.
At 2 a.m. it was done. I took a step back and stared at my work. Van Gogh looked younger than he did but I felt a sense of accomplishment. I was proud, amazed, and still very excited. And my left hand was sore from holding the palette.
Reluctantly, I left my “studio” and went to bed. My eyes were tired and my body was exhausted but I had never felt so awake. I thought about creating so many other paintings and crafty things that I had write it down.
Then I fell asleep somehow.
Today I woke up feeling funny in my head.
I feel alive.
*jumps up and down*
Here is the other reason to jump up and down.
I found a new music I love:
Hey blog,
I’ve got a guest blogger today. My wonderful Mommy.
I came from a poor but happy family of nine, four boys and five girls. I am the fourth member with two brothers and an elder sister. My mom worked very hard to subsidize my dad’s meager earnings of about RM180 monthly. She washed clothes for RM10 a month, cooked and cleaned for a family of six for RM35 a month. As such, my mom could only give us 10 sen daily for food when we go to school and 40 sen for the two-way bus fare from my house in Sungei Bakap to my school in Nibong Tebal which is 4 miles away.
One day, I was mischievous and spent away my 20 sen bus fare for a mixed fruit salad, we called “rojak”. I thought I could quite easily borrow from our kind elderly neighbour whom I called as “Koo kong” (Grandpa). Grandpa worked as a manager at the bus station and he had lent me some money for bus fare on a few occasions in the past. I had always made sure I returned the money when I reached home, although my Mom had advised me not to do so. However, she did not scold me, she was very kind and loving to all of us.
So, on this very day, I thought, “Oh, I will just borrow from Grandpa” after spending my bus fare on rojak. Having enjoyed the rojak very much, I walked happily from school to the bus station which was about 5 km away. Then, to my shock, Grandpa was not there. I was told that he was sick and could not come to work. My young mind started to roll because I did not know anybody else except Grandpa and I dared not speak to anyone. I knew my mom would be very unhappy if I ever borrowed money from strangers.
After a while, I decided to walk home thinking it was not that far anyway. After walking for about an hour under the hot sun, I started to get tired and hot. I began to lose hope that I could walk all the way home which was still a long way to go. I got worried and scared. I started to cry and wail my fate. I prayed and begged for the spirit of my Grandma to save me. I chose Grandma because Dad used to tell me that I resembled my Grandma and he was sure my Grandma would have loved me very much, had she been alive.
I cried and cried but I continued to walk for another half an hour. Suddenly, a man who was cycling stopped his bicycle and asked why I was crying. He was a young Indian man, maybe in his early twenties with a kind face. I told him I did not have any money to take the bus and I had to walk home, miles away. He walked beside me, dragging along his bicycle and told me to stop crying as he could help me. Being so young, I did not actually understand how he could help me but I felt somewhat relieved.
After a while, this man stopped a bus that passed by. The man asked me to get on the bus and he told the bus conductor to take me home. He paid for my bus fare. Probably, as I was still young and in a fright, I had forgotten to thank this kind young man. However, I still remember this man even now after a period of 42 years, I am now 50.
