For a chronic dose of cuteness

We live in Singapura

I may not be Singaporean, but we are pretty much the two only nationalities who can appreciate the awkward beauty of bahasa rojak.

Our first Christmas together and other stories

What the beach looks like when you manage to convince a beach-hater to go on a long walk with you. Next up: rainbows and unicorns!

Cheese and cumin sticks from RD's mum. Tastes strangely like murruku.

I took C out for dinner in very Hefner-esque, cheap boudoir restaurant. Mediocre food, but a nice night out anyway.

What a defeated cat looks, post-shower.

Nibblies at Aunty Lil and Uncle Kev's. The shortbread in the foreground was made by us.

Rosey (L) and Moo Moo (R).

KG was clearing out 3 tonnes of bricks and dead plant matter in the process of his renovations. It's amazing what a long and arduous process it was getting rid of the stuff.

Galileo's thermometer. Very fascinating. As the temperature rises, the baubles, filled with different fluids, fall. Each bauble is numerically tagged.

Our Christmas cards carefully balanced, where the cat would not get them. A flea-bitten cat is an angry Grinch.

Photo taken by C's dad, at his family home, where we spent Christmas.

This is Cat (aka Cool Cat, or Cattenborough). If he likes you, you get head nuzzles, kitty kisses and throaty miaows.

Christmas lunch - ham, turkey and roasted vegetables. Yums.

One of our favourite gifts, from C's folks - almost too cute to use.

The best Valentino quote ever

(best appreciated when said out loud in a bad Italian accent with lots of hand gestures)

When asked what advice he would pass on to young designers in Harpers Bazaar,

"... they take a piece of cloth, pin, pin, pin and they make a big pouf and to try to get rid of everything, they put a huge belt. No, no, no."

The immigrant's Christmas

For whenever a Malaysian politician spouts another embarrassing quotable, I become Chinese. And whenever we come across another FOB (fresh off boat) mainlander doing something mortifying in public (like sucking meat off KFC bones noisily), I am Malaysian. And for the purposes of avoiding yet another drunk come-on, I develop an Australian accent (Aussie women are fierce).

I've never felt like I fit in anywhere. I wasn't Christian enough in church. I wasn't Chinese enough to hang out with the Ah Bengs and Ah Lians. I wasn't good-looking or well to do enough to be part of the cool kids. I wasn't focussed enough to be a nerd. I wasn't conformist enough to blend in with my ex-colleagues. For much of my life, I flitted between social groups, tailoring my mannerisms to suit my companions du jour.

Similarly here, I remain not ________ enough to be with the ___________. Yet now I understand why the Gold Coast feels like home. We're a motley crue of everyone from everywhere, all in search of a more coastal lifestyle. Almost everyone I know here was born somewhere else. C's dad moved from the UK as a six and a half year. C was born 2,300 km away, in Tasmania. RD is Slovakian. SK is from Slovenia. SE grew up in South Africa and Sydney. KG spent the first half his life in Adelaide. X spent his childhood in the States and Sydney. TF and I grew up a suburb apart.

We are not united by culture, nor common language. Not religion, sometimes not even interests. Perhaps all we share, is the very act of upping and moving somewhere else. Of building a life for ourselves, unencumbered (or at least less encumbered) by our pasts. Of the freedom anonymity affords. And in this rootlessness, we are blessed to find love in our chosen families.

This Christmas, I am not attending any obligatory functions, nor buying presents because it is expected of me. Instead, I am carving out my own traditions and choosing to spend time with the few people I care about here.

And this Christmas finally feels like my own.

Dogs and cats

This caused C to tear. The video below is just off the cute spectrum.

We also showered the cat today. Fleas. He reacted surprisingly well and does not hate us, though we were taken aback by the decibels of the initial alarmed miaows.

Heat and humidity

Last week flew by with errands and visits and visitors. This week was nicely lethargic, aptly reflected by the cat's perma-belly up position.

Apple and rhubarb pie, made with love. C's folks came over for dinner and were served korma curry and the first roti canai I'd had in a long, long time. Unfortunately, the process went something like this:

Jan: Let's ask your parents over for dinner!

C: Okay.

(2 days before dinner)

Jan: We don't have enough plates! Let's buy some!

C: ...

(2 hours before dinner)

Jan: We don't have a dining table or enough chairs!

C: This was your idea!

Luckily, they were extremely gracious guests and acted as if balancing hot Indian curry on their knees was a normal dinner ritual.

C and I had health check ups. I was given the option of a pap smear, which I duly took. A little weird but really not that bad at all. It detects HPV, y'all. My grandma died of cervical cancer, so it was nice to have this on the government.

Banana cake with cream cheese frosting. Divine.

Some hors d'oeuvres served by my French teacher for our last class. I finally tried foie gras. Much better than pate, but I can't get over the fact a poor goose was tortured to produce the stuff. Also discovered that good marzipan and bad marzipan are a thousand miles apart.

Purr-ito!

C and I escaped the hot weather with a fairly impromptu trip to the Currumbin Rock Pools. Many scrapes and bruises whilst being checked out by teenagers.

WTF EPF

I was looking up some information on the EPF site today. I'm torn between appreciating the whole semangat rojak going on and feeling embarrassed that my government can't even standardize their language on a public website.

Slow cooker tattoos

Emperor Moe does kitty porn. You have no idea how many times visitors exclaim over his girth, which is apparently dog-like.

C and I did Chocolate Mousse Cake with Coffee Mascarpone. Ugliest cake ever, but with 0.5kg of dark chocolate, sooooo rich and calorific we can only nibble a few teaspoons of the stuff each day.

The blue bottles are back!

Lunch at RD's. Baguette with chived omelette, pickles, radish and coriander and bow-ties with pancetta and onion. SO GOOD.

Powered paraglider on Main Beach.

To explain the strange moniker, it's located in a suburb named Runaway Bay.

The children's meals come with tiny colouring pencils!

The boyfriend and the cat and the other book from the guy who wrote the very excellent Everything Is Illuminated (found movie atrociously boring though). A good read so far.

The cat decided that the best way to gain our attention would be to sit in the centre of the 1000 piece puzzle we'd just started.

Osso bucco and mash on part of our new dinner set.

Jan: Your fifth tattoo should be of this pattern on the dinner plate.

C: So we can commemorate how domestic we are?

Jan: Yes.

C: How about I get the slow cooker done instead?

Random things

Whilst deciding which files will survive my laptop reformatting, I came across these little pieces of photographic nostalgia.

A view of the Gold Coast from the Q1 with KG.

Riga, from PVDB's trip.


Me and my two little munchkin friends, who are now married (!!!). Tioman in 2005. On the hellish bus ride to the jetty, I sat by an ulamah who screamed his head off because I wearing a sleeveless tee and three quarter pants. Seriously.


The same trip. Brocolli island in the distance as we do a G-rated moon.

On a 3 day, 2 night liveaboard on the Great Barrier Reef in 2006, earning my diving licence. Photo taken by X. Note ridiculously tall Dutch people in surrounds.

One of my most favourite photos ever. The lick was unexpected and very welcome. Singapore 2006 with KJ.

Sigh. The new wing of MidValley. I miss the gigantic centres of mass consumption. And European high street brands.

Pavilion, all shiny and new. Let's hope their management checks for reindeer testicles for this Christmas' decorations.

My French class on the last day of the last term.

The roost is currently ruled by Emperor Moe, as SK, our flatmate has returned to Slovenia. Moe is a bit of an arsehole, but we love him to bits anyway. He alternates between shredding my arm for no apparent reason to acting like a tempura prawn.

"Hi! I'm a cute kitty! Please disregard the fact I just scratched you, left fur all over your fingers so you couldn't use your iPod Touch, constantly interrupt you by sitting on whatever you're doing and then bit you... and feed me. And clean my poo."

"No? Imma seal! How can you resist a cute little furry seal?"

Damn You Auto Correct

This site should be spread generously. Like love and peanut butter.

Sunny Coast

We were invited to spend a few days in Bundaberg where it was apparently turtle-hatching season, but a miscommunication (i.e. they left their phone at home) led to a slight change in plans.

We headed to the Glasshouse Mountains first.

Bluer than blueberries


Weird wormy looking patterns on a tree

My favourite photo of the lot

The weather was ridiculously sticky and hot. We wound up driving around in minimal clothing. We took the advice of a tour guide and headed along the scenic route through to Montville, Mapleton and Maleny. These were very lovely, quaint tourist-friendly towns. Very Dandenong Ranges-ish.

The Mary Cairncross Park was a well worth the drive.

C under a magnificent, centuries-old strangler fig.

Dreamily floaty fungi all along a fallen log

Mushroom clusters tucked into the tree buttress

The roots look very much like a serpentine tongue, no?

Stink bug

More mushies

The rear end of a pademelon, a kind of marsupial. Very adorable. We sighted a family of three and three others separately.

We then drove through Bli Bli (yes, that's the name of a real town. There's even one called Obi Obi, but I couldn't be bothered making such an enormous detour) to get to the coastal towns. We settled at renting a room for AUD56 at Sunshine Beach. Fortunately enough, no one else took the other room so we got the entire house to ourselves. It was no Hyatt but it sure beat sleeping in the car.

Whilst I do live near the Broadwater, there is something so soothing, so comforting about sand between my toes, the waves gently lapping at my ankles and the seemingly infinite vastness of the ocean. It was very nice to wake up to a stroll on the beach.

After a rather uneventful dinner at Pizza Capers (nice meal ruined by a rather lookatmelookatme roach, duly squashed by C's boot), we took the long way to the famed Hastings St (i.e. we got lost). The conversation makes a lot more sense if you remember I was driving in the dark.

Jan: Why is the light flashing?

C: *totally nonchalant* I think because the bridge is up to let the ferries through.

Jan: WHY ARE THERE FERRIES HERE?

Anyway. It was my bad. I had assumed the beachfront area would be called The Esplanade like all the other touristy coastal towns (Cairns, Gold Coast, Caloundra), but the GPS led us to bloody North Shore instead.

After strolling up and down the lovely street, admiring things we couldn't afford, we settled down at Santi's for a drink. His James Squire beer and my hot chocolate in the foreground.

The next day was blessedly enough, a Wednesday. I had wanted to go to the Eumundi Markets for ages, in spite of lacklustre reviews.

It was AWESOME. Loads of interesting, one-off items and food, glorious food.

Freshly fermenting ginger beer, yum.

Ridiculously expensive pancakes (AUD8 for 12). Yum.

Cool stall with interesting plants. They had loads of carnivorous plants too, the sort you read about on the National Geographic - sundews, the Venus Flytrap, pitcher plants, all surprisingly tiny, their legends having morphed into larger than life monsters in my fertile imagination.

Yummy German sausage in background and fried Tibetan momos, another item crossed off my list

How do roses thrive in 28C heat?

We went through Mooloolaba and Caloundra on our way back, even stopping for a quick dip. And then off we were again, to Bribie Island. Which was like a Manly (Sydney, not Brisbane), but much further away. It was quite strange to see land from a western shore - I've never stepped foot on Western Australia.

The Seaside Museum

The trip ended with roast chicken eaten with fingers and strawberry ice cream on cheap cones. C gets extra bonus points for being sweet and patient and not maiming anyone with me (having part of your thumb grated off is surprisingly debilitating).