Getting acquainted with Antwerp

Apparently this city lies at the crossroads of five international motorways, linking the Netherlands, Germany and France. Bergen op Zoom where I work is a speedy 30 minutes away, and Maxis sends me texts every morning when I cross the border, to tell me to enjoy my time in the Netherlands, and not to worry as I can call the Malaysian embassy at +31703506506 if I need to .

I love how urban it is here. It is classic and beautiful like so many European towns, but there is size, scope and enough trash on the street to make a city a city.

It feels a little like Sydney. It reminds me of how much I relish walking a city, disappear in it, discover it at my pace and make it my own.

I will make you a Bo Bunh

One sunny day in Lausanne, I decide I would visit Dalat for dinner.

Tripadvisor highly recommends it so I take a cab, 10 minutes up slopes and into apartment suburbia.

I sit outdoors in a corner between the wall and the other side of the door, and a nice man hands me a menu in French, as most things are here. I don’t recognize the words but I smell something wonderful coming from the kitchen.

I suspect he is the owner, a French man who married a Vietnamese lady, and we gesture to each other that I don’t read but what is that cooking? Do I speak Vietnamese? No. Chinois, anyone? No. He decides to take me to the kitchen where I am introduced to a petite Asian lady with kind eyes.

For some reason, I am so happy to see her and I have a huge grin on my face when I tell her I am from Malaisie and could I please order what is cooking? Apparently there are several things cooking. After some back and forth, she tells me, she will make me a bo bunh. Her eyes tell me, with the confidence of a mother who knows what is good for you, this is what you want.

That settled, the one who I think is the husband takes me to choose my drink. He shows me the interior of the dark cooler and all its possibilities. I take a sugared green tea, which he makes a show of swirling in a wine glass and letting me try. I love this couple already.

The bo bunh comes – a bowl of vermicelli topped with beef sautéed in onions, spring rolls, carrots, beansprouts, peanuts and coriander. It is a hearty serving, yet I realize as I look at it that I am going to finish every last scrap. And I do. I take my time, for it is so good and so authentic that it makes me understand how food can be restorative, even remind a person of who he or she is.

These two people will never know the kindness they offered a homesick girl in a foreign land simply by being themselves and cooking good food. I am truly grateful.

2nd time around

"Maybe I'd gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I'd circled the globe. How would I know?
- Murakami -

Although there's nothing like being in a place for the first time, I say sometimes coming back is even sweeter.

Sydney after 7 years, and Amsterdam just about two, it's good to see you again.

Actually, it is Simple

When things are going well, be grateful.
When things are not going well, don't worry.

Euro-Asia

Where “privacy” and “personal space” are still buzzwords for some living in Asia, these here are requirements as basic as breathing, existence unfathomable without.

Where watching, gauging and measuring before speaking are valued as strengths, these may be a handicap here.

Strength, built from self-possession and individualism, pit against fluid power gained from years of tolerating and standing in the shoes of others.

A million other things, none right or wrong, just as different as apples are from oranges.

How is it we are so exhaustingly different? And how do we achieve more common ground?

Be it as Neil Gaiman said “If only experience could be endowed without experience”, surely we will be enriched by these times, but the currents of give and take make trying teachers.

The Dropdown List

How is it that sometimes things are said quite eloquently?

“Because of the rat race, a lot of us have been pushed into studying something that would give us security for life”.
– Scarlette of Core Design Gallery, Timeout KL April 2010 –

If you were a post-secondary / college student in Malaysia in the late 90s, instead of “I want to be ___”, your career decision may likely have been influenced by “I will select from the below list”, which looked something like this:

1. Accountant
2. Engineer
3. Doctor
4. Banker
5. Lawyer
6. IT (no designations because to be honest at the time, no one really knew what it was, other than IT was the next big thing)
7. Pharmacist
8. I am struggling to even come up with more

Call it realities of capitalism, the developing country, or the arguable conservatism/foresight of parents who want the best for their children, there is no wrong or right. I do hope though, that we are moving towards an environment where individuals from more professions can find their choices equally rewarding in practical and personal aspects, so long as they do their jobs well.

To fill that blank myself, I might have said….anthropologist. What about you?

Discussion with an atheist

Today a colleague of mine told me that spirits cannot exist in the same realm that we do, simply because the world would then be overpopulated. I told him that unlike real people, probably more than one spirit can sit in the same chair, so really they wouldn’t take up so much space.

This is the math grad who believes that there is no God (in the context of the bible, at least) because given the proven time that photosynthesis takes, the world could not have been created in 7 days. I don’t argue with that, but then, I haven’t read the bible.

Anyway, he counters by saying that even if this were true, at some point, we would still run out of room because think of the multitude of spirits we must have through time since the creation of man (being from Hong Kong, he is very concerned about space and population control. Being Malaysian, I am a little more easygoing about real estate in general).

Why then I say, that is exactly why we have reincarnation. Same soul, re-born into a different body that lives through a different time. At some point, perhaps that soul might move on to somewhere beyond, and there will be room for a new one here and there. Everyone/thing else in between, is what we accountants would just call timing differences.

Hey I don’t have all the answers, but mathematically it seems to make good sense, no?