The Chloe paraty bag - would be perfect in black of course.Friday, March 27, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Product Review
Have been using this organic serum for the past couple of weeks. Plant extracts always work for me : absorption of this creamy serum is great, as is its moisture content. Not sure if it has indeed erased any of my lines, but it's a serum that really comforts the skin (esp now that this skin is getting older and dryer by the day) Complements the Aesop moisturiser perfectly!Called "Forget Your Lines" this serum is suppose to erase fine lines and stress lines. Hope it has helped relieve me of these stress lines I am piling on... heh heh!
(photo courtesy of natures-gate.com)
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Park Guell
Browsing through photo archives and decided to write about the lovely Park Guell in Barcelona again. Enjoy the photos.
The signature reptile from Gaudi.
The lone saxophonist in the park. He was good and his CD was on sale for ten euros.
To appreciate how steep the climb and descent to the park was.
The Journey V
"Long, how have you been? Is everything alright? Is work difficult? Are you eating well? Have you lost weight? The rice is almost ready for harvesting, and someone offered a high price for our ox the other day...." The standard questions each time Long called home which he answered in monosyllabic umms and ahhs.
"Don't worry about me, I have to go, calls are expensive. Good bye. Send my regards to Mei mei." Click and the phone line went dead.
In the rowdy noisy background of his dormitory, the silence on the other end of the line to his family in the village was deafening. It wasn't that Long didn't want to call home. It wasn't that calls were expensive, in fact they were ridiculously cheap. It wasn't that life was rosy here in Singapore. It wasn't that work was lonely, being the only grown man who could not make himself understood in this community. It wasn't that colleagues ostracised him, and customers shouted at his inability to converse in English. It wasn't that he was not willing to try, but Long just wanted to speak mandarin so he could be understood better and serve his customers quicker.
It was that he could not bring himself to let his family know any of this, at all. The more frequent the calls, the greater the temptation to breakdown each time he heard his mother's concerned voice. The longer each phone call, the higher the longing to return home to his village fields. The more words spoken, the shakier his voice may become to betray the strong front Long has been staging for the past 10 months.
There was no way but to speak less and call less frequently. Numbness is better than weakness.
===========================================
In the new flat Long now shares with 3 other acquaintances, he no longer needed to sleep on the floor on a thin, dirty, bug-ridden mattress. Long finally had his own bed albeit a double deck. It was paradise compared to what he had put up with for the past year.
While many of his more resourceful friends found accomodation in HDB flats much sooner, Long did not know many people and was shy to mix around even with his own countrymen. It was difficult for him to rent a place on his own as it was way beyond his affordability. So when the opportunity came up from Lucy who was pre-disposed to look after the welfare of foreign workers in the company, Long quickly grabbed the chance to move to a new flat.
With Lucy's resourcefulness, she got the rented place for a good deal and Long paid almost the same rent for sharing a room with 3 others, as he had been paying the unscrupulous agent for sharing the room with 7 other workers.
At least not everyone here is out to exploit foreign workers like me, Long thought to himself, grateful for the help and attention that Lucy has been giving him since he arrived.
In this new flat, Long no longer needed to share a bathroom and toilet with 30 other workers. He only had 7 other people in the flat which was brightly ventilated with sparse furnishing. A dining table and some plastic stools sat in the kitchen, and a 14 inch TV sat on a console in the living room with a 3 seater couch.
He bought himself a plastic box to keep his clothes and some other belongings he accumulated during his stay in Singapore. He no longer needed to live out of his suitcase, even if it meant having his pseudo cupboard of a plastic box hidden under his bed.
Here, he was allowed to boil water and cook rice and instant noodles. No frying or other methods of cooking were allowed except boiling.
Enterprising Long then started to cook rice for dinner and lunch the next day, topping his lunch box with boiled vegetables and boiled egg. Sometimes he added pickled vegetables for flavour. What he cooked for dinner, often was what he will have for his next meal at lunch. And this diet persisted for a long time, given the constraits of his living conditions.
Long also took on a sideline distributing flyers at the MRT stations. He didn't need to speak to anyone, just needed to ensure the flyers were handed out diligently to passers-by. For each kilo of flyers he distributed, he earned 60 cents.
This job he took on during his days off and sometimes for a few hours before he started his night shift at work, or after his day shift at work.
Soon he found out that he could also distribute more flyers if he delivered them to doorsteps or into postal boxes of housing estates. Long soon carried heavy bags of flyers and walked all over his estate to deliver them. He took the lift to the highest floor of a block of flats and walked his way down distributing flyers at the doorstep of each household. He could not understand why residents in Singapore often locked their post boxes. Perhaps it was a central government control to prevent media circulation of negative news that would affect the ruling party. Such acts were nothing new to him. But he secretly applauded the government for installing such beautiful steel postal boxes which came with a central lock which only a legitimate postman could unlock, probably with a key issued from the central government.
He also learned how to make occasional requests on his work roster to allow him to distribute flyers during pedestrian peak hours along MRT walkways. Slowly but surely Long was accumulating a tiny bit of savings from his job as well as his part time job.
With each meal that he cooked, he was saving himself a tiny sum each day. And this was the portion that he had to fork out for his utility bills in his new flat. In the previous dormitory, the utilities were included in the $250 he paid each month to the agent.
=========================================================
Long thought about his tiny savings each month and smiled contentedly. He had done his family proud and his village proud by coming out here to eke a living. Here he earned 5 times more than what he made back home, and was not vulnerable to droughts and floods. He was working in a cosmopolitan city in a slick working environment.
These were the flashy things he must say, and not the loneliness or discrimination he faced and still faces daily. True that he earned 5 times more but expenses were 5-6 times higher as well. Sigh. We all see what we choose to see.
Counting down, he had 6 more months to go before his 2 year contract is up.
"Don't worry about me, I have to go, calls are expensive. Good bye. Send my regards to Mei mei." Click and the phone line went dead.
In the rowdy noisy background of his dormitory, the silence on the other end of the line to his family in the village was deafening. It wasn't that Long didn't want to call home. It wasn't that calls were expensive, in fact they were ridiculously cheap. It wasn't that life was rosy here in Singapore. It wasn't that work was lonely, being the only grown man who could not make himself understood in this community. It wasn't that colleagues ostracised him, and customers shouted at his inability to converse in English. It wasn't that he was not willing to try, but Long just wanted to speak mandarin so he could be understood better and serve his customers quicker.
It was that he could not bring himself to let his family know any of this, at all. The more frequent the calls, the greater the temptation to breakdown each time he heard his mother's concerned voice. The longer each phone call, the higher the longing to return home to his village fields. The more words spoken, the shakier his voice may become to betray the strong front Long has been staging for the past 10 months.
There was no way but to speak less and call less frequently. Numbness is better than weakness.
===========================================
In the new flat Long now shares with 3 other acquaintances, he no longer needed to sleep on the floor on a thin, dirty, bug-ridden mattress. Long finally had his own bed albeit a double deck. It was paradise compared to what he had put up with for the past year.
While many of his more resourceful friends found accomodation in HDB flats much sooner, Long did not know many people and was shy to mix around even with his own countrymen. It was difficult for him to rent a place on his own as it was way beyond his affordability. So when the opportunity came up from Lucy who was pre-disposed to look after the welfare of foreign workers in the company, Long quickly grabbed the chance to move to a new flat.
With Lucy's resourcefulness, she got the rented place for a good deal and Long paid almost the same rent for sharing a room with 3 others, as he had been paying the unscrupulous agent for sharing the room with 7 other workers.
At least not everyone here is out to exploit foreign workers like me, Long thought to himself, grateful for the help and attention that Lucy has been giving him since he arrived.
In this new flat, Long no longer needed to share a bathroom and toilet with 30 other workers. He only had 7 other people in the flat which was brightly ventilated with sparse furnishing. A dining table and some plastic stools sat in the kitchen, and a 14 inch TV sat on a console in the living room with a 3 seater couch.
He bought himself a plastic box to keep his clothes and some other belongings he accumulated during his stay in Singapore. He no longer needed to live out of his suitcase, even if it meant having his pseudo cupboard of a plastic box hidden under his bed.
Here, he was allowed to boil water and cook rice and instant noodles. No frying or other methods of cooking were allowed except boiling.
Enterprising Long then started to cook rice for dinner and lunch the next day, topping his lunch box with boiled vegetables and boiled egg. Sometimes he added pickled vegetables for flavour. What he cooked for dinner, often was what he will have for his next meal at lunch. And this diet persisted for a long time, given the constraits of his living conditions.
Long also took on a sideline distributing flyers at the MRT stations. He didn't need to speak to anyone, just needed to ensure the flyers were handed out diligently to passers-by. For each kilo of flyers he distributed, he earned 60 cents.
This job he took on during his days off and sometimes for a few hours before he started his night shift at work, or after his day shift at work.
Soon he found out that he could also distribute more flyers if he delivered them to doorsteps or into postal boxes of housing estates. Long soon carried heavy bags of flyers and walked all over his estate to deliver them. He took the lift to the highest floor of a block of flats and walked his way down distributing flyers at the doorstep of each household. He could not understand why residents in Singapore often locked their post boxes. Perhaps it was a central government control to prevent media circulation of negative news that would affect the ruling party. Such acts were nothing new to him. But he secretly applauded the government for installing such beautiful steel postal boxes which came with a central lock which only a legitimate postman could unlock, probably with a key issued from the central government.
He also learned how to make occasional requests on his work roster to allow him to distribute flyers during pedestrian peak hours along MRT walkways. Slowly but surely Long was accumulating a tiny bit of savings from his job as well as his part time job.
With each meal that he cooked, he was saving himself a tiny sum each day. And this was the portion that he had to fork out for his utility bills in his new flat. In the previous dormitory, the utilities were included in the $250 he paid each month to the agent.
=========================================================
Long thought about his tiny savings each month and smiled contentedly. He had done his family proud and his village proud by coming out here to eke a living. Here he earned 5 times more than what he made back home, and was not vulnerable to droughts and floods. He was working in a cosmopolitan city in a slick working environment.
These were the flashy things he must say, and not the loneliness or discrimination he faced and still faces daily. True that he earned 5 times more but expenses were 5-6 times higher as well. Sigh. We all see what we choose to see.
Counting down, he had 6 more months to go before his 2 year contract is up.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
How do you like to be loved?
" If someone does not love you the way you want them to, that doesn't mean that they love you any less than they want to. "
No one can love you more than yourself. There is no one who understands your own basic needs more than oneself. There is no one who knows what you want and desire, more than yourself. Therefore you are the only person capable of loving yourself in the manner you want. Be it love expressed in the fulfilment of material wants or emotional needs.
Only when one has fulfilled the basal level of the human need to be loved, is one capable of loving another. Therefore one is not capable of loving another until one is able to love oneself.
However one has an inate ability to make a conscious CHOICE - to continue loving only oneself, or choose to love others, depending on the level of pleasure and happiness in doing so. If one derives higher levels of happiness and pleasure in loving others, one makes a conscious choice to do so, on top of the love one has for him/herself.
The basic premise is that one has to love oneself to understand the pleasure and happiness in being loved, before one can move on to love another and convey this same or higher level of happiness to the recipient.
In the same manner, one cannot provide material comfort or love to another at one's own expense. By doing so, it only wrecks pangs of guilt in the recipient of this goodwill. To accept such love deprives the giver of material gains. To reject such love deprives the giver of emotional needs.
One is therefore incapable of loving others until one is contented with the same level of love for oneself.
================================================
When I saw the abandoned pack of kittens and their nursing mother, it was a sight to behold.
The mother was scouring for leftover scraps from the nearby food stalls and bringing them to her young.
When my dad spent the last of his foreign currency to buy me yet another pair of jeans instead of the shoes he wanted while on holiday, I was wrecked with guilt for making such demands. But this feeling did not set in until many many years later when we spoke about it.
In those days before credit cards were popular, my parents travelled with wads of cash and travellers cheques. Whatever amount one brought on holiday is sustenance for that period of travel. And I made a demand on my dad on our last day of shopping, simply because I wanted him to give in. I just wanted. Not so much I liked the jeans, but I liked the fact that my dad gave in to me. I was 9 years old.
Thinking back now, I always feel guilty whenever my dad spoke about this, and my face would flush even thought we've spoken about it countless times. It was one of life's lessons he wanted to teach me, one that took many years before he decided to deliver his punch line. One that is said so simply but honest to the bone, and one that he knows I will never forget, and that will make me a better person in life.
Till this day, I've not even worn the jeans once because upon return from holiday, I realised those were popular only in the holiday destination and not in real life. I had gotten dizzy while on holiday. And Dad knew and played along, only to teach me a lesson in life many years on. That I had frivolously deprived him of a sturdy pair of shoes that would withstand whatever fashion trends of the time.
Only Mum would say "Buy what you want before spending on others. The young have many years to waste their youth and spend their cash, but we don't have time to bring it to our graves."
Till this day, I wish he had chosen to buy his shoes instead of my jeans. Till this day I wish he had chosen his own contentment over my obstinate demands. Till this day I still remember how important it is to be able to love oneself in order to pass this love onto others, and be completely in control of one's emotions in doing so.
No one can love you more than yourself. There is no one who understands your own basic needs more than oneself. There is no one who knows what you want and desire, more than yourself. Therefore you are the only person capable of loving yourself in the manner you want. Be it love expressed in the fulfilment of material wants or emotional needs.
Only when one has fulfilled the basal level of the human need to be loved, is one capable of loving another. Therefore one is not capable of loving another until one is able to love oneself.
However one has an inate ability to make a conscious CHOICE - to continue loving only oneself, or choose to love others, depending on the level of pleasure and happiness in doing so. If one derives higher levels of happiness and pleasure in loving others, one makes a conscious choice to do so, on top of the love one has for him/herself.
The basic premise is that one has to love oneself to understand the pleasure and happiness in being loved, before one can move on to love another and convey this same or higher level of happiness to the recipient.
In the same manner, one cannot provide material comfort or love to another at one's own expense. By doing so, it only wrecks pangs of guilt in the recipient of this goodwill. To accept such love deprives the giver of material gains. To reject such love deprives the giver of emotional needs.
One is therefore incapable of loving others until one is contented with the same level of love for oneself.
================================================
When I saw the abandoned pack of kittens and their nursing mother, it was a sight to behold.
The mother was scouring for leftover scraps from the nearby food stalls and bringing them to her young.
When my dad spent the last of his foreign currency to buy me yet another pair of jeans instead of the shoes he wanted while on holiday, I was wrecked with guilt for making such demands. But this feeling did not set in until many many years later when we spoke about it.
In those days before credit cards were popular, my parents travelled with wads of cash and travellers cheques. Whatever amount one brought on holiday is sustenance for that period of travel. And I made a demand on my dad on our last day of shopping, simply because I wanted him to give in. I just wanted. Not so much I liked the jeans, but I liked the fact that my dad gave in to me. I was 9 years old.
Thinking back now, I always feel guilty whenever my dad spoke about this, and my face would flush even thought we've spoken about it countless times. It was one of life's lessons he wanted to teach me, one that took many years before he decided to deliver his punch line. One that is said so simply but honest to the bone, and one that he knows I will never forget, and that will make me a better person in life.
Till this day, I've not even worn the jeans once because upon return from holiday, I realised those were popular only in the holiday destination and not in real life. I had gotten dizzy while on holiday. And Dad knew and played along, only to teach me a lesson in life many years on. That I had frivolously deprived him of a sturdy pair of shoes that would withstand whatever fashion trends of the time.
Only Mum would say "Buy what you want before spending on others. The young have many years to waste their youth and spend their cash, but we don't have time to bring it to our graves."
Till this day, I wish he had chosen to buy his shoes instead of my jeans. Till this day I wish he had chosen his own contentment over my obstinate demands. Till this day I still remember how important it is to be able to love oneself in order to pass this love onto others, and be completely in control of one's emotions in doing so.
Sheraton
Photos from the lovely Sheraton in Shanghai. This was where I'd called home for almost 2 weeks. Fortunately it was a wonderful place with lovely big rooms. Thanks to friends who managed to get an upgrade at a fantastic rate.
I'd never had a chance to order room service as I was too occupied each day and night - yay!
Monday, March 23, 2009
Biscuits
One of my favourite traditional wife biscuits lovingly delivered from a dear friend.
(In case you're wondering, I've eaten them all up much much earlier :))
Isn't the packaging lovely? This is probably the most successful traditional bakery that has revamped its image and marketing to break into the new era. Gosh, their packaging is so enticing that it's even branded itself as THE gift to bring back from HK.
Who knew traditional biscuits could be so successful?
Of course their products are tasty and all, but without the successful marketing and packaging glitz, they'd probably be less renown than what they are now.
I hope to get my hands on some of these on my transit trip. Yummy!
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