brand new day sanraku

scored a room on the third floor that looked into the lone tree outside the window. sort of felt like i was staying in a tree house when i'd wake in the morning and feel like i was surrounded by leaves. this ryokan stay felt like it was all about the light. or at least that how it feels when i look at my photos - trying to capture the different light through the day :)

nasu, incidentally, is famous for its dairy products so i think i overdosed on natural yoghurt while i was there. mhmM!

next up: photos of the treacherous journey to the next ryokan, honke bankyu where we had to go around a mountain...

saturday sunset

it's funny how evenings are the most chilled out part of my day and then it picks up speed from there.

had lazy morning after the big clean up and emerged in the afternoon for a grease fix at jerry's at club street to counter the residual alcohol. chased the grease with coffee at shots at ann siang. impromptu spin after - spontaneity is underrated. battled the crazy traffic being out at sea is always worth it ;)

left my camera at home so these photos (all unedited) were snapped on the iPhone. really impressive quality. despite my nonstop whinging about the heat, i've to admit that the horrid weather made for some atypically stunning sunsets. look at the clouds! look at the light dispersion! love how within seconds the sky changed colour. wow :)

and now, continuing with this back-to-nature, expose thyself to the elements theme, i'm off to conquer the hill in an attempt to undo this week's damage, for maggi goreng and prata past-midnight comes at a price and my body is a temple. ommmm...

goodwill

didn't take photos but was back at the atlantic dining room for lunch with my cousins. his runner (who happens to be a sous chef in civilian life) took fantastic care of us. he zhng-ed our mains, plied us with complimentary pre-dessert and made sure we rolled out stuffed and satisfied.

the green apple granita is one of the best i've ever had! it tasted like apple pie but icy and refreshing. mhmm :) i'm drooling just thinking about it.

and i'm so glad to have 3 cousins (we're a small family) whom i'm very close to. we're around the same age, doing about the same thing (the elder 2 girls are lawyers) and i love that we get along. have had brushes with obnoxious family and am pleased to announce that my cousins are nothing like that. they're the sweetest, most likeable trio and i think by stopping at 2 (twa koo and mama), my gramps did something right. 

oh and the point of this post, in addition to the plug for small families, is nothing deeper than my delight at sponging off his goodwill, because, seriously, how can i ever say no to dessert, and complimentary dessert at that :)

word from the wise

It’s generally a terrible idea to rush romance (or commitments) for the exigencies of real estate.

-yes, i've probably taken it out of context but this is oh-so-apt about singapore.

(the new york times)

day 24

tuesday 1 june 2010 stockholm to skavsta

crazy mad rush of a day!

rolled outta bed at J's and straight to lunch with C (click for link to read more about C!) at gondolen. never been up the tourist trap and C was very kind to take me. had a great time catching up with C, one of the spriteliest seniors i know. he's in his 70s and a grandfather a few times over and he's got a wide array of interests, from picking up italian as a 5th language 8 years ago, followed by almost monthly trips to italy for language courses, to golf, and scuba diving (he learnt last year!) and he cooks haute gastronomy and i am so very inspired by him and am more convinced than ever that age is not a limit. so as you can imagine, C is fascinating company and excellent conversation. plus he was kind enough to introduce me to not one, but two sets of swedish partners for which i am immensely grateful. so after lunch, we strolled to his boho legal consultancy smack in the middle of gamla stan for tea. my mama taught me never to go anywhere empty handed, so we picked up some pastries first and spent the afternoon discussing one of their partners newly-formed private equity fund. they asked if i'd 5million euro to invest. HAHA. how i wish! hence i am constantly awed by their hospitality and warmth (so much for my anti-swedish people rant) because i am nothing, for now at least, and yet they are so very kind.

was offloading with A about the semi-guilt i felt taking up other people's time and not being able to contribute much (we met at the nobel square to sit and talk till i'd to go) and she shared an interesting perspective. she said that the golden oldies probably didn't need anything from anyone (except maybe that EUR5million) and could very likely have been just happy to have a young person to share their views with, to pass it on. felt a lot less obliged and liability-esque after our last face-to-face h2h and am more determined than ever to pay it forward. that's the beauty of hospitality, especially the warm european hospitality i've been so blessed to receive on my travels. it just inspires me to treat guests and travellers who come my way as well as i can within my means :)

said goodbye to A, and the rest of the gang who'd just caught the annie leibowitz exhibition by the water, and literally ran from J's (picked up my stuff) to central, where i caught the 2nd last bus to skavsta.

lovely airport hotel, btw, and i watched family guy from the restaurant and felt connected to my kungshamra corridormates, with whom i've established a tuesday night family guy watching ritual.

skavsta in the setting sun

clean lines of the airport hotel

new find

this looks like an awesome website 

for great photos and bite-sized bits of information. 

(courtesy of jauntsetter!)

post-commencement

thoughts here.

and surveying the mass of balloons and streamers that had descended on us with a bang, a friend of mine quipped,

"10 minutes after the nursing graduates are done playing with the balloons and have left the hall, we're still going at it."

-cue attack of the random balloons-

doesn't that say so very much about our chosen profession :)

la sagrada familia

tried to photograph her from the angel with the fewest cranes, although the cranes are probably synonymous with the church by now. ironically, i was told by my well-informed friends that once the construction is completed, they can't charge visitors for entry any more. which begs the question, why would they ever finish when the work-in-progress commands 50million annually from ticket revenue? dollars and cents aside, the queue was as long as my 1/2ft iberico sub. mhmm :) nothing like iberico to go, and then eaten straight up in a queue.

winter morning

the sun's streaming through the clouds, there's a blanket of white, the fresh powder's being blown off the roof in sheets, there are red berries on the wet, black, broughs.

woke up to run through the rebuttal but i rather watch the clouds move across the sky.

snow!

and for once it's not melting on the ground :)

house guests

was talking with A.Mc over punch at S' on friday and he mentioned how he'd been the fortunate beneficiary of much european hospitality, having stayed with friends, friends' friends on his travels around europe. on a smaller scale, having been the houseguest of a parisian family friend in paris last month, i know how blessed i felt when i stayed with them. my host even gave me a stack of unvalidated metro tickets to use when i explored the city on my own! every detail was seen to without being stifling. i don't know how they did it but it was a perfect balance of time together and personal time/space, without me feeling like i was intruding on their privacy. i'd have time to myself after breakfast (before sight-seeing with them), after lunch (we'd come back to the apartment and everyone does their thing till tea-time) and after dinner (they were upstairs by 2200h and i'd have the run of the downstairs).

it got me thinking about european hospitality and how being a houseguest is relatively uncommon back home. maybe it's the space constraint - i don't know many families on our tiny isle who have an extra room! every bit of space is utilised and an empty room for visiting guests just seems to be a luxury few can afford. so, hypothetically, if a friend of mine wanted to visit, there physically isn't space for him/her unless he/she doesn't mind the sofa. but i've heard from a sofa regular that the love of my life runs at the door wanting to be let in the whole night, so might not make for the most comfortable of sleeps. but more than just physical space, i think the home's very personal and not somewhere i'd want people over. maybe it's more my parents but they'd balk at the thought of a stranger around the house because the home's private. part of me attributes it to an asian conservatism, and the other part to lack of contact with the outside world. they don't actually have friends who'd stay with them because their friends aren't backpacking students on a budget. or their friends wouldn't impose their kids on them. and they wouldn't make the first move and invite someone because it's just not entrenched in their psyche. also, we don't have a guest room.

that said, all this doesn't stop me from dreaming of one day living somewhere with a guest room at the ready for friends blown eastwards. that'd be nice :)

sold out

i'm guilty of frequently lamenting that there are no good chinese restaurants in europe. chinese restaurants (within my budget, bayswater notwithstanding) tend to get lumped together with random bits of asia's culinary offerings. on a not-so-unrelated note, as J petulantly pointed out, 'we've a restaurant in my hometown that doesn't know if it's japanese or korean. the sign says japanese but it serves bulgogi and sushi.' much ink can be spilt on this culinary phenomenon - the attempted assimilation of immigrants; adapting asian cuisine to the local palate; economies of scale but i'm not interested in deep sociopolitical discourse. well, not at 1043h anyway.

my lone point is this - i used to complain that there weren't enough specialised restaurants and the asian restaurants proliferating europe are sorry hodgepodge excuses that i wouldn't be caught dead in unless i'm on the brink of starvation. what in the world is kung pow chicken anyway? or chop suey? FAKE FAKE FAKE and in fact, probably how an italian would react in shenzhen. BUT when i invited J and S over for a simple asian night in i.e. dinner at chez moi, all i could offer them were spring rolls (not very asian) and chicken chow mein, the staple of any substandard asian take-out. limited kitchen and grocery resources would be a paltry excuse, seeing that there are asian grocers in stockholm and my little communal kitchen is surprisingly well-stocked, cleaniness of communal pots and pans aside. so there's no excuse really but my sheer sloth, inexperience (i learnt how to chow from youtube) and seeming ability to maintain a grip on my chinese culinary heritage. not that i ever had a good hold on it to begin with....

and in true student on a budget fashion, i asked for some help with dessert and they brought apple pie, ice cream and glogg. i just had the remnants of glogg for breakfast, which according to S makes me a first rate alkie but in my defence, the negligible alcohol it in couldn't have withstood all that stove time. also, tell a lie. i ate up the pie and ice cream for breakfast too. move over kelloggs, this' the new breakfast of champions!

the poltergeist

english as it is broken.

hot chocolate

after my kettle run-in, i needed something to soothe my frayed nerves and this little baby hit the spot. met J, N and L for tea in the city and all was right with the world again. it's fascinating how diverse our ethnic backgrounds are. J's a french citizen who is half-armenian and half-spanish. one of her grandfathers is from a country that doesn't exist anymore! N and L are both australian, N's parents are lebanese, born and bred, while L's dad's irish and her mother's chinese and there we all were, seeking warmth in a tiny cafe in ostermalmstorg, tucked away in stockholm. the world is so small :)

friends with benefits

(over msn with a chindian friend who's dating my favourite korean girl)

me:

you're going to have multicultural babies!

D:

yeah

uber mixed

me:

humsum only

D:

unfortunate dilution of my indian blood

but oh well

me:

further dilution you mean, mr. 3/4

D:

it could also turn out

extremely wrong

haha

can you imagine

korean eyes

indian nose

me:

shack max

D:

i think one of my friends

will either be ortho or plastic

if baby come out like that i'll ask him to be a plastic

(pause)

D:

i was actually leaning towards transplant surgeon

for when my liver finally gives way

the la nonna

possibly the best pizza back home.

the misses

it sort of burns on my conscience that, to date, i've missed a grand total of eight weddings this year.

part of me still feels awful for missing my dear, eldest cousin's wedding in may when i was conquering the machu picchu. and there were seven other weddings of relatively close friends. not BFFs but still lovely ladies i'd have liked to have watched float down the aisle. and i just found out that i'm missing two x childhood friends' wedding in december. as in, i've two childhood friends marrying their respective partners (not each other) and hence two more weddings that i won't be around for.

plus there's a prospective wedding next year that i'm hoping won't be during my graduation trip. eeP!

maybe i should stop burning my bridges..

quote of the night

"she's best friends with my best friend's ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend. that means i'm actually supposed to hate her."

pillow fight

minus the pre-requisite pyjama party.

gotta love being in college.

photo credits to M, these were ripped off facebook. incidentally, the building in the background in the first picture is where we've most of our classes.

2 x prints

(usually) = fashion disaster

(spotted while walking from lappis to universitetet)