Cirrus Cloud on Play: Yoga and Yoda

I am one of those unlucky people who have extra long limbs splashed with inflexibility. Long limbs are good but inflexibility not. My muscles (especially my hamstrings) do not seem to extend much for some reason and I fear that when I grow older, I will shrivel up looking like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

My aim for the year was to be able to touch my toes when I bend over by Christmas. So I thought to myself that I have to practice yoga to improve my flexibility.


I must, I must, I must touch my toes!

When I was still living in Singapore, my very good friend, JZ, introduced me to yoga. JZ was a gymnast so flexibility was innate. She dragged me into class and boy did I struggle. After two minutes, I had wanted to walk out but I did not want to embarrass her. Everything was horrid. I could not understand a word the instructor was spewing and I could not bend anywhere. The last 10 minutes was sheer bliss to me. The instructor had told us to lie down and relax.


Elegant tree pose which JZ can easily do

We were made to take very deep breaths and clear our heads. And I fell asleep. I was in slumber on a yoga mat, in the middle of the class. JZ said under her breath, ”Babe, wake up.”

That was the last time I was going to embarrass myself, or any of my friends. I swore off yoga.


Some of the yoga poses I probably did the first time round, without me knowing.

Now that I am in New York, bored with a gym membership and no friends to embarrass, I decide to rediscover yoga.

The first class was a mistake. I accidentally went for the advanced yoga class. I was beyond a beginner. The instructor was very kind and patient to see me through 60 minutes of shock and bewilderment. I felt like an alien drowning in a sea of flexible homosapiens!

Words like “downward dog," “cobra pose," “dolphin," “tree," “vinyasa," “chaturanga," “reverse warrior," “pigeon” and “lotus” made me think I was in a Kama Sutra class! I had no idea what each term was; let alone how to do it. I copied the guy in front of me. The lady next to me did not just touch her toes; she put her palms underneath her feet while keeping her legs straight. Oh, did I add that she was 62? Lily is her name.


Caterpillar crawling...


...and searching for food from the sky.

People like Lily make me feel like killing myself on a bad day, or inspired on a good one. Born with a competitive nature, I stuck it through 2 months of yoga. I want to challenge myself and if 60-somethings can do it, so can I.

I realised that breathing is a fundamental of yoga. Every graceful movement (for some) is done in accordance to either an inhale or an exhale. After a month of frequent yoga sessions (at least 3 times a week), I dare say that I can do a “cobra pose” from chaturanga better now. It looks like a caterpillar crawling and searching for food from the sky. Initially I must have looked like Chewbacca doing yoga, mane and all. Awkward and clumsy I was.


The same frustrated look (and hair) I have whilst in a yoga class.

Today, for the first time, I went to a yoga class taught by a male instructor. He is very graceful, handsome and speaks with a strong Greek accent. His physique embodies a yoga ideal. He has a strong but lean body, fluidity of movement, and absolute precision in every pose. Just as I thought I knew quite a bit about yoga, this "Yoda" made us do something I have never heard of or imagined. He told us to put both our index fingers in our ears and hum like a sweet honeybee, “not a mosquito." Remove and repeat 3 times and thereafter, focus on our right ears. We should hear a high-pitched sound.



Errrr, Yoda, I heard nada…


Some pictures taken off the internet

Tianni on Eat: Be Very Hungry

About a month ago, the Chinese-owned nursery our two-and-a-half-year-old goes to in Beijing decided it wanted to improve communication between teachers and parents.


Little K’s playground - Huijia. Hardly the swankiest in the area, but positively paradisaical compared to others

So it started giving out a feedback form at the end of each week, summarizing the curriculum covered in class and listing out the progress made by each tot in memorizing songs, distinguishing colors, or the like. This being one of the world’s last remaining bastions of communal (communist) spiritedness, the weekly reports also included observations on the kids’ ability to play together and cooperate with others, and their participation in herd, I mean, group activities.

I did not initially pay much notice to the A4-size slips of paper handed to me when I dropped the tot off at school. After all, I’ve become quite familiar with the school’s eagerness to introduce so-called progressive measures befitting its status as a private preschool and its corresponding inability to follow through with these policies. Take its Web site, for example. Each parent was issued an ID and password and told that we could keep in touch with our children’s progress in class with photos and updates posted online every day. It sounded like a brilliant idea, especially to working parents like me. Except that after about a month, the daily updates dwindled into a fortnightly trickle, and then eventually stopped completely. The last batch of photos posted online is dated November 2009, about five months ago.


Drawing, games and outdoor activities – a packed curriculum for little tots to justify astronomical fees

Expecting this feedback form to follow the same quick route to obsolescence, I forgot about the sheets handed to me. Until I got home from work one day and the ayi (helper) in all seriousness told me, “Kaela,” basically meaning, my daughter is anti-social at school. Now my nanny has been with us for close to the duration of our stay in China, helping to look after the kiddo since she was a teensy 2-month-old baby. A proud, tough (and loud) Beijinger who was during Mao’s revolution sent into the countryside for ‘re-education,’ she is also highly competitive on behalf of my toddler. The image of her running with my girl in her arms and overtaking dozens of other nannies and children in order to grab the most sweets during Halloween trick-or-treating has seared itself for posterity into my memory. So when she spoke to me in that tone, I had to pick up the form and see for myself if the sky had indeed fallen.

Predictably it hadn’t, but apparently, disliking group activities and preferring alone time in class was equally bad, if not worse. Then her teacher, in trying to put this terrible piece of news across in the gentlest manner, wrote after the initial remarks that she is “certain” Little K will “improve with time.” She was trying to be reassuring, I must add, but that only made me wonder how bad my daughter’s crime really was.







Now, first things first. This preschool my daughter attends is one of a rash of privately-run early education schools that have mushroomed across China in the past decade. Adopting Western concepts of early childhood nurturing with bilingual instruction, these businesses have very much succeeded in cashing in on the consequences of the country’s one-child policy, namely two generations so far of over-indulged children and their obsessively competitive parents who are, in the words of a Singaporean statesman, very “hungry” for their offspring to succeed in life. In a country where the average income is about SGD$8,000 per annum in large cities like Beijing, these schools cost about $400 a month, an astronomical sum by any stretch of balance-sheet arithmetic. One can only imagine the extent to which middle-income Chinese parents must have scrimped and saved in order to hedge on their future retirement – a burden that traditionally falls on the children.

Still, fees at these upscale local nurseries pale in comparison to truly "international" kindergartens run by foreign investors and staffed, not by local staff and the token "English teacher" (usually a straggly Peace Corps-type foreigner looking to earn pocket money during local immersion), but by full-time native English speakers holding relevant qualifications to boot. These nurseries charge at the least, double of what private Chinese schools advertise, ostensibly because they bestow upon their young charges not just an early classroom introduction to tomorrow’s United Nations world, but also a much-coveted North American accent. The promise of an early boost up the crowded societal ladder has seen no lack of affluent parents fill many an international classroom with young Chinese faces.


Forget Baby Einstein; for these kids of migrant workers, 'kindergartens' are basically cheap and sometimes unsafe daycare while their parents labor in the city


Half an hour’s drive from the city center, it’s a different world at the Cuigezhuang village largely inhabited by migrants workers.

Unfortunately for my dear future investment of a daughter, her parents, both relatively poor scribes, can’t afford to give her a leg up in the Darwinian race with a blue-chip preschool enrolment. In our darkest guilt-laden hours, we reason that our liberal-leaning tendencies towards egalitarianism can only make our toddler a better human being, even if she has to make a living in adulthood cleaning for these rich mainland kids who are poised to take over the world with their melodious Beijing Mandarin and perfect American English.

My delusions, however, haven’t stopped me from fretting, as good mothers do, of depriving my only child of a good start in life and generally having been too lax. After all, I’ve been guilty of not using picture flashcards on her the moment she started to crawl, and of not having signed her up for any of the myriad music-and-movement classes other mothers had when she finally learnt to totter upright.

Yes, Little K could be only two and yes, toddlers at this age are generally disinterested in their own kind, but perhaps, just perhaps, her lack of social graces is an early signal that she is neither likely to be voted class monitor, nor to win the title of Miss Popularity, nor to run for the college student union. In all likelihood, she could be a complete failure in the schmoozing and networking circles that characterize high-level corporate success. It was a complete nightmare to think that my precious daughter will be following in my very footsteps!


Barebones -- no fancy equipment, no ‘English teachers,’ no early childhood curriculum.

Much has been said about how hard Chinese parents push their children from a tender age, but you don’t really appreciate it until you experience first-hand the jostle to survive among 1.3 billion people on a day-to-day, cheek-to-jowl basis. Whether it’s the millions lining up for seats at the train stations at Spring Festival, the tens of thousands queuing up for admissions interviews into the country’s top universities, or the thousands applying for a few hundred civil service job openings, cut-throat competition is just a day in the life for mainland Chinese.

Often, the only difference determining which side of the great divide one belonged to – whether one was comfortably behind the wheel of a luxury European car on the clogged streets, or perched on two thin rubber wheels in between two-feet-high sacks of potatoes – was whether one had the opportunities afforded by well-connected and moneyed parents, or lacking that, had struggled hard enough to lay hands on a brand-name college degree. Social realities have given birth to a generation of parents and youngsters willing to go to great, and here I mean extreme, lengths for the faintest hope of raising a few notches their social standing. The corruption rampant in every tier of Chinese society or the dishonest merchants selling fake milk or eggs to me do not pronounce a judgement on morals, but only reflect the necessities of survival in the jungle. Play by the rules of victors or risk being sidelined.

It’s hard not to face up to the stiff realities of competition that my daughter, cocooned as she is, will likely find herself up against when China becomes a global superpower and its swathes of very hungry and ambitious citizens venture abroad in ever larger droves. At the very least, I’ve chided myself, I could equip her with as many soft skills as I can afford to buy. Perhaps there was even a special course somewhere on the Art of Playschool Socializing that I could sign her up for.

Very thankfully, about a month after it introduced the feedback forms, the school stopped handing them out, as I'd expected. I could at last return to my laissez-faire parenting and deluded faith in stress-free childhoods. The worrying, I tell myself, can wait, at least till the day Little K runs home crying over her first broken heart.

Duck’s Nuts on Eat: Feeding the Tassie Devil in Me

It was left out of the map of Australia during the 2000 Sydney Olympics, and is the butt of many jokes by Aussies living on the mainland.

But the island of Tasmania, Australia's most southern state, is full of beautiful delights -- and importantly to the Asian expat, home to probably the best seafood in the country.

Yes, Australia isn't quite know for its cuisine (and neither is New Zealand, for that matter), but there's no doubt that in Tassie and NZ, there's plenty of great, fresh and cheap seafood to be had.



Really yummy fish and chips in Launceston, Tasmania's second-largest city, located in its north-east

I went to Tassie a few weeks ago to visit a good friend. It was a rushed trip, just four days, and we were more focused on hiking and exploring the countryside and the bush rather than on food. But when I reached there and saw all the wineries, and cheese factories, and chocolate factories, and fresh fish, oysters, and everything else, I couldn’t help but go "AAAWWwwwww.”

So why is Tasmania so good for seafood? It's simple, really. It's a wee island (though I'm sure heaps bigger than Singapore) surrounded by clear waters full of all sorts of fish and other slimy stuff.



Salmon, trout, tuna, crab, oysters, abalone -- you name it, they've got it.



A prawn-peeling competition at a big seafood restaurant by Hobart's main wharf. We stumbled across the comp when we popped in to eat some fish and chips. The winner peeled 14 prawns in one minute.

To be honest, I sometimes find it hard to find good seafood in Sydney that's not ridiculously expensive. I'm a big fish fan, but I often have to resign myself to some Tassie salmon once in a while and a tad of herring. In Tassie though, perhaps because the cost of living is a lot lower, fish is heaps cheaper and waaaaaay fresher. There's fish and chips everywhere, unlike Sydney (where it's here and there and usually just frozen stuff in pubs), and it's under $20. Now, I'm on a pretty tight budget because my pay's rather low. My usual eating budget is preferably less than $5 a meal, though I could stretch it to $10 if I'm desperate for food. But under $20 is not too bad for some of the best fish I've ever eaten.

So back to Tassie again, and besides its tasty seafood, it has some lovely wines and cheese and chocolate factories. The eastern and south-western areas of Australia have some good wineries -- think the Barossa Valley in South Australia, the Hunter Valley in NSW, Margaret River in Western Australia and the Yarra Valley in Victoria. But so has Tassie. We managed to try out some wines, though unfortunately, I didn't take photos of those bottles, so you'll have to make do with this photo we took at Bicheno on Tassie's east coast. Kinda cool name for a wine eh? It's from South Australia, my favourite place for wine, and a good one too.



Sumptuous wine, not so sure about the name

What I think was unexpected for me was how English and Irish (if I'm not wrong, most of the convicts were from Ireland) the architecture was. Most of the villages or small towns were like villages and small towns in the UK. So of course, we found plenty of English-style food and snacks, like scones, pancakes, and lots of cream.



Fresh, warm pancakes at Tasmazia, a large maze near the spectacular Cradle Mountain in the north-west

We dropped by Tasmazia, which purports to be the world's largest maze. It's in the shadow of Cradle Mountain (super wow), and also home to the Village of Lower Crackpot (no kidding!). We tucked into some fantastic pancakes and toasties -- a fitting end I think to a short but fun trip that turned out to be more about food than we expected.



Ah, toasties

(Some pictures taken from the Internet)

Horse with No Name on Love: Is the Ring the Thing?

I lost my wedding ring a couple of weeks after we arrived in Arizona. It happened on a long car ride back from the doctor's. It was nearly midnight. The kids were running insane temperatures. I was exhausted and not exactly paying attention to my appendages.

One minute the darn thing was on my finger, the next, it was gone. Just like that.

Had it been been any other piece of jewellery, I might have sulked for a day or so, then moved on.

Had it been any other time in my marriage, the man and I might've shrugged it off, and welcomed the excuse to go ring shopping. C'est la vie and all that.

But this wasn't any other time.

I nearly tore the car apart trying to find that small bit of metal. That ring literally put me through the wringer.

You see, things had been germinating between my husband and I since our first week in Arizona: Dark, fearful, unsaid things that had seeded themselves in the days before the big move. Hurtful, menacing things which sprouted over the many days and nights of trying to cope with grounding our lives in normalcy again.

So when I lost that ring - THAT ring – at the exact time that we hit a rocky patch in our marriage? I couldn’t help but wonder... was this a portent of things to come?


It was time to step into my new life.

I blame the baby. No really, this was totally the little pumpkin's fault. I was in the backseat with the kids, trying to distract the baby while my husband made the long drive home from the doctor's.

She must have thought it was fun to swipe the shiny thing off my finger when I wasn't looking.

Worn out from the late-night drive, my husband's reaction outfroze the winter air. He stopped at a diner. We hunted around in the dark for a bit, then gave up.

“Are you sure you didn't drop it at the doctor's office?” he grunted icily. “You're forgetful lately.”

“Hello? I'm tired. You get up with Pumpkin sometime.”

“You know I would.”

“Sure. You have to work. Let's just go home.”

Work: It had been a sticking point with us for a while now. It was sucking up his life, and draining the rest of us of ours.

“Two weeks to settle in”, he had said before we came here. He was off to work as soon as we landed. I was left behind with the kids and the task unboxing our lives.

“This trip will be good for family life”, he had said. I saw him, sometimes, briefly, at breakfast. And then in the half hour before we went to bed.

The weekends should have provided some solace, but we didn't have the time to stand still. Those days were a blur of trawling furniture stores, grocery stores, stores upon stores to buy things. Things which would make our lives better, easier, more comfortable. But comfort was in short shrift.

The road home stretched on, dark and endless. I felt us drifting.

We got home and went to bed. Like a bad Raymond Carver story. The parents silently brooding at the dinner table. The parents we swore we'd never become.

Sure, we'd had problems before, especially after our first was born in Australia. We were young. Just a year married. A million miles away from home. But we got through it. We talked. And when we got tired, we talked somemore. We came out of that experience wiser and more sure of one another.

What changed?

We stopped talking.

The new routine was getting to my husband like nothing before. He came home sullen, silent, unwilling to share. I resented the silence more than the hours he spent away. Suddenly he was a stranger. We'd begun the downward spiral of shutting each other out.

Frustration, elation, apprehension, delight: These emotions dissapated in the vaccum across the dinner table and over the bedpillows each night.

I would weep quietly in the dark because I hated confrontation.

Another week passed and no sign of the ring. I scoured the car every chance I got. I had to find it.

The irony was, I hardly ever wore my ring because I have sensitive skin. The night I lost the ring was the first time I'd put it on again in a long, long time.

“Does losing your ring mean you guys are going to separate?” My older girl Sweet Pea quietly asked one night before bed.

“'Course not,” I said to myself, then louder, for her sake.

“But what does it mean?” She was insistent.

“It means... we get another ring, that's all.”

“Is it allowed?” Her eyes opened wide.

As with all innocent questions, the answers hit hard. Square in the jaw. Square in the face. Square on the head.


Sometimes it takes a child's mind to put the world in perspective.

Of course it's allowed. Everything is allowed. Because the ring's not the thing. It's a small, shiny bit of metal. Finding it would not solve the problems in my marriage. I was the only one who could solve the problems in my marriage.

So, this post is about love, right? It's been a wretched Taiwanese melodrama up to this point. But here's the love part. Pay attention.


Love is easy. Keeping the family close takes work.

I sat my husband down. I thanked him. For his hard work. For the days he spent driving to Ikea to haul furniture home. For the hours he spent in line at the Motor Vehicle Division making sure his licence (and mine) were in order. For the strong work ethic he was showing our daughter, even if it meant long evenings spent at the office.

Then I reminded him: I love you. I'm here. You've stopped seeing me, and I've stopped listening to you.We're too wrapped up in our individual worlds. We flew halfway around the world to keep the family together, but our internal guidance systems got fried somewhere over the Pacific, and now we're further apart than ever.

We both know this: Work is not going to hold your hand or mine on either of our deathbeds. We are the only ones who will. So we came up with new houserules, because this new vibe was not working: We had to kiss each other before he left for work, even if I was dead asleep. He would wake me up. Kiss me like there's no tomorrow, then start the day. Rinse and repeat at day's end.

Simple, right? Exactly.


Hi, I know you're there. I see you.

We did that for a week. We remembered each other. We kissed each other. We held on like there was no tomorrow. We carried each other, emotionally We talked. No complaints, no judgement, no whining.

The new routine became a habit. A good habit we had taken for granted, that had gotten lost in the big move. We forgot which box we left each other in. Never again.

There's an epilogue here. You'll like it.

Sweetpea was jingling a bunch of coins in the backseat some weeks after and they went flying. Naturally she hunted down every last one because she knows I hate a mess.

“Hey Mom! I think I found it!” She held up my ring. Triumphant.

It had fallen into a small nook beside baby's carseat. How Sweetpea saw it, when I failed to, how she dug it out, when I couldn't, is just one of life's mysteries.

“You're a very clever girl, my dear,” I said, with a smile. I didn't need the ring anymore. But I didn't tell her that. That would be my secret, and my husband's.


The item in question. As heavy or light as I want it to be.

The small bit of metal's gone back in the bathroom drawer. Just for safekeeping, you understand. Maybe I'll put it on again someday.

Una Ragazza on Love: School on Saturday

Un Ragazzo and I have a little group of agricultural scientists to partly thank for our encounter.

It was almost midnight on a weekend one recent spring and I was making my way home after a long work event on farming, food, and the health of Americans. The scallops and steak had been amazing and the wine to help wash it all down was even better; I left the party slightly buzzed yet wired to continue the conversation on the world's food chain.


A food chain discussion on a weekend night, anyone?

Throwing myself in front of my MacBook to finish the food science presentation due in eight hours, I opened up a second window to browse for interesting chatter on a dating Web site that I had occasionally visited, at times like these when I would yearn for intellectual banter with a male specimen of substance.



Plenty of fish in the sea: a cornucopia of online matchmakers to suit the tastes of every New Yorker

Let's pause here for a second. You are probably thinking:

Online dating in New York? Is that even necessary? Aren't you in testosterone haven simply by being in the sexiest city in the world? Are there not amazing-looking and intelligent men around every corner, ready to whisk you into the nearest French bistro or wine lounge for the most fantastic date we've all seen on Sex and the City? And, aren't dating Web sites full of losers who probably cannot carry a two-minute conversation without looking or sounding like Napoleon Dynamite?



Allow me to respectfully disagree. Having perused dating Web sites on and off for about 18 months, while at the same time meeting guys under "regular" circumstances in New York – including at dinner parties, on subway platforms, in bars, movie theaters, bookstores, gyms, and parks – I find online dating to be but another medium to meet people. The main difference, and a key one, is that online dating is a much more productive and efficient process, providing answers to fundamental questions that may take up to a handful of dates for "regular" daters to find out.



The New York subway, a relatively common place to throw a line at a cool chick with some time to kill

Have a preference for guys of a particular age, height, race, religion, body type, or hair style? Like a gentleman who enjoys chess, Mexican food, zorbing or Tolstoy? You can play as many rounds of speed dating as you like in one night in your pajamas, without having to put on any mascara or even repeat your own elevator pitch a single time. In that way, the odds of a negative first-date experience with a guy from Match.com may actually be lower than those of a date with a guy who'd picked you up in a Village pub.

The taboo of online dating is outdated, and its stigma of being a magnet for losers is also ill-placed. A quick Google search would reveal multiple pleasant and even attractive profiles on dating Web sites, many of them with academic and professional titles to match the looks.

As for the Sex and the City dating experience, it really boils down to which of the ladies you'd like to emulate. If you're a Samantha, you may think of dating in Manhattan as being in Dylan's Candy Bar. If you're a Miranda, you would more likely think of it as being in Home Depot – full of stuff but none of which you'd want to bring home, let alone into your bed.



Dylan's Candy Bar, an institution for the sweet-toothed

In fact, I consider online dating a complement to regular dating. New Yorkers are competitors. Kiasu competitors. If there were 248 places in which men are looking for women each evening, why stick to 242? With the ability to control the first moment of truth – to take a leaf from the soap giant P&G's handbook – through a well thought-through pick-up line and a picture of your sober self, why limit your chances of success to the probability of an eligible bachelor strolling through the doors of Apotheke or Employees Only at 1 a.m. to find you still coherent and charming, with great hair?



Checking out the chemistry at Apotheke

And so that was how I met Un Ragazzo. Between paragraphs of writing about poultry, tomatoes and cheese, I got pinged by a guy going by the alias of "School on Saturday."

"Why the name?" I asked.

"It's an old joke from the Fat Albert cartoon TV show," Un Ragazzo replied, sounding a little sheepish. "'You're like school on Saturday: no class.'"



That sense of humor, along with his very smart technique to pay me a compliment about my writing (in my profile), earned him an e-mail response from me. That led to nearly five hours of online chatting that flew by as we went from Ricky Gervais to Little Britain, to The Larry Sanders Show, to green technologies, to Monty Python, to Da Ali G Show, to North Carolina, to Fabian Cancellara, to exchanging pictures (verdict: cute!), to Woody Allen, to Almodovar, to previous disastrous online dating experiences, to Trivia Pursuit, to traditional Chinese medicine, to running down the West Side Highway, to not being able to run down the West Side Highway, to very old grandfathers, to Asterix and Tintin, to Belgian beer, to pool, to carrom, to Trader Joe's . . . to finally realizing we could be exchanging phone numbers to carry on the conversation.

I typed the last of the 10 digits of my phone number, and the silence was deafening as my eyes fell onto my cell.

I didn't have to wait long. Seconds later, he'd called and we were reintroducing ourselves to each other, this time verbally for the first time so he could hear my accent that didn't come through in my writing.

I guess neither of us screwed that up, because within minutes, we had agreed to meet for a drink halfway between our apartments, in Midtown, that very next night.

As I hung up the phone, my brain quickly reminded me that I'd need to get some shut-eye before getting up to look refreshed in two hours to speak with my farming colleagues. It then promptly switched gears to tell me that I could wear my new Club Monaco top to the more important meeting that evening.

Good to know. Because this guy might really be worth that blouse. . . Optimist or hopeless romantic? You decide.

As for the challenge du jour? The answer is clear.

Internet: 1. Meatpacking District bars: 0.



A review of the Meatpacking District in its heyday (2006)

(Some pictures taken from the Internet)

Shakeleg on Play: Walking Barbie

It's very easy to tell the rich from the poor in Indonesia.



The richest are chauffeured around in flashy cars, wear beautiful clothes, and hang out at swanky Grand Indonesia and Plaza Senayan. They have bodyguards and maids in uniforms pushing baby prams behind them as they teeter about in their Christian Louboutins.

The poorest beg, walk barefoot, and live hand to mouth.









Me? I'm one of the ordinary folks who ride ojeks (motorcycle taxis) and shop at Mangga Dua and Blok M.

Wait a minute. Actually, I don't fit into any category.

Being a foreigner means I'm not trapped by social conventions so, I present myself in whichever way I fancy and nobody gives a damn. I could be at a messy wholesale market haggling over batik pajamas today and have cappucino and pancakes at Harvey Nichols tomorrow.

What Indonesians embrace as life here is play to me because I have zero identity. And I try to have fun when dealing with the unfamiliar.

I play around with Indonesian names. Last week I told the Starbucks cashier my name was Cahaya Bintang (Light of the Star) when he took down my latte order. The previous week, I was Bunga Dewi (Flower Goddess).

I thought they were outrageous but nobody batted an eyelid. I think I'll name myself after the airline Merpati Nusantara (Dove Archipelago) next week.



I play around with Indonesian public transport. So many to choose from – the ojek, the bajaj (three-wheel taxi), the mikrolet (minibus), the kopaja (non-aircon bus), and the Transjakarta (aircon bus).





There's always live entertainment on the bus by way of hawkers selling anything from roasted peanuts to nail clippers and buskers strumming miniature guitars and crooning pop songs for a hundred rupiah (two cents) or two.






Typical Guitar Man (video taken by my friend, The Brown Dot)

Bored one day, I decided to join a busker in his massacred rendition of John Denver's "Leaving on a Jetplane." Kudos for the effort, though. Most streetbuskers sing only Indonesian songs.

"Am living owner jade plains, don't know when I will beg again," he sang with a thick Javanese twang.

"Oh babeeeeee, I had to goooooooo," I continued, howling like a werewolf.

He jumped, probably shocked that someone was actually listening to him – and responding in a way only a crazy foreigner would.

I smiled and said "Mas, lagu Peterpan, dong," encouraging him to sing a song by a local poprock band. He obliged and I slipped a 1,000 rupiah in his grubby plastic bag.

I play around with various Indonesian personas. I am the talented housemaid who can manouevre two trolleys along supermarket aisles, cook, clean and charm security guards into helping to clear nasty cockroaches and grasshoppers in the apartment.



But I'm less successful in being a Walking Barbie. These creatures come in all ages, shapes and sizes and are seen everywhere in the glitzy malls and clubs.

This is a typical Walking Barbie's beauty routine: several hours at the salon for a keramas (hair cream bath and head massage) and then styling the locks in tight curls or cascading lush waves. While the hair is being worked on, the feet are massaged and the fingernails, shaped and painted.


Indonesian girls spend hours at the salon to get these cascading waves!

Like in Singapore, there are plenty of beauty services here but at the fraction of the price. Full-on makeup with fake curly lashes? Brow shaping? Your wish is my command, says the beauty genie.

But the difference? It seems that girls here prettify themselves too much, too often. A little terrifying for this plain jane whose standard Singapore attire is a tee matched with a pair of capris and Crocs sandals.

But I did try. Let's just say since I arrived here, I've become vainer. I exercise regularly, eat moderately and shop happily.





Now I own lace dresses, tailored pants and bow hairbands! I get body massages (six Singapore dollars an hour) and foot reflexology sessions weekly. I even have a personal masseuse who makes house calls.

The potions seem to be working. On a visit back to Singapore once, several former colleagues commented that my face was glowing and "You're resembling those Indonesian stars more and more" – kind compliments which I don't take seriously. Because ladies and gentlemen, let me assure you, these so-called stars' asses look prettier than my face.



Looking beautiful is too much hard work. I only tried the Walking Barbie stunt once and I didn't like it, so I stopped playing.

I continue to look for more "toys" in Indonesia. I don't care if they're played by the rich or the poor.

As long as my senses come alive and I feel alive, my life is richer than ever!

(Some pictures taken from the Internet)

Rojak Group Timeout: Goal!

Il Mondiale, Piala Dunia, la Copa Mundial, ฟุตบอลโลก, Weltmeisterschaft, 世界杯...

Say it in any language, the most recognized global sport has got many of us eat.shop.play.love writers missing sleep and nearly forgetting to feed the baby. As Germany, The Netherlands, Spain and Uruguay roll into the World Cup semifinals, we chip in to share images from our neck of the woods.

Duck's Nuts in Sydney says:

My photos were taken at the FIFA FanFest live site at Darling Harbour in Sydney. There were more than 20,000 people who were watching the game in the freezing cold (about 5 degrees celsius) at the site, including me. I had gone to the game with some German friends. They are always great to watch football with as they know their team very well.


Sydney, Australia: Germans fans at the Darling Harbour FIFA FanFest live site chanting "Deutschland, Deutschland" before the start of the Germany versus Australia game on June 14 at 4.30 a.m. Sydney time.


Sydney, Australia: Socceroo (Australian) fans wear their green and gold in support of their national football team.


Sydney, Australia: A Socceroo fan wears his national flag as a cape and dons the national jersey as he watches the main screen at the official FIFA FanFest site in Sydney's Darling Harbour. There are only six official FanFest sites around the world outside of South Africa. The other five are in Berlin, Mexico City, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Rome.



Sydney, Australia: The FIFA FanFest site showed how multicultural Australia is. A large group of Serbian fans got together to watch the Serbia versus Ghana game. Unfortunately for them, the Black Stars won 1-0. Sitting in the foreground are the Socceroo fans, who were waiting for the next game, Germany versus Australia, which the former won by four goals (4-0).

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Una Ragazza in New York says:

Even as World Cup fever strikes every man and woman, young and old, some things never change in the most fashionable city i the world.


New York: A mini kit for the wannabe midfielder


New York: Gotta look good even if I may be hitting the mud any second from now



New York: Enjoying my biftec a la cazuela at my favorite latino cafe watching the South Korean team play Uruguay on a South Korean television (viva la Samsung!)


New York: Try solving this mystery -- Puerto Rico didn't qualify for the 2010 World Cup but these entrepreneurial guys are making a fortune selling the country's flag outside of Penn Station in Manhattan. Why is that so?

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Shakeleg in Jakarta says:

To celebrate the World Cup, Indonesian teens in Central Java are donning sarongs and letting the trapped wind under their seams do the kicking.



Central Java, Indonesia: If that's not hot enough for these players of Sepakbola Sarong (Sarong Soccer), losers will have to dance to the beat of dangdut music so, everyone aims to lose!





Indonesia: Dangdut dance by one of the country's famed dangdut singer, Inul Daratista


Central Java, Indonesia: World Cup is also a way to spread political messages. Students wear masks bearing the faces of the country's corruptors while playing soccer as a protest against corruption.

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Horse with No Name in Arizona (and Washington, D.C., and New York) says:


New York: The Eat Drink Bar in Times Square, where I was visiting on vacation.


New York: Major marketing going on here in Times Square. There's a massive Nike poster. Massive.


Washington D.C.: At the International Spy Museum cafe, a guy holds his head as the U.S. team concedes the goal to Ghana that would seal its fate in the round of 16. Everyone in the cafe was riveted to the screen, even the security guards. They were all devastated by the time the final seconds rolled around.

Post script: After the 4-0 German/Argentina thrashing. I overheard snippets of conversation from tourists and locals alike, dissecting the match as they were shopping. At one of the junctions, a huge ruckus started up, cars sounding horns in celebration of the win. It was pretty festive-sounding, one would have thought the U.S. was still in the running for the cup.

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