Easter BunBun

Happy Easter Everyone!

Let the Easter Bunny and the colorful eggs bring fertility!! =)

Merry Xmas everyone!

It's Christmas Eve, and it's snowing outside. A white Christmas for a family reunion and friends and relatives to gather.
I'm not a christian but how much anticipation towards this festive season is as much as everyone. Pap used to bring us for caroling, which was truly my favorite moment when i was a kid. Pap loves the warmth showered and how the people rejoice us. He embraces joy, harmony, care, merrymaking... We would be following the caroling choirs visiting hotels by hotels and we at the back tracing their tail along the tourist belt from Batu Ferringhi to Tanjung Bungah; Hotel Shangri-La, Golden Sand, Holiday Inn, Park Royal...till the very last Mutiara. My favorite Xmas song would be Feliz Navidad, Here comes Santa Claus, frosty the snowman, Rudolph the red nose reindeer,etc...

Now many memories swift to my mind,the caroling, the cartoons, the films especially home alone!! And i like every of them.

The snow queen

This would be my very last white Xmas in Russia. I can't feel any festive air here because mostly Russians are Orthodox and they celebrate on 7th of Jan. I can't see any lights, deco on the streets...sad isn't it? Anyhow i tend to delight myself by listening to Xmas songs..

Merry Jolly Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!

Christmas songs by Frank Sinatra & Bing Cosby.

冬至，Winter Solstice Festival

冬至，Dong Zhi literally translated as the "arrival of the Winter". It's a festival when family members gather and celebrate the good year they had gone through. Usually it falls on the 21st - 23rd December. This is the beginning of the winter, the day when the people who stays at the northern hemisphere will experience the longest night fal of the yearl. Whereas the southern hemisphere will meet it within June 20-23rd. The origin of this festival comes from various cultures and places. For us chinese, it has a phylosophycal trace on the yin and yang, which Yin symbolizes feminine, negative and dark qualities of the universe, and yang masculine, positive and fiery qualities, and when something goes to one extreme it then goes to the opposite. Winter solstice in the northern hemisphere is the shortest day and longest night. After it, days become longer, which ancient Chinese thought meant yang qualities would become stronger, so should be celebrated.

The festival can be traced back during the Han dynasty, it was a day to make offerings to heaven and people’s ancestors, something both emperors and common people did.

And, when i did some readings on this warm festival, i realised that medicine plays a great rolte on this special day.

In other parts of northern China, such as Henan, people eat dumplings in honor of a famous doctor named Zhang Zhongjing (150-219). Zhang is remembered not only as a brilliant physician but as being very kind to the poor.

According to local custom, one year the winter was so cold that many people in Zhang's hometown of Nanyang suffered from painful chilblains. Seeing that his small clinic was no longer able to accommodate an ever increasing number of patients, Zhang asked his brother to put up a tent in the village square. A large cauldron was placed inside the tent to prepare medicine, in which Zhang had dumplings stuffed with mutton boiled. Every patient got a bowl of the soup with two dumplings, and their chilblains disappeared in a day or two. Zhang's mixture soon became a popular recipe, and when he died, people began to eat dumplings on the day of the winter solstice in his memory.

But in parts of South China, the whole family will get together to have a meal made of red-bean and glutinous rice to drive away ghosts and other evil things. In other places, people also eat tangyuan, a kind of stuffed small dumpling ball made of glutinous rice flour. Since most of the Malaysian chinese has southern root, we eat tang yuan with sweet brothand thus the mutton stuff dumplings are stil not our commons. Eating Tang Yuan is symbolic of family unity and family prosperity. For good luck, families prefer to have some pink tang yuan to mix with the white ones.


Since we don't have the coloring here, we just made white ones..:) with the brownish罗汉果 sweet broth, a chinese gourd 。

Happy Halloween

Last leaf before en route

Final autumn in a foreign land,
i treasure every moments that bring me gaiety,
and scribble every thoughts and inspiration,
and pictures telling their own stories.
HQ08

Dubai Burj Al Arab lookalike apartment standing arrogantly facing the Volga river next to my kvatira.

Golden hue of autumn

crimson leaves

Raya with joy

My final Raya here in Volgograd had put a contentment as an ending. As this is the final year, i decided to look around for baju to greet this Sunday open house at Hiroshima.
It started at 2pm, and by the time me and my housemates reach there, people already started flooding the hall where we were arranged to take our food in a buffet manner.
There were performance played by the newbies and video clips for reminding us about our root, our Malaysia.
And during the Best costume session.... i turned out to be the winner..goooosh...i was in the middle of munching and chewing my stubborn beef tendon when suddenly i saw all the faces looking at my side and fingers pointing and waving to call me out to the stage....help me and save the beef!
i was so malu that i wanted to hide myself into a hole...eventually i went out to recieve a jar of cookies and candies.Phew
Then we had a great picture session.Batch photo, groups photo, random taking, housemates gang, kvatira gang,etc...


FUN!

Entreé of spring

sakura at kim hostel

Cherry blossom( sakura), in China it symbolizes the feminine beauty, the feminine principle, or love . Whereas in Japan the cherry blossoms are believed to exemplify the transient nature of life, because of their short blooming times. They bloom en masse, the extreme beauty and quick death, has often been associated with mortality, which is the reason it becomes widely utilize in japanese art, music, drama, anime, manga, martial arts, for ambient effect.

Quick death of a beauty

The japanese belives that the soul of the deseased warrior reincarnates in the blossoms, which bring an aesthetic affect during WWII. The pilots would paint sakura on the sides of their plane before embarking for a kamikaze mission. They even brought along the sakura branches on plane. So, it brings the idea of the falling of the cherry petals resembles the sacrifice of youth, thus honoring the emporer.

Sakura taken on the 2nd day of the blossom

cherry blossom in Washington DC


Washington DC cherry blossom