Second chances

I suppose it is just the time of the year where everyone stops to take stock of what they've done for the past 360 odd days because I've come across Top Ten lists and review lists on almost every blog I've been on.

I'll always remember 2005. Some of the reasons are too personal to be posted up but I thought I'd just post on one significant shift in my interior landscaping.

I'm trying to re learn chinese.

For those who know me in real life and who do not know yet, I realise it comes as a bit of a shock. I've always been the biggest anglophile around and until 3 months ago, I had no idea who Jin Yong, Gu Long or Jay Chou were, which just goes to show my utter disconnection with the Mandarin cultural universe. I could barely read even the simplest words in Chinese and I think I had trouble even writing the easiest sentences. I had and still have the Chinese linguistic abilities of an 7 year old.

I don't think I could read Jin Yong and Gu Long yet...because right now, I'm trying to read my sister's Secondary One Higher Chinese textbooks and I seriously cannot even get through ONE chapter without running into a gadzillion unknown words. It sounds so ironic, after all those years of hating it and wishing it would go away, but right now, I would give anything to have chinese tuition again.

All this just proves God has a huge sense of humour.

There were a great many reasons for this shift. One of which is the fact that I've finally grown out of my hatred for my secondary school and the language I associated with it. Another is that the usefulness of being fluent in written and spoken mandarin was discussed by several bloggers I greatly respected such as Mr Wang and being a practical person, I grasped the fact that it made no sense to refuse to learn just because of petty old hatreds. Besides, it helps that every other magazine I flip open talks about China, the economic powerhouse and I'd hate to think of myself missing out on career opportunities just because I was too stubborn to back down from my Sinophobia.

The final reason is a sentimental one.

I'm chinese. And I'd really like to at least try to reconnect with my culture.I don't know if I will be reading Tang poetry anytime soon or ever. But I'd like to at least try not to be so enormously handicapped at even basic reading and writing of the language.

So if anyone out there has any practical hints/ suggestions/offers to give me free tuition, I'll gladly listen. But please keep in mind that I live in Melbourne and I may not have as many Chinese language resources at my fingertips.

And hey, just to throw in another shocker for my friends out there... I'm now a huge Jay Chou fan! I have succumbed to the charms of the chief mumbler of Mandopop! I hope Jay Chou learns to enunciate soon because trying to figure out the words from his singing is proving almost impossible. Of course the upside is that it forces me to read the lyrics and improve my reading so I suppose it all works out

Uh, and if anyone would like to suggest other Mandopop singers who don't quite mumble as much, that would be helpful too. I'm hoping that if I play chinese music night and day, by process of osmosis, at least some of it will soak in and my chinese language abilities will magically be raised in a matter of months.

Well, it could happen...

Happy New Year everyone! May 2006 prove to be a fruitful and interesting year for you!

On devils and whatnot

I'm starting to feel as though the Australian tourism board should pay me for ruthlessly promoting their country so much but my trip to Tasmania was so good, I just have to sing it from the rooftops.

I have to state at the outset that Tasmania's not a place for those who travel solely to shop; there is practically NO shopping there. 20% of the country is made of National parks and at least another 40% is farming land and various big empty looking plains and several scary looking non national park forests.Its two biggest cities are Hobart and Launceston and trust me, there are suburban centres in Melbourne bigger than each of them.

What Tasmania has got is something for every nature/activities enthusiast. Hiking,bushwalking, fishing, rock climbing, kayaking, surfing, you name it, they've got some remote beautiful spot that's perfect for it somewhere. It also has something for every gourmet foodie out there. Fantastic vineyards, gourmet cheese farms (the Camembert was fantastic, I'd recommend it to anyone), oyster farms, strawberry farms...you get the picture.

So the trip went roughly this way. We'd drive up to some farm, pig out on the fresh and delicious produce then feeling guilty, we'd go find some national park to walk it off in. It was the perfect combination of sinful indulgence and at least some concessions to a healthy lifestyle.

I took loads of photographs on this trip but most of them involve myself or my family standing around and grinning and besides, my skills at photography are basically non existent so please go there, there and there for some websites of award winning Tasmanian photographers that specialize in taking landscape photography of one of the world's most remote and unspoiled islands. It's basically a goldmine for landscape photographers; it is just that beautiful and varied.

Thing about going to Tasmania is that one has to really stop and take a minute to appreciate its unique flora and fauna. It's no use going there just to take a photo at one of its beauty spots and declare yourself to have been there. It's home to some really unusual creatures like the Tasmanian devil and the platypus. For an explanation as to why the platypus is so special, take a look here.Besides that, the wet and cool climate has produced some of the world's last remaining temperate rain forests where certain species of trees take 500 years to mature. I saw so many thousand year old trees and found myself actually feeling angry at the thought that people wanted to cut them down for the sake of the timber industry.

Let me just describe just this one scene for you. My family and I were driving through Cradle Mountain National Park one evening and we decided to stop and take one of the short walks. And that walk was almost ridiculously storybook-like in an Australian way. Around us, wallabies sat around munching thoughtfully on grass and glancing at us warily every now and then. One of them even had a joey in its pouch which was so Roo in Winnie the Pooh I nearly died of happiness right there and then. The setting sun was low over Cradle Mountain itself and everything was bathed in this odd golden light. There were even wombats rooting around the bushes and sniffling at little streams. It was remote, Arcadian and I felt like I had fallen into some bush ranger's paradise.

Australians do get alot of flak for their racist and white supremacist attitudes, but they at least got one thing right eventually, which was to try and protect the indigenous geography and fauna of their country. To my mind, they're still not doing enough but at least they're trying. (As opposed to the Americans who seem to have stopped trying. If Bush gets his way, more of North America's National Parks will be open to the timber/logging/oil industry which is criminal)

I don't usually gush this much and I promise to do it less from now on. But I've taken two trips recently to some very beautiful and protected areas and now I can't get over how much I've been missing out my WHOLE life. I'm already promising myself another trip to Tasmania and at least one to Kakadu National Park up in Darwin. I really hope I get to do all that before I graduate or at least before people go out of their minds and decide to destroy it all.

Some Perspective

I've been fielding alot of questions from concerned friends lately regarding the race situation in Australia.

So I thought I'd just post this up to say- it's not quite so bad as everyone thinks.

Yes I know about Cronulla and the problems between the Lebanese Australians and white Australians there.

But I also know of complete strangers who went to Nguyen Van Tuong's memorial and cried for him, more specifically, white strangers who had never known him and yet mourned for him.

I've been in Melbourne for close on two years now and I have never really encountered outright racism in any form. I did have some drunken strangers drive past yelling incoherent and possibly racist taunts but I get the feeling they were doing that to everyone on the street and that it wasn't a particularly unusual thing for drunk boys to do.

Generally, the local Australians do tend to keep to themselves and to some extent exclude the international students. But I find that once you take the trouble to chat with them and make some friendly overtures, they're actually pretty friendly and perfectly willing to help you out in class. Trouble is that most international students tend to stick to their own little cliques and avoid the local Australians (including the Australian born Asians) almost completely.

Even among the international students, people stick to the crowd they're most comfortable, which will usually consist of people from the same region/country. It's for that reason that I've never gotten anywhere with the mainland chinese because they stick so tightly to their own and because I really cannot keep up with their fast paced mandarin.

On the whole, Australia is a pretty insular and xenophobic country. But the situation is generally getting better, particularly in the larger cities. This is especially so for the Asians rather than the Lebanese, I suspect, because the Lebanese Muslims have that other religious hurdle to cross.

Or perhaps I just struck it lucky in that maybe Melbourne is just simply a kinder, gentler and more understanding city than Sydney.

Who knows? Or maybe the fates could conspire to prove me wrong and Melbourne could riot next week.

Boredom Meme

Recent upheavals in my personal life have left me pretty much too drained to really write or post up anything interesting. Out of boredom I shall do this meme which I picked up on this blog.

At any rate, it has to be better than sitting around listening to truly depressing music.

THREE NAMES YOU GO BY:
1. Blur Queen
2. Silly Girl
3. Jie

THREE SCREEN NAMES YOU HAVE HAD:
1. Adina Haes
2. Shine
3. Mesaana

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. My eyes
2. My ears- nice flat against my head ears
3. My hands

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS YOU DON'T LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. My thighs
2. my thighs
3. My calves

THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE:
1. Chinese
2. Teochew
3. Indon Chinese(sort of)

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU:
1. Death
2. Heights
3. Being unloved

THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS:
1. Milk
2. sleep
3. Internet Connection

THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW:
1. My glasses
2. A large T shirt
3. Undies

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE SONGS (currently, anyway):
1. Shi Jie Mo Ri by Jay Chou
2. Angel By Sarah Mchlachlan
3. An Jing by Jay Chou

THREE BOOKS YOU ARE CURRENTLY READING:
1. White Apples by Jonathan Carroll
2. Death: The High Cost of Living by Neil Gaiman
3. A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle

THREE THINGS YOU WANT IN A RELATIONSHIP:
1. Intelligent conversation.
2. someone I can be alone with without feeling invaded
3. safety

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE (in no particular order):
1. I've never been to Canada
2. I read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables in one day
3. I dance horribly

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS ABOUT THE PREFERED SEX THAT APPEAL TO YOU:
1. nice hands
2. a deep mellow voice
3. straight teeth

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES:
1. reading
2. cooking
3. sleeping

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW:
1. Go Home
2. Figure out my life
3. Figure out what I want to do with my life

THREE CAREERS YOU'RE CONSIDERING/YOU'VE CONSIDERED:
1. stay at home wife/mother
2. Journalist.
3. Banker

THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO ON VACATION:
1. Hawaii
2. Vancouver
3. New York

THREE KIDS' NAMES YOU LIKE:
1. Lynn
2. Grace
3. Joshua

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE (at least, not immediately BEFORE):
1. Have and raise kids.
2. Find a job I actually -like-.
3. Get a Masters degree in Eng Lit


THREE WAYS THAT YOU ARE STEREOTYPICALLY A GIRL:
1. I love reading celeb gossip
2. Shopping should count as a sport
3. I like the toilet seat put back down

THREE FEMALE CELEB CRUSHES:
1. Nicole Kidman
2. Monica Bellucci
3. Jennifer Garner

THREE MALE CELEB CRUSHES:
1. Edison Chen
2. Tony Leung
3. Viggo Mortenson


I'm not passing this on to anyone. I'm just out of my mind bored and trying to distract myself from other problems.

Only This and Nothing More

Just this odd old poem that I loved when I was a kid. Something about it always seemed so mysterious and romantic even then.

Yes, it is Yeats again, just wait till I start on Tennyson and then everyone will be drowning in saccharine and sighs.

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.


By William Butler Yeats

P.S I know, I know, I posted up a Yeats poem with an Edgar Allen Poe line as the blogpost title. Somehow I feel like there should be a rule against it...the two are SO different.

Grim indeed

Caught the show Brothers Grimm sometime last week and was sorely disappointed. I thought from the trailers that it was a show with great promise; I don't know what I expected- something a little more magical/fantastical perhaps?

All the same, I couldn't help but feel that the script writers tried too hard to incorporate elements of the Grimm Brothers stories without any coherence or thought to how it would complement the story as an organic whole.

I know of so many great writers who have successfully rewritten the traditional fairy tales( Neil Gaiman comes to mind) or who have managed to incorporate elements of traditional stories and myths into great stories. In the Brothers Grimm(movie), the incorporation makes so little sense and detract rather than add to the already thin storyline of the two brothers.

The greatest pity is that it could have been so much more than what it turned out to be.Some parts of the story really were rather decent and Monica Bellucci does a reasonable good portrayal of the evil witch/queen but a great deal of the script involved the scriptwriters trying too hard to include stories that had no place being there(the Gingerbread man scene comes to mind).

As it was, the movie seemed confused as to whether it should have been a comedy or drama, and the net result was that it did neither well.

For Nguyen Van Tuong

Psalm 121


" 5 The LORD watches over you—
the LORD is your shade at your right hand;

6 the sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.

7 The LORD will keep you from all harm—
he will watch over your life;

8 the LORD will watch over your coming and going
both now and forevermore."


I'm glad you're finally home in Australia.

Beautiful Australia

One of the things I love about studying overseas is the long lazy road trips that I take with my friends. This picture was taken at Wilson's Promontory National Park, its not one of the most popular or famous parks in the world but it should be; it was that gorgeous.

Think of one of the most beautiful beaches you ever seen, white sand stretching on endlessly. And the sea and sky meet and marry in a glorious harmony of blue. All this, and all to yourself.All the beaches we managed to visit on this trip, were almost completely or completely empty. Some were accessible only by a dirt track which we hiked.

We played frisbee, ran around taking photos because we were so breathless with the beauty of it and splashed one another in the rolling surf.

In the few days we were there, we hiked past gum trees and semi tropical forests, saw wild snakes(which nearly made me faint!), wallabies, wombats and two cute little echidnas. Fought off swarms of drunken flies and got back to our motel room exhausted every night.

This is the life.I feel so bloody lucky to have seen all this and experienced it with friends who turned out to be tons of fun.

Good bye to Idle Days

Rest in peace, Idle Days.