Everyone get to stay at home and no need to go for classes! yey~ *get slapped*
So being a good girl, I stayed indoors throughout the morning when the typhoon come passing by. I won't dare to go out in case some flying roof tiles hit me or some tree branch come crashing on me. You'd never know how lucky I am on this kind of things..

So I stared at the strong wind swaying and rocking the trees from my window, of which the tightly locked glass was clattering like it's gonna break off any minute. Here's the view from my window, though it's kinda hard to see if the tree's were swaying or not.

But then you can see the effects of the tremendously strong wind on the tree branches here.
See? that thick branch was broken off the tree. What if it hit me when it was torn off? Scary..

Luckily the buildings are all intact. The big bad wolf can't blow away the concrete house!

But sadly if you look closely, some other things got blown off their position.


Yup. the bicycles all look damn pityful..

Even mine fell to the side due to domino effect, under the bicycle shelter, which is at bottom left of the picture. That's me in the reflection with GACC shirt XD I took the pictures indoors so don't mind it :p

Then when it's about noon, the typhoon was said to have pass over to the tohoku area, which is in the north so it should be safe to go out. So I went over to my lab to set up my desktop (provided by the lab woot!) using Ubuntu. It took me very long cos after setting up the pc, me and my tutor found out that the DVD drive slot just won't budge.. So in the end I have to set up another one with working DVD drive. It's only pentium 4 my goodness.. oh well. Not that I'm complaining.

So after much frustration, I managed to set up half of the settings needed, and then a lab mate of mine, who's a really nice japanese girl showed me the best scene ever during sunset! we went to the roof top and saw this amazing view of Mt. Fuji!!
Isn't it cool? I din expect to see it from here, but she told me that it's only about 200km away so it can be seen when the clouds are gone, thanks to typhoon 18!

And here's the Mt. Fuji with the huge ass antenna dish on the left which is always revolving.




My frustration was blown off completely thanks to this beautiful scenery. Really hope to be able to go climb Mt. Fuji someday!

And so this is the end of the report on typhoon 18!

Hello everyone! I've safely arrived in narita airport on 3rd of October (Friday) 7 o'clock in the morning. All of us went our separate ways in the airport too quickly before a group picture can be taken. Anyhow wish all of us will enjoy our new adventure in Japan!




GuangYi, Eka (a new friend from Indonesia who's in the teacher's program) and I were then guided all the way to Tsukuba University by the uni's agents. Thanks to Ms. Matsumi at the airport for purchasing bus ticket to Tsukuba Center, and Ms Yuriko and Ms Ayumi for hailing taxi for us to get to the university dormitory, we were able to reach our destinations respectively before 12pm.

Then Yik Chia, a fellow Malaysian Mext Scholar who came to Japan in April helped me to do registration for my dormitory. My room is on the 4th floor and we carried my 40+kg luggages up by stairs.. But that's nothing compared to when I saw my room.. It's really like empty, except for a window (no curtain!), table, a swivel chair, a bed and a basin. OMG not even a closet to begin with.. So being too tired to care, we just dumped everything into my room and think about the things I need to buy later. damn pek chek (exasperated) I tell you.

But the worse is yet to come. It's raining and i was drenched on the way to the dorm. So I'd think of bathing but then, there's only the public bath available! and it's not open until 5pm! *faint* Luckily Yik Chia let me used her bathroom (damn sad mine does not come with one) and then off we went for lunch.

I'm super grateful that we have Yik Chia and Radzian who brought us to go shop for stuff. There's plenty of convenient shops which are seriously convenient, cos I can get almost everything I need from one place, if i don't want to compare prices. But I do, so we went to several shops to get all the necessary things for basic survival. Here's some pictures for you to see what my room is like.

Do remember that everything besides table, chair, bed and the window is self bought. seen a white pole across the room? well it's used as below.




I don't have a balcony so I have to hang dry my clothes on the pole.


Here's the other end of the room. My LAN cable is connected to the port on top of my door. how greatly "convenient" is that? In the end I had to get another 10M LAN cable cos mine was simply too short for this.


This is where I wash and drink from.

The good thing about my room is that it's clean and has got a nice view over looking the greens and a tennis court, which is too dark to be seen now, though it's just about 6pm when I took the photo.

Well, all in all the dormitory has toilet on all 4 floors (my room's on the highest floor) and has kitchen and washing machine on alternate floors. Best of all, I found that my dormitory block has 2 enclosed shower places! Omg it's like a god bless so I don't need to go naked in front of others. Even if it needs 100 yen for just 10 mins of shower time, I'd go for it even if I'm broke XD

So that's all for now! I'll upload more soon!

*edit* here's my window view at 12pm.

This is the straight out view from my window. the road goes out of campus and there's many convenient shops there. The tennis court is actually blocked by the tree leaves.

The right view. The road ahead (opposite direction of the cyclist) leads to my Dormitory Living Center, where the management office, public bath, some convenient shops are at.

This is the left view. the red/pinkish building is Oikoshi dormitory block 13, right beside mine.

That's all about my room now. I'll be going to do my ALIEN REGISTRATION *I'm not prawn!* later at the city hall so stay tune for pictures!

Two more days before moving into a new phase of my life. I've been waiting for this ever since completing my last semester in MMU, yearning for time to wind up faster. Yet now that it's just 2 days before departure, I feel nervous over this from head to toe.

So many people I love will be left behind, family, friends, and all the familiarity which I've taken for granted for so long. For the past few months I've been getting closer to my family members, getting updated with my friends and highschool mates, so that I could burn their image in my mind and recall when I'm there.

I'm really thankful to have met good and sincere friends all along the years in highschool and university life. You guys have painted my canvas of life with vivid colors. I won't forget the times we had as classmates, hostelmates, housemates, club and event committees, movie kaki, makan trip kaki, bday party goers, exam crammer and many more. Thank you especially, to Kristine, Loo Mun, Weiyong, Shin Dee, June and William for being there for me always.

But time flies, and there's so little time left when I realized that there's so many things that I could have done for my close friends and family. All I can do now is to pray and hope that people I love dearly will be well and healthy while I'm away.

Even though I'll be venturing into a completely new and strange place, starting over again, like the start of MMU life, just that now it's in a different country all together, please don't worry about me, because I'll be alright with kind people there lending a hand to help me settle down.

I'll be updating once I am connected to the internet. So for now I won't say farewell this time, but see you again soon!!

Literally. Have you ever wonder how the space between the ceiling and the roof of your house looks like? When I was a kid, I used to stare up at the ventilation hole and think that if I stare long enough I'd see the monster living up there.

"Boogie man lives up there!!" ...Too bad kids nowadays are too smart for that already, sigh.

Well last Sunday after returning home early from a grocery shopping in Tesco (sadly the only 'in' place with air-con in Taiping) with parents, we decided not to go out anymore due to laziness. So dad decided to fix our telephone line at home. It became problematic when the phone line is connected to the phone upstairs (my house is a double-storey) and disrupts the internet connection without fail. So dad, the super handy-man came to the rescue!

Dad's the coolest when it comes to fixing stuff XD

He went into the master room and slid a piece of the ceiling board off the side and went up the boogie man's hideout. I follow suit, and here's a picture on the way up.

The lamp is so dusty, and everything else too up there.

Once I'm at the top of the ladder, I can't help looking down.

Ooohh.. getting dizzy.. not! haha. I'm not afraid of heights, but more of falling down and kissing the tiles. painful.. *wobble*

So turning my head up away from the scary sight, the arc of the roof came into view.

That's a fluorescent light at the bottom left which my dad installed so that boogieman can't lurk in the dark here.

Walking gingerly on the wood, dad reached the hub of telephone lines and start working on them, basically just rewiring and clamping them up with terminal caps.


I didn't dare to walk up there, knowing my own clumsiness. one wrong step and off i go plundering down to my death. noo way. So I've only taken pictures standing on the ladder.

Here's a wooden support of the roof, with the blue-ish metal thing fixing the wood together.


And this is the water tank. I hope no rats or cockroaches are swimming in there.. nope I'd suppose that's out of the question. *gulps*


And this is the wires connecting to the tv aerial, which is not in use ever since we installed Astro XD

My exploring up there was cut short when dad had wrapped up his work. So we came down safely and successfully have the phone upstairs ringing with the internet connection intact. Mission accomplished!

So that's all about the adventures of exposing the truth behind boogieman's hideout! Now that we are done with that, I feel more insecure knowing rats and cockroaches would easily take boogieman's place up there... >__<

I've had this function where i can hide/show my long-winded grandma story posts in just a click after discovering the javascript to do it last time, but it was malfunctioning somehow since a few weeks ago.

So today after googling for new codes for it, I've got to this page which has what I needed. Delighted, with some more copy-pasting along the way, I managed to get it right again! It seems that the only problem it was not working earlier is that the web hosting of the source code was down.. *Grumble grumble*

Anyway it works now so try it!

Ok. I don't feel so good today and been sitting on the same chair for the whole day staring at the screen trying to fix it. I wanted to do the singapore trip post instead of this actually.. *sigh*

Guess I'll have to keep it for the next post~

Do you all remember the peanut plant back in my older post? Here's a reminder of how the peanut leaves are.

So last week my uncle had harvested most of them, while I was still in Singapore (will blog about it later!) and left only a few plants. My auntie had aired the peanuts, and served them steamed. Nothing beats organic peanut and steamed without that eeky yellow dye! Yet I really wanted to see the peanuts with roots attached, so today uncle pulled out a few of the remaining plants and show me. The whole plant is pulled out of the soil and the peanuts are revealed! See if you can count how many peanut pods are there in the picture below!



It takes about 3-4 months after the seeds are planted for the peanuts to ripen. So how do you plant a peanut plant? get the packets of peanut from kacang putih store and scatter them on the soil? well, of course the only thing that is gonna grow in number are ants :P



Each of the peanut pod as shown above has about 1-4 nuts. So in order to make them as seeds for the next round of planting, the pods are plucked off from the roots and will be aired/sun dried for a few days. This is to make sure it's harden and less susceptible to ants. Then the pods are cracked open to take out the nuts within. After that the dried nuts will be mixed with a layer of ant powder to prevent further attacks of ants when they are soiled. This is done like how you shake fries and pepper in a paper bag. Finally it's ready to be planted in the soil!

Here's a closer look of the peanuts.


So this is the end of the 2nd round of botanical show and tell from my backyard!

It's been a few days since I've arrived in KL. The haze is horrible and I get even more horrified when I see people wearing masks. sigh.

On Thursday I reached Hang Tuah station on the afternoon and met up with Weiyong to go collect our robes and do the registration stuff together in MMU Cyberjaya. We reached there at about half pass two, and got everything done by three. Lucky us for there's no queue required at all. Then the trip back to KL took around 2 hours due to the long wait for bus and KLIA transit. That's why I hate traveling in KL. It takes longer to travel than doing the thing you want to.

On Friday, I finished up the translating task, ate lunch then went to Sungai Wang to meet up with Loomun, June and William. They were buying presents for Suj and Cyc in Pavilion after lunch there, so I walked to join them too. well, again traveling took 1 hour before I get to see them. After browsing around and getting the right present, we went off to see G.I. Joe. It was really packed with CG actions but with kinda cheesy dramatic plot. But I'm really awed by the would be technology in the movie. 3D interactive hologram, the accelerator and even the cool spectacle Ana wore really got me high. As for real world progress, we have touchable holography now in Tokyo seriously, where there are ultrasonic waves shoots out to create pressure sensation on you when you touch the hologram. Here's the video from pink tentacle.


So after the movie, we had dinner with suj in the foodcourt, where i had this spicy mini beef steamboat from the little taiwan store. It's really good with meatballs, lean beef, corns, some greens and Cellophane noodles or called 冬粉(dong fen). Loo Mun ate Vietnam vege-salad-ish kind of dish, which is totally not her kind of choice at all usually. She was afraid of getting sick, that's why she sacrificed the tomyam she wanted for the greens lol.

Then we went to Lowyat to scout for digicam and prices. Nothing much except everyone got what they wanted there. Then we parted and I went back on monorail, and took bus to return to my aunt's house after one hour plus.

Saturday = lazying around waiting for parents day. I was so free that I typed several emails to my friends in Japan, one usually takes up an hour or so due to my poor japanese grammar. and by the way, I got my TOEFL results from the online website today. Well although I didn't get full marks, it's more than enough to qualify for the entrance requirement for Tsukuba University haha. So who wants the TOEFL guide book to score I bought earlier? It's as good as new and moreover it really helped to score! *wink wink*

Now there's only one day left to convo! Some how I dread the draggy event and can't wait for it to be over soon enough. I'm only interested in taking pictures with friends and family so why can't we skip right to that part instead? lol.

Anyway, I hope to see you all if you manage to be there!

Many great people had passed away, like the king of pop, Michael Jackson, the first female president of Philippines (in fact, first in Asia), Corazon Aquino, and also our great local commercial/movie director, Yasmin Ahmad. All these people will be greatly missed, as 80's babies practically grew up listening to MJ's songs and watching the moonwalk dance. Meanwhile Aquino made a huge impact by having an amazingly peaceful transition to democracy in her country from years of authoritarian ruling, after which her husband, the opposition leader was assassinated. But then it was Yasmin Ahmad's death that sank my heart the most. I have seen all the commercials she made for Petronas and others, most focusing on the diversity of our society in Malaysia, and how it doesn't really matter as long as we understand and make peace with one another.

From what I saw on tv, she was said to have been educated in a Chinese primary school before, thus the more she is able to relate on living with different races, and integrated that in her commercials and most of her movies like sepet, gubra and other later movies. It can be said that her life is just like her movies, as she was married with a Chinese too.

Some rumors has been going on saying that Yasmin Ahmad is a trans-gender, or an intersexual (IS). Well I was wary that someone out there just wanted to defame her, but then there seem to be some facts behind the gossip if you google around for pictures. Anyhow, Yasmin Ahmad is a really respectful director for portraying the values and virtues that we Malaysians should treasure and so, the surface doesn't matter at all as long as what we see within her touches our hearts. Moreover, her spoken English was perfect! I was very impressed indeed when I see the 'Yasmin's Muallaf Q&A Session at Picturehouse, Singapore' on youtube, which the link was found in Kristine's blog.

In conclusion, I should really start watching all her movies and re-watch all the commercials on youtube. She would have done more amazing things with her pending movies, but then it's fated that we wouldn't see anymore of her new movies then... May she rest in peace and we will miss her very much, especially for the CNY and other festive commercials.

I've just updated the last post with more pictures after coming back from the clinic in town. My back has been having this annoying bruising pain since I came back from MMU at the end of May. I've been doing stretching, jogging and a little thigh exercise to hopefully shake off some weight, but instead I guess I've strained my back spine/muscle. Nice move, Lisa. Sigh.

My Godmother had tried to massage the pain off my back but to no avail. So I went to the doc's this morning to get a number, return in the afternoon, waited again for about 40 minutes for my turn (the most popular doctor in town) and got out after 5 minutes of diagnosis. Bought with RM25, these are the colorful candies I have to eat 3 times a day for 2 weeks to hopefully cure the ache.


And here's Hiro feeling as dead as I do, cos my Godmother had went to KL without him.

In this post I'm going to have a show-and-tell on my backyard sowed and plodded by my uncle. Tada!

It is actually a stretch of land covered with weeds, which the government owns but have nothing better to do with it than letting it rot. Far behind it would be the vast jungle with a really nice waterfall recreation area called Burmese Pool.

When I was little, my grandfather had a tool shed built out of zinc roof and wooden planks there. then around the shed were a lot of Durian trees. Our family used to eat durians from our backyard during its season, but then the municipal ppl came and chopped off and demolished everything there to make way for a so called new housing area but end up suspended instead.



So when my uncle and godmother come and live with us, he started clearing the weeds and make a small vege haven there, planting chilies, pandan leaves, xiu pak choi, bayam, long beans, lady's finger and others.

Let's start off and see the cute chilies plants!


And there's purple ones too which are super hot!


Here's my uncle watering the plants. Every evening after work he would dedicate his time to his babies in the backyard. On the left is long beans plants, the right is my fave, peanut plants!


The long bean plant. creeping plant it is~


I like peanuts.. but no peanuts growing yet. Even if there's peanut it'd be underground :p


Then we will move on to the hairy plant! who would have thought this is the plant that produces smooth crunchy timun?


Timun (Cucumber) is also a type of creeping plant. The spiral tendrils are clinging on the strings hanging from above.


There's a special guest in our backyard, ladybug on timun flower! I've actually made this into my wallie lol.


And the Timun Finale, Baby Cucumber~

I've been searching high and low for this baby timun but I never knew that it looked so spiky in the first place?! so in the end uncle have to point it out for me. btw cucumber is scientifically considered a fruit! woot!

Planted near the cucumber plants is this, called Mali leaves in Hokkien. the leaves are served along with the famous egg-noodle called Ban Mee or Mee Hun Kuey in Chinese.


Walking towards the right, there's this bunch of wild blue flowers and wines hanging on the fence of my backyard. This is used to make the blue food dye for the nyonya kuih (a kind of dessert).


Further then, I've seen something in the garden for the first time in my life...
Aloe Vera flower blossom!!


You'd think What? does aloe vera even have flowers? got tipu me or not...
So here's the whole pic, with the flower stemming from the aloe vera plant


See? It's real! here's a close up on the aloe vera flower.


Nature is amazing right? Well I've found so many little wonders in my own backyard, let alone the whole world! And that's all for now. Go explore your own backyard today! XD

*edit* I've missed out the papaya cos it's technically not in my backyard, but anyway for those who are curious, here's the mighty green papaya trees!


And here's the close-up. they take ages to get ripen, but will quicken when there's more rain. Still it's quite long until this batch shows any sign of mellowing.


That all for now! :D