food gallore

Food, food and more food.... I guess that's the best thing being a Malaysian, We are so obsessed about our food.

1. Korean Restaurant, at PJ SS2

Ginger tea, fermented bean paste and garlic slices

Various type of side dishes, and its free refillable !

Here comes the pork belly, super fatty


After pan fried, the slices shrink due to dissipation of the fat

Here comes the slices, straight into my mouth, YUMMMM..

Fried beef, as good as the pork and less fatty


Kimchi soup, Some sort of steam egg, taste like cawan mushi actually


Sweetened black beans and an eagle eyes view of all the sides we had

2. Mat dou Se, a hongkie style dessert restaurant, SS2

fried drumstick, seaweed-ham roll with WASABI mayonnaise dressing!

Of course, i had my favorite mango lou

3. Fish head curry retaurant, Serdang

Went out with Colleagues for lunch during one of those boring cant-wait-for-sat-to-come Friday.

Very rich and creamy fish head curry


Simple stir fried kai lan



Smooth oyster sauce toufu

4. Zen Cafe, Midvalley
Zen cafe is a subsidiary of Secret recipe, but for some reason, i think their food tasted much better than Secret recipe.

Yummy sundried timato quiche



Hazel nut toffee drink, not my favorite, Super rich greentea cheese cakes

5. Yut Kee
An old legendary nostalgic chinese restaurant near Bukit bintang, hot coffee and half boil egg, with Auntie and Ah peks reading newspaper and happily chatting across the table. What a great breakfast for Saturday morning.

The shop looks old in a special way


Roti Babi!!! Super expensive, RM7 per piece


Full of pork slices, lap cheong, onions, veg etc.

Ok, thats all, lazy bum signing off now,

18 SX (perhaps)

I know its rare that i blogged twice a day, but i came across something super funny during my marriage preparation course yesterday which i'm dying to blog, and seriously it has been quite some times since my fingers itched to blog so much.

The topic we had yesterday was "Sex and Marriage", before your adrenaline starts to pump and your throat goes dry, no, they didnt teach what's the best position and how to keep the sexual relationship fun and alive. Its very much theoretical based sex education on what sex should be, sacred, intimacy, a way of communication, a means to give yourself..... Ok, you get the picture.

However, the speaker got the science totally wrong and he went on and on telling about it. The speaker said that sex is exclusive for married couple only (which i agreed), and sleeping around without any attachment is like reducing your whole being to sex organ cuz you let your organ senses rules over your heart and head (which i agreed, but a bit funny, try to imagine a being with no limbs, no face but sex organ). ok, here comes the funny part:

During sexual intercourse, there will be an exchange of DNA and particularly the male's DNA will be left circulating in the female's bloodstream, hence no-string-attached sex can never be a total detached act.

That's when my eyes widen like this (O_O) and i had to contain my laughter so hard from escaping my mouth. It even funnier that other couples looked so serious and went on nodding their head in total agreement.

Of course i get the message which the speaker was trying to convey but he got the facts totally wrong. Sexual intercourse doesn't involve transfer of DNA (or the way Manglish would pronounce it Di-O-C-Rai-Bo-New-Click Eh-Sit), unless its a fusion between the egg and the sperm. The sperm which contains male's heriditary material will be dead and flushed out of women's body in matters of hours if its fertilization doesnt occur. And male's DNA can never enter into female blood stream unless the sperm have certain super-sperm ability which can break through the barriers of arteries and veins and swim right into women's blood circulation. Even if we really want to be anal about it and insist that during sex union, male's DNA (contained in sperms) do enter to woman's body, but seriously do you know how much of external DNA our body takes in everyday? the food- meat, vege that we eat, airborne bacteria which we breathed in, they all contain DNA, and the beauty is our body has restriction enzyme which is able to breakdown foreign DNA. Transfer of genetic material can only occur from parents to children or through gene theraphy.

Seriously, the only organism which exchange DNA during so called intercourse is bacteria, through bacteria conjugation. So now are we reducing our whole being to single-cell organism?

The Transient Life

Here comes another emo post.

I remember some times ago, i was sitting alone in a park, on this chair beside this huge tree which was heavily blossomed with broadleaves and intertwining twigs. The trunk was buttressed at the base with these rounded swellings which some people refer it as burls but it always appeal as some sort of tumors to me. It was breezy but i can somehow smelled the rain is coming, maybe it was the fact that the moisture in the air felt damp against my cheeks.

It was a late afternoon, The road was unexceptionally quiet for a saturday afternoon like this. It reminds me of the summer feeling of being in UK during those rare sunny days. I was half sunbathing while waiting for my colleague in front of his apartment. Under the shades of the humongous tree, i was listening to the smooth, eccentric voice of Jason Mraz telling me: lalalala... life is wonderful, lalala... life goes full circle.

With the trees, the sun rays, the still in the air, the lazy afternoon, the colors, the smell and the sound filling all my senses, for a split moment there, i really thought that life is wonderful. Or in another words, with my congested senses, my mind had tricked me into believing that life is wonderful.

Of course, life can be wonderful and contented, but i don't really want to be in a false delusion that good things in life come easy either. Yes, we can enjoy the breeze, the smell and everything that life offers to us, with gratitude and great optimistics. However, i don't want my senses and rationality to be masked by these 'blessings', and ignoring the fact that life is complicated and whether we like it or not, we still need to work hard in order to gain happiness.

I am not a pessimist person nor i am an optimistic person. Sometimes when i'm having the best time in my life, there is always a voice at the back of my head warn me that the happiness is fleeting and i shouldn't indulge too much in it. Its like the forces of the pendulum of a swing. The more forceful it sway to one side, you will felt the equal forces when it sway to the opposite side. The happier i felt this moment, the lower i may fall the next moment when the unexpected hit me.

I had finally started to read Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" after much coaxing from my peers and fighting with my own resentment and resistant. I remembered watching the "New Moon" movie and end up having the biggest regret of my whole life- for allowing myself to sit through 1 and half hours watching a mundane life and rampant immaturity of a teen girl. My friends promised me that the book will change my view all together and thats why i've decided to give it a try.

I had went through 300 pages so far and i had to admit that it did changed 50% of my view. However, i still think that Bella is an overly naive teen girl who says things like "I would rather die than stay away from you" way too easy. I would like to think that love is bigger than life, but from another perspective, life is not about love all the time. I received an email from my friend last week, telling me that two of my ex-college mates passed away lately because of road accidents, at young age of 27. I cannot helped but felt sorry for them that they never had the chance of going through marriage, having family and kids, building their home and growing old like normal ones. If you compare this, the reality of life to Bella, the suicidal adrenaline junkie who engages in as much frivolous risk just to maintain the perversion of the ill fated Romeo and Juliet saga, you will think twice before you went gogo-gaga when you hear something like "i can't live in a world you do not exist".

It makes me ponder, to an extent that my head pains. How come it's so hard for me to accept that life can be wonderful and transient at the same time? How come i have so much of angst in me when someone claimed that he/she would die for love? Can i wish for a wonderful simplistic life like what Jason Mraz sang? i do hope that life can go easy on me, because obviously i have no answer for this.

Book review: The fifth Mountain

English is always a secondary language for me. Its not that its less important or less of priority compare to my mother tongue (Chinese of course), but if the 'ease' of using the language is the yardstick, i have to say that English always comes second.

I read from Manglish's post "On Writing" a few days before:

"it is hard to compose in Chinese inside our head and then write in English. We are perpetually seeking the right word to convey the right feeling."

That was exactly my 心声.

Here comes the perfect example, When the Chinese word 心声 came naturally to me, my fingers which were reflexively typing on the keyboard stopped momentarily in the air. The word supersedes the rest of all other English adjectives. So like what Manglish mentioned, i was 'Perpetually seeking the right word (in English) to convey the right feeling (which i can do it effortlessly in Chinese)'.

**心声 means the voice of your heart, sometimes when you cant find the right words and during that time a person speaks the same thoughts you had, its as though the person heard the voice of your heart.

(After a moment of re collection) Let me rephrase myself again.

That was exactly what's on my mind. (but again, there is sort of reduction in the intensity and emotion which i attempt to express here).

I am always aware of the fact that i am a Chinese who is speaking English. Not that its difficult, but its a constant awareness whereby the linguistic part of my brain have to work extra hard in putting the sentence together, finding the right vocabularies, right grammar. And my research project's mentor used to tell me that unless i am thinking in 'English' i can never 驾驭 (ok, the clostest i can think of the word for this is 'mastering') the language.

I only started to speak English after i've met Peter (i think its around my final year of college studies, dont ask me why, i never find the need of speaking the language before that), of course the command of the languge was accelerated during my days in UK. However, i do aware that i am far from conquering it. In fact, if i count the years i've actively communicate and interact with others using English, it was only a short 5 years, which basically makes me not only a amatuer, but a kid in the world of English.

However in this short 5 years, i have found immense joy in using the language, especially in reading. Although Chinese vocabulary is rich, English is equally great. For example 'Serendipity', the way chinese would describe it is "美丽的意外", but it doesnt sound as beautiful as 'serendipity', in fact, a single word "疲惫” has so many parallel word in English, "tired, exhaust, fatigue, weary, lassitude, feeble, prostration, debilitation, enervation" which can be used in different context with explicit meaning.

I had just finished reading "The fifith mountain" by Paulo Coelho recently. It was a not-so-biblical story based on an Old Testiment's prophet called Elijah in the bible. The book describes the "word" as one of the most powerful weapons of destruction. During that time highest priest is the only one who has the privilage to inherit the history of a nation, of which they passed from mouth to mouth, generation by generation. When, the 'alphabet' was introduced by Merchant to the country and was slowly being practiced by the layman, the high priest decided to declare war and destroy its own nation in order to prevent the spread of the language.

Daggers and spears left traces of blood; arrows could be seen at a distance. Poisons were detected in the end and avoided… but the word managed to destroy without leaving clues.-Paulo Coelho

How true it is.

Anyway, highly recommended book. (*Warning, read it as a story, without any religious presumptions, it can be mind provoking as Coelho described the liberation and thinking of ownself are important in one's relationship with God and His calling)

A timeless message from the book which i really love.

Every man hath the right to doubt his task, and to forsake it from time to time; but what he must not do is forget it. Whoever doubteth not himself is unworthy –for in his unquestioning belief in his ability, he commiteth the sin of pride. Blessed are they who go through moments of indecision.