New Year's Resolutions 2014

Resolutions are meant to be broken, hahaha! Although I am pretty sure that I will not be able to fulfil all of my resolutions, I will at least successfully accomplish one or two resolutions!

1. Read at least one book per month. I just bought 20 books from Big Bad Wolf Book Sale. Even if I do follow this, I will use up to 20 months to finish all the books. Start small first, if too ambitious, maybe I will not do it at all. 
2. Do sit up at least once per week for exercise's sake
3. Cut down on coffee intake. (maximum 1 cup per day)
4. Improve my skill in parallel parking.
5. Attempt a 10 km marathon.
6. Learn basic Tagalog (actually, the target is just to finish reading the book)
7. Learn Microsoft Access
8. Improve my report writing skill
9. Always keep my room tidy (my desk in my office is very organized though)
10. Do not get angry easily (this is tough!)
11. Sleep early and cut down on internet time. 

Japanese people will pray in a local shrine on 1st January

Nengajo 年賀状

Four more days and 2014 will come. With the advancement of technology, no more hand written greeting cards, and no more SMS greetings. However, now we can get tonnes of greetings from friends in Facebook, Line, WeChat, Whatsapp and so on. Come to think of it, we actually save a lot of money on cards and SMS, it's not so bad. Although I don't mind the digital greetings, it's still quite heatwarming to receive greeting cards by mail!

In Japan, almost everybody still send out nengajo 年賀状 (greeting cards) to family members, friends and acquaintances every new year. Interestingly, no matter how early one sends out the nengajo, the recipient will only receive the greeting card on 1st of January. JP post will employ many temporary workers to handle all those nengajo. However, the cut off date is 25th December if one wants the recipient to receive the nengajo on 1st January. If one sends out the nengajo after Christmas, there will be no guarantee that the recipients will get the nengajo on the 1st day of the year.

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown

I have been quite productive this month, I finished two books already!(´・ω・｀)

Angels and Demons

The first book I read from Dan Brown was Deception Point, it's very interesting and engaging, I finished it in a very short span of time. So, I was looking forward to The Da Vinci Code (it was very popular that time), however I was disappointed with it, it was too hyped up by the media, so I didn't even watch the movie.

Popular Book Store vs Big Bad Wolf Book Sale

When I read the newspaper, I thought an advertisement on a page was the advertisement for the Big Bad Wolf Book Sale due to the big "RM8 nett each"!

A Popular Book Store advertisement in The Star

KFC Instead of Turkey for Chritsmas

The Star Metro Central highlights that turkey may not be easily available during Christmas time due to stringent halal certification. When I read about that, I am thinking that even if turkey is not available, KFC is abundant here, they can learn from the Japanese where the Christmas dinner is often made of KFC set meals.

When I first heard that Japanese eat KFC for Christmas, I felt strange, although I am not a Christian, I strongly associate Christmas with turkey. But, it's true, even weeks before Christmas, posters on the Christmas Set Meals could be seen around the KFC Japanese stores. A Japanese colleague even told me that sometimes, people queued for hours for this, Wow!

Wanderer in Malaysian Borneo by Pengembara

"Wanderer in Malaysian Borneo" is a book I got from the Big Bad Wolf Book Sale recently. In fact, I finished this book in less than a week after I bought this! This book became my first to read because it has the smallest page numbers (total 136 pages with not so small font), hahaha! In one of my resolutions for the new year, I hope I am able to read at least one book per month to finish my current unread books (so that I can buy more new books guilt free!).

Well, as the title suggests, this book is about the journey by Pengembara in Malaysian Borneo (Sabah and sarawak) from 1991 to 1993. The Pengembara utilised both land and water transports for travelling. Although the author travelled Sabah and Sarawak in the 90s, it seems that the transportation in Sabah and Sarawak is still not so good, just read a columnist article in The Star about how difficult it is to get a patient from a rural area in Sabah and Sarawak to get his or her necessary treatment, accessibility is still a problem, so sad, instead of building more white elephants in big towns and cities, government should really improve the health care facilities and resources in rural areas. Mmmm, in city too, many government hospitals are out of space and resources to take good care of the patients. Look at the Auditor-General Report every year, all the wasted money can really make a differences to the general well being on the public.

Front cover for Wanderer in Malaysian Borneo

Big Bad Wolf Book Sale 2013 - 6th December 2013

6th December 2013

I work in a 24 hours manufacturing company, although my working time is just normal working hour, if there are any issues, the operator will not hesitate to call at the middle of the night and weekends. So, I worked really hard this morning to ensure that I didn't have any pending items that will drag to next week. Right after the bell rang for lunch, me and my friend, Dila just picked our stuffs and left the company to go to MIECC (the venue for the book sale).

We reached The Mines area around 2 pm, however the traffic condition was quite bad, many cars were waiting to enter the junction that leads to MIECC, if it's only slow, I wouldn't mind, but there were many inconsiderate drivers who cut from left hand side, so annoying!

The roads around MIECC were full of cars, luckily we got a parking space on the main road outside MIECC, the parking fee was RM5 per time, I think it's quite reasonable, after we parked the car, we tried to find the parking machine to get a parking ticket, but couldn't find one, so we decided to ask around, the parking area was manned by a staff at the road curb area, so manual! After we walked towards the building, then we realised that inside the MIECC, there's a parking building! However, I noticed that the indication on the parking bays was full, no empty bay left. We came on a really busy time. Since we haven't eat lunch, we had our lunch in The Mines Shopping Mall. The Mines Shopping Mall and MIECC is connected to each other with a covered passage way. 

After fulfilling lunch, we went to the book sale. To my surprise, compared to 2010 sales, this time around, we didn't have to queue to enter the hall, just walked straight and entered. The crowd was smaller than I anticipated (compared to the cars outside the building). Then, me and Dila split to find our own favourites after taking a box from the staff near the entrance (a fellow book lover asked me where to get the box when she couldn't hold the books with her hands, please remember to take a box near the entrance, or else it would be very tiring to walk back to the entrance with all the books). Initially, I wanted to target on non-fiction, but all the fiction looked so tempting, so I ended up with many novels today!

Sony E-Book Reader

I like books and I like the feeling of it. Until now I cannot understand why I bought the E-Book reader in the first place. I bought this pink E-Book with discounts, I think I paid 10000 yen for this. After I got this, I went to the Project Gutenberg website to download many ebooks (since it's free)! I forgot how many ebooks I downloaded, but the only ebook I ever finished reading was Grimm's Fairy Tales. Then, I read a page or two from many other ebooks. Then, I just left it in the box, not even bother to take it out.

Luckily, it got a second life when my brother needed something to read his PDF course materials. He grew tired with looking at the computer screen whole day. So, I gladly gave away the E-Book Reader. The funny thing is until my brother played with the E-Book reader, I didn't know that the operating language can be changed to English, I just lived with the original setting.

Four Seasons in Japan (or More Precisely in Kyushu, Japan)

I lived in a city (Kumamoto City 熊本市 in Kumamoto Prefecture) and town (Nakatsu 中津市 in Oita Prefecture) in Japan. To me, Kumamoto City is an ideal city to stay. It's not too crowded and not so rural with all the necessary public transports and shopping malls. I visited Tokyo before and I felt the environment was too crowded to my liking, while my second home, Nakatsu was a bit 'kampung'. There're paddy fields in front and behind my apartment building! During summer time, whether you like it or not, the insects chirping will accompany you the whole night.

Both places gave me a very good safety sense, I felt safe even when I went out at the middle of the night alone. In Nakatsu, there's even no street light outside my apartment and there's a small graveyard nearby. Well, it's so well maintained that I didn't feel it's creepy to live so near to a deceased resting place. Anyway, sometimes I would go out on the middle of the night to buy things in the convenience shop on a bicycle and I totally enjoyed the quietness, it was kind of dark though, have to be really careful not to drop into a drain. One of my friends joked that we are just the temporary tenant who stay in a place, but the deceased is the permanent resident of a place. Good point!

Another plus point when living in a foreign country is I got the chance to experience four seasons, especially winter. However, me and another friend, Dila is done with winter now, still ok with autumn and spring though! Winter was too cold for us, no matter how thick we wore, plus the uniqlo heat tech, plus woolly socks, plus woolly gloves, plus heat pads (2 - one for each pocket), beanies, etc. The cold was chilling to the bones! Snows, when I first laid my eyes on the white snow, I felt very exciting, after awhile, I started to get tired about the slippery road and monotonous white. Autumn and spring was awesome, spring with the flowers and autumn with the read leaves.

Well, below are the photos that I have taken from my apartments in Kumamoto and Nakatsu. I missed the views.

Kumamoto
I stayed in the 8th floor, so I could get a pretty good view from the balcony. 

view from my apartment in Kumamoto (4 seasons)