“Go Green” with Near New Banknotes for Chinese New Year

To me, Chinese New Year is the time for family gathering, not the food, not the angpow and certainly not the holiday. Last year, I was in Japan during Chinese New Year because my stint in Japan would end on March, since it was just about two months time before I could go home for good,  I decided not to go home during CNY, it was a big mistake, I ended up crying when I watched all those CNY advertisements (especially the advertisements by Bernas and Petronas) and I felt so sad! Anyway, now I am at home, I can have a gathering with all my family members this year for Chinese New Year. Yeah! 

From July 2013, Bank Negara started the drive and encourage the public to use near new banknotes for angpow during Hari Raya Aidilfitri and Chinese New Year. Apparently, Bank Negara will print around 750 million pieces of RM1 and RM5 banknotes for the festivals, but 70% of it will be deposited back into the bank without any transaction or payment. Wow, the most interesting fact is printing that 500 million pieces of banknotes will consume more than 80 tonnes of ink and 2 million kWh of electricity which is enough to power 7,500 Malaysian homes for a month! (source: BNM)

總舖師 (The Moveable Feast)

總舖師 (The moveable feast) is a Taiwanese comedy about food. This movie has another name, direct translate as "Zone Pro Site". lol! Mmmm, it doesn't accurately reflects the true pronunciation of 總舖師 in Hokkien. Anyway, it is a very good comedy, I laughed from the beginning till the end.

Poster taken from douban

Quartet and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Just finished watching 'Quartet', a movie whose the leading actors and actresses were not young people. And the plot focused entirely in a retirement home. In this movie, the residents in the retirement home tried to raise money from an annual gala to keep the home going. Well, at the end, they succeeded, of course!

I watched another movie revolves around retirement home too , 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel'. It's about retirees who couldn't afford to retire in United Kingdom and were lured by an advertisement to retire in India. The cost is lower in India, so, these retirees just sign up and flew to India.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke

Happy New Year, today is the first day of 2014, initially I planned to binge watch Korean dramas, but I changed my mind, instead of watching TV, I would read a book. I chose fairy tales! The book was "The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories". I bought this book because Neil Gaiman was one of the persons in the acknowledgements and partly due to the illustrations. 

It's a collections of short stories about fairies. In this book, the fairies were huge, most of the times taller than normal human beings, very different from my imagination of fairy, in my imagination, fairy is around the size of Thumbelina. The tones of the stories are quite dark and touches a bit on ladies power!