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!