Back & Sick

Hello guys, how are you doing? I hope you are doing better than me. I'm down with flu. It's really bad. I've been having it for 1 week plus. Yesterday I finally surrendered and went to the doctor and man was that expensive. My usual doctor is not back yet from visiting her son in England that I have to go to a different clinic and it cost me double than usual. I do feel much better but I am not totally well that it's pretty annoying. I really really hope I will be great by Monday. There's so many things that I have to deal with and I need my brain to be working. If it can work better than usual it would be even better.

So I arrived here on Tuesday night. The plane was 1 hour late and so I arrived later than I wanted to. I had my flu and there's something with that and the air pressure that there was a point where my ears hurt a whole damn lot. I remembered it had happened to me before but I was still pretty worried. I couldn't hear really well after that, it felt like there's water in my ears. Luckily by the time I woke up the next day, they felt much better. I was so heavily medicated that I kinda lost my taste sense and basically I was just plain miserable. I felt so bad for having to stay at home yesterday but I thought I needed to. I was thinking the long weekend would be good for me to get a good proper rest. However I did go to class today. We are starting at 08:30 for our remaining classes to make up for the class we missed when Mr. M went for a holiday. It's not ideal for me because I already normally come late when it's at 9. So it's hard for me to be half an hour earlier and you can be sure that I am not making it on time. Well at least Mr. M is entertaining. I was thinking that one of this day I would on reflex punch him because he's so mischievous.

Let's talk about home. Well it was so great to be sleeping on my bed. I really really really love my bed at home. I hope I can have it here in Singapore :( I had a haircut. I met with the girls, Marlisa, Emilia, and Dewi and confessed something to them. I confessed the same thing to my mother though I downplayed it a lot. It's so weird that I am telling all these people. If it really goes my way, I think it would be nothing short of a miracle. But as I wrote that I don't even know what my way is, what I want is. Maybe when it comes down to it, I just can't commit. Moving on. So Chinese New Year rituals and traditions were the same. Saw the aunts, uncles, cousins. Heard stories. Saw changes. I seriously only get to see most of them once a year and for the adults, you don't see much changes in them but for the little ones like my cousin's kids, it's a whole lot different. I love seeing Little Alden because as my aunt said it, he seemed to be very open to be around me. The last time I saw him he was just learning to walk but now he's walking and maybe next year he'll start singing like his sister, Mikaela. Man I still remember the time when Mikaela was so young that she peed in our living room without warning :P Anyway, baby Alden was so funny. He was like a turtle. When you put him lying face up, apparently he couldn't get up on his own. My cousin said one time he bumped his head or fell trying to get up that it seemed he's traumatized to do it again. So they are using this to punish him. As mean as it is for me to say it, it is really funny to see him get frustrated and starts crying :P

Me and the aunts and an uncle and a cousin took a trip outside Jakarta this time around. We went last weekend actually. We went to Puncak. My auntie has a really wicked driver. He kicks ass. Well under Singapore standards he may be seen as reckless. I even had my worries when we were going down a mountain on a foggy dark morning when it was only 4 am. Well roads in most mountains are always in a spiral, so there's always a lot of sharp turns. We had fog and it was dark because the sun is not up yet and it's Indonesia which means when I say it's dark it's really dark, it's not as properly lighted as Singapore. I do wonder if living in Singapore all this time is like living in a sterilized bubble. I am prone to sickness more easily in Indonesia because things are not so clean as here and I've become rather spineless because it's always so proper and by the rule here. Anyway so that driver under that condition, still managed to go at a really high speed and overtook some people. I was pretty worried at that time actually. I think he got us down a mountain in around half an hour so it's actually totally awesome! When we were going there, the sun was slowly rising so it wasn't so dark but the fog was pretty thick and yet we could arrive substantially earlier than my uncle who left earlier and whose house was nearer to Puncak. My aunt and uncle were so impressed with the driver that they wondered if we flew there :P

Anyway it's been a long time since I went to Puncak. It's cold there. We went to Taman Bunga Nusantara. It was actually pretty nice there. It's unexpected that Indonesia has such a place. It's not like totally amazing but it's not bad and I think for Indonesia to have such a place, it's pretty cool. Then we also went to see a waterfall in Cibodas. It was quite a walk to get there. The trail wasn't actually smooth so it was actually quite a fun walk. Well at least for me, I know some people had difficulty going through it because of the distance and perhaps the fact that walking on the path was like walking on cobblestones. Again the Singaporean influenced me was thinking of how actually the path was not so safe and there weren't actually staffs or people who you could call if something went wrong. There were little boys who worked to help tourists to go to the waterfall. Not actually a good business since you can't possibly go lost when you just need to follow the path but I did see a boy who piggybacked an Indian boy as the Indian father ran behind them. Obviously they were tourists. I couldn't help feeling it's ironic and amusing at the same time. 2 boys with different fates in life and as much as I pity the Indonesian boy, I thought it was cool of him for being able to do that :) By the way these boys are like 9 or 10 years old. Anyway the walk was fun for me because you just felt so good when you completed it both on your way in and out.

Another interesting visit on our trip was when we visited a factory outlet. I know many Indonesians are crazy about factory outlets but I had never visited a good one until this time that I felt pretty sad that it's after chinese new year hence I couldn't shop :( I so want to go there again. All the branded goods were like 4-5 times cheaper and I'm pretty sure that some of them could be even 10 times cheaper. I do question the originality of the goods but they seemed pretty authentic. My aunt who has a clothing store said that they are authentic because as you know your clothes though they are american or italian brands, they do come from places like Indonesia, China, and India. Even the recent gap jeans I bought was made in Bangladesh. So my aunt said some of these goods are rejected goods but that doesn't mean they are bad. The mistakes could be so minor that you wouldn't even notice it. She also said that sometime these goods are left over. Like the factory was told to make a dozen and yet they make 13 or 15. When I touched the fabric, they did feel pretty good. You have things from Armani, Gap, Guess, Esprit, Marc Jacobs, Prada and many others. I was pretty shocked when I saw something from Desigual there. I can go crazy inside there. Even for an Indonesian price, it's really not expensive. So who cares if a button is perhaps not so perfectly sewn in. I hope we can go there again but the thing is, it's pretty far :(

That's about it peeps. Here are some pictures from the trip. I took a lot of pictures of flowers that even my mom was bored with it :P The peacock picture is from Taman Bunga Nusantara. For more pictures you can go here. Stay healthy all!









:) eKa @ 8:16:00 PM •

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