Nikko Getaway (Part 1)

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To blog or not to blog?

I'm damn good writer but I'm just too lazy :/

Ever since I've gotten Twitter, every spur of an obscure thought is posted online before I can even form a paragraph. 140 words to sum my thoughts is a good practice but a bad thing for this blog here. The more I micro-blog, the more I wonder why I even keep a full-on blog. Heck, even Facebook statuses are reduced to only sharing of funny pictures or cool songs.

However reading what I wrote from the past is kinda fun. This blog shall remain, but it will only be dusted again like a Summer house waiting for its owner to visit when the holidays come.

What did I say about being a writer? ;)

Of short, sweets and smiles

Today me and my friends went to the short+sweet festival at KLPac. It’s a performing arts festival where they showcase dance, musical and theatre performances. We were there for the theatre performances where we get to watch 12 ten minute plays of the 1^st week. The 2^nd week would have another 12 plays. From each week, the best play would perform at Gala Night where they would be judged and nominated for performing awards.

Unfortunately, my phone went dead in the midst of the show so I couldn’t take pictures or make notes about all the performances. So I shall talk about the ones that left an impression on me. Yupp, what good is a play or story in general if they are not impressionable? So here goes my amateur critique/thoughts on the plays I can remember!

‘Life decisions’ was quite a nice play. I think it’s about a man who wants to commit suicide and is helped by a ‘death handler/angel’. She is there to make sure his death looks like it’s a murder committed by someone I guess. I really liked the dramatic lighting effects they used throughout the performance, the narrow, long hard edged light in particular. I have no idea what kind of light produced it, but I really liked it. It makes the approaching death handler/angel scarier as she walks towards the man with a needle in her hand and a knife later on. The actress playing the eccentric death handler was really good at expressing her emotions and her speech was clear.

‘Because the world needs unicorns’ was a crowd pleaser. Everyone laughed at the unicorn who always claim that it’s so ‘mythical, mystical and wonderful’ (ok, I’m not sure if that was exactly what the actor said, I couldn’t remember the last word he said) as he pleads to be included in the list for Noah’s ark. The dragon made quite an impact as the actor walked in bad ass with a cigarette in hand, puffing away smoke through the whole performance. The play had witty lines and I was wondering what message the story wanted to project. Noah was stuck in the middle, having to forsake the unicorn for cats instead because they bring comfort and are cutesy (and they make good poster faces for greeting cards! Hahahahahah!!! XD ) The unicorn served no purpose to mankind and it only pops up once in a while, therefore it is not worth saving. The mystical creature argued that his very purpose is to be like that, although he appears once in a while, he brings magic, wonder and hope to people. And you cant argue with magic! Reluctant to leave the unicorn helpless, he gives the unicorn another contact of a rival boat company. (another witty joke about competitive companies that always copy products from the original innovator) The play ends with Noah telling his superior a.k.a God, that the world does need unicorns. What does it mean here? We are all caught up in the need of having logic and what makes sense that we are losing more of our child like imagination and optimisms for things in life?

‘Who moved my donut?’ talks about the health food fad that is growing and how it’s affecting junk food, specifically the donut. The actor for the donut was delightful with his facial expressions and body language. It really cracked us all up too. After his stylist/PR advisor’s suggestions of turning him into an alfalfa/spirulina/wheat grass covered health donut, the donut alas prefers to be himself instead of following the trend and changing who he really is. After the sound advice of his friend, cake/aspartame (me and my friends couldn’t really catch who the fella was), the donut decided to change his scene in India, where people like all things sweet!

‘Boleh saya bantu’ was an entertaining sketch in Malay. I did felt kesian for my friends who don’t know understand the language, therefore unable to get the comedic lines made. There was nothing special in particular with this play, just the fact that the mak cik spoke in a Kedah accent and the typical funny malay puns that made us all laugh, well except for the number of non local audiences.

‘The beginning’ was a contrast from the belly-aching laughs to a more gut-wrenching performance. It talks about how an American girl deals with her new school (I don’t get why she was in a primary school uniform) life. She is always taunted and scolded in class because she doesn’t do well in her math papers. The story doesn’t mean much to me, but the actresses’ deliver of her monologue was really good. I give credit to her alright!

‘When you cant stop running’ was done in Cantonese and is the first play I saw utilizing the use of media. They had a projector screening a short intro of 1 of the characters running from his work place back to his home (the stage). The nifty thing about this performance is that they had subtitles on the screen. My friend said “Ah, finally some subtitles for me to understand!” which is really needed for all of us because I myself cant really understand Cantonese :/

‘The joy of solitude’ really struck a chord with me. And it did so for many reasons! First of all, it was done in Hokkien which I was so delighted to hear! I only hear that dialect when I am back home and hearing it over here made me feel like I was back in my hometown. Second of all, they were funny as hell!! There were only 2 actors, 1 uncle sitting in his chair another young man rushing off to work. The young man accidentally broke the key while opening the lock which trapped him inside his own apartment. The young man scrambles to call people for help. The actor for the uncle serves as a voice for each of the responding people the young man calls, from the locksmith to his co-worker and it really makes me (and I’m sure the whole audience) laughed till our tears rolled out when he slams down the phone and goes ‘DUT! DUT! DUT!’ like in a ‘in your face!!!’ kind of attitude. XD Then as the situation gets more frantic, the uncles tells the young man what to do and all, and the young man just follows what he says. Seeing them react all panicky made me cry from laughter even more. Then amidst all the hilarious moments, then came the struck of realization that the young man is forever trapped in his apartment. All the young actor had to do was stand in front of the audience, pretending that he was looking out his window while the uncle tells him his daunting fate of being locked in his apartment. As the uncle talks of his future in loneliness and it is from there that he might find the joy of solitude, you can see a glint of tear in the young man’s eyes. Wow, that really impressed me. No words nor actions were needed to convey the fear this guys has for his fate. The young man then walks off but turns around at the last step and they reenact the opening scene which felt like an ‘Inception’ moment. I hypothesize that the uncle is the young man’s conscience perhaps and the moral of the story is well, maybe, when you are in a bad situation and where there’s nothing you can do, maybe the best way to deal with it is to find the joy in it. Which brings us to another reason why I liked this play, there were comedic moments but at the end, there was a reflective and profound moment too with a philosophical moral to the story.

So that was it for the 12 plays I saw. It was really a treasure of an experience for me and I think the short+sweet festival shall be added to my list of things to catch every year. ;) After the show, almost all the actors, directors, writers were in the lobby talking and walking about and me and my friends were in the crowd too which felt cool! We went through a lot of rain and toil to get there but we were so grateful that we decided to come to this awesome festival anyway from Cyber. I don’t think any aspect of our day was short and despite the stress, trouble and craziness we went through on our journey, it was certainly worth it and will forever be a sweet memory for me! <3

Boiling pot

So what do you do when you are frustrated and you feel like exploding into an enraging scream like a pressure pot waiting to burst out its hot steam? I don’t know. That what I’m feeling right now.

I am at what people would call a relaxed place, a coffee house yet I am extremely jumpy because I am waiting to check out my final exam results. This is the first time my university has announced the results so early on. Indeed it was too good to be true to know the results so soon. I have gotten as much 500 internal server error messages as the number of shit that ‘bombs away’ from a flying flock of pigeons. This is terrible. Of all the IT services fees I pay to them every semester, I’d expect a working server ready to face restless students who eagerly want to know their results. This is just plain stupid. I wonder why I expect the best out of services I pay for. -___-

Sometimes if you’re lucky, you can get into the Home page but then you are cut off like sausage when you get into the User sign in page. If you’re not lucky at all, the dreaded ‘Internal server error’ page will appear before you. I guess my luck has gotten a tiny bit better now, the pages are loading at a sloth’s pace. Yes sloth, animals that I find slower than snails.

It is at this kind of uneasy enraging situations that one’s patience is truly tested. I think I f-bombed MMU a couple of times on facebook and twitter and I almost lash out on my friends for being conveniently offline all of a sudden when I ask them to help me check my results. Turns out the connections has been bad since afternoon says one friend, right. I let it slide, I’m still sane enough to realize our friendship is worth more than knowing my results right now. Patience tested.

So here I am, sitting in a coffee house, people relaxing, couples chattering with whiffs of coffee in the air. Thank god I wasn’t this frustrated just now when a couple and their baby were sitting next to me. The baby kept crying and screaming, I could have exploded and done an ugly thing O_O

The page is still loading. I only see the top banner of the page and nothing more. 10 minutes have passed. Patience tested again. A paper straw on the table next to me just fell down.

Nothing beats waiting in frustration and not knowing what to do than waiting in frustration and not having anything to do. It’s not like I have other things to tend to while waiting for the page to load or take my mind off things. It sucks that I am very vacant right now and all I can so is stare at the spinning green loading circle…hence I am writing this entry here!

Check Facebook. Nothing.

Check Twitter. Nada .

Check Flickr. You must upgrade to a pro account to view your pictures in the future. What a fucking rip off!

Wait a minute! I have a blog and there appears to be a few entries that I can kepo, I mean, read! OK! Off I go! Tudeloo~

The joy of reading

I have just finished reading a classic literature called Jane Eyre. This is my first time ever reading classic literature (if you exclude some of the classic children’s stories) and I am very happy about it. I have never been an avid reader when I was a kid, I think…. I was fond of writing but never holding a book and reading it still for hours. But eventually with a surrounding of books in my house, I guess I must have developed a late love for reading.

I think my first few books were R.L Stine’s Fear Street sagas. I don’t know why I even picked up horror as a genre for me to start with because I am absolutely not fond of horror or anything in the lines of scary and unnerving. I think I eventually grew out of the Fear Street books and ventured on to some teenage vampire love story. Don’t be mistaken, it definitely was not Twilight! Yes, teenage vampire love stories already existed before them! I cant remember the title of the book but I think there is a sequel to it, which I cant remember if I did got to read it or not. Anyway, from there, I just chose some random books that had interesting titles or cover art. I was 14 back then, so I frequented the Teenage novel aisle.

I must let you all know that book stores back in my time were kinda rare to me. So if I do visit a big enough book store that sells mainly English reading material, it was like a supermarket challenge for me. I had to go through every aisle as quick as possible and find whatever I might like and get it before it’s time to go home. I had to make the right choice too because a book would cost RM35 and above and that was so expensive! If I were to buy a book, it has to be the ONE, the chosen ONE! One day at Borders, I was dashing to the Fiction aisle, and found Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens. At that time I was really really really into Muse and I was listening to their Absolution album. So a book about the Apocalypse interested me and the fact that it was a humourous book (a satire) made me purchased the book. I really loved the story and from there I decided to follow Terry Pratchett’s books and I still like them now.

Then came the convenience of iBooks to me and I realize that the free downloads available were classic literature. I have seen a trailer of the Jane Eyre film and since I couldn’t watch it, might as well read the book then! And I really felt so immersed in the story. I am not a fan of full on long and descriptive sentences that can go on a page or two just describing a scenery but I think I have gotten a bit used to it. I think without those sentences, it would be less of an ‘imaginative experience’ for the readers to have. I thoroughly enjoyed the book because I felt what the characters felt. Every joy and sorrow the characters went through, I could feel them. More often than not, I would loudly exclaim in my room “WHY must you do this Jane?? Gosh!! ” after reading the part of her running away from Thornfield (seriously, why??) then only I realized I’ve gotten too excited about the story, hehehe…. And when she gets a happy ending, I would clap for her fortune, as if I was her friend congratulating her. When I reached the last pages of the book, it kinda saddens me that I have to part with ‘a friend’ that has brought me excitement and drama all the while. Really it does! I just wished the book had never ended and would continue on the life of Jane Eyre!

But unfortunately stories must come to an end and the journey that I have went on with the hero/heroine of the book is over. It may be nice to feel the paper pages as you turn them when you dutifully finished a page and it does feel a tiny bit triumphant as you sign your name and date at the back of the cover page but to be able to experience the emotional ups and downs of the story is really the true joy of reading! :)

Cover songs

Has anyone come to the point of being sick of listening to the radio because of their excessive replay of the same songs in 1 day? Well, I have! From Lady Gaga's Just Dace to Kesha's Tik Tok, I really couldnt take it anymore so I stopped listening to the radio altogether since last year...I think...God knows when I stopped, I just remember it being a long time ago. It’s only on occasions when the ol’ pendrive is missing from the modulator or when my friends are sick of hearing my songs that I turn to a radio station. And more often than not, I would go ‘ugh’ when I hear the first tune which is as predicted, overplayed.

I could go on and on about how I dislike the music of today and prefer songs from the good old days but I think I’ll leave that to another post. :P I have a friend who is taking a radio DJ subject as his co-curriculum subject. He told me one of their assignments was to host a show for 20 minutes. How cool is that? Your assignment is to host a show that everyone (or perhaps a number of people on campus) will be listening to! And the best thing is I think, you get to play your own songs! Now that is what I call actual DJ-ing, getting to play music of your choice! (I believe those commercial radio stations have a strict list of songs that each DJ is forced to play whenever they are on air for the day)

Then it got me thinking, if I were to host that show, what songs would I choose to play? Well, I thought of covers! I always liked musicians cover songs of different genre. It’s always cool to see how they are going to add their own flare to the song and twist it into their own genre of music! Since I am an avid Youtube user, I shall share some of the covers I think are nice to you all! However I suck at technology and I don’t know how to post multiple videos in 1 post, so I’ll just have to put those different links in an unattractive list of URLs :/ Unappealing as the blue lines are, do check those videos out!!

Muse- Feeling good (Nina Simone cover)

This is by far my most favourite cover of Feeling Good, of course as a Muser, I’m biased toward them but it really is a rocking cover. The original song itself has extravagant sounds of brass whenever the words ‘feeling good’ are sung. This cover has not lost that extravagance by replacing the brass with heavy bass and loud drums. There is also the use of a megaphone thrown into the cover too! I prefer the live version of this cover because the singer adds in some ‘oohs’ at the end of the song which adds to the ‘sexiness’ of the song.

Editors- Feel good inc (Gorillaz cover)

Editors has a front man with a very deep voice and I mean that literally and metaphorically! Tom Smith, the front man likes to add a dark and mellow element to his songs and the song ‘Feel good inc’ really is about longing for freedom (watch the meaning of the original music video to understand). The bands interpretation of the song really makes the meaning of the song more obvious to us and the mix of a few lines from their song ‘Munich’ blends perfectly together with the cover.

Corrine Bailey Rae- Munich (Editors cover)

Now a cover of the previous band, Editors by soul and jazz singer, Corrine Bailey Rae! The original song itself gives me a fast and frantic feeling (you’ll know when you listen to the opening riff) but Corrine manages to turn this song into a slow and relaxing number. Her soft vocals echoing the line ‘People are fragile things you should know by now’ (chorus) sounds like a warm advice by a mother rather than a cautionary warning from the original version. I also like the bluesy bass riff that you can hear faintly in the song.

Franz Ferdinand- Womanizer (Britney Spears cover)

This is quite a good cover because Franz Ferdinand manages to keep their own signature fun and eccentric style to the cover. If people didn’t know the original song, they would think that this is a song written by the band themselves!

Glee- Blame it on the alcohol (Jamie Foxx cover)

OK, who can exclude Glee from a list of cover songs? They practically made an entire TV series based on cover songs! Out of all the songs I heard from them (not being a Gleek, I only heard a tiny amount of their songs anyway), I like this song the most.

Sarah Bareilles- Single Ladies (Beyonce cover)

Sarah Bareilles manages to turn the electronic pop song into a cheeky doo-wop song. It’s very clever of her because a doo-wop style would retain the essence of the song while giving it a totally different spin.

Neon trees- Baby (Justin Bieber cover)

Yes I know, I also feel weird typing JB’s name in a blog post. I believe the kid has been giving inappropriate songs to sing for his age (well, that’s not the case anymore since he is much older now, but come on back when he sounded like a little kid, he is singing losing the love of his life?) Anyway, Neon trees brilliantly mixed this song with ‘Stand by me’ because of the similarities in the bass beat. I also like the drummer’s backing vocals accompanying the raw and emotional vocals of the lead singer.

Biffy Clyro- Love Sex Magic (Ciara ft. Justin Timberlake cover)

I like the fact that Biffy Clyro made a cover of this song using acoustic instruments and the song still sounds essentially like the original!

Languages, Bahasa-bahasa, 语言

Ola! It’s a new semester and I am taking Spanish class as my co-curriculum subject. Yes, before this I had taken French for beginners BUT as my Spanish lecturer always puts, “our lovely university” doesn’t allow us to take the same language for the 2^nd time. Seriously, 1 semester (around 3 months) is not enough to learn a language, not to the extent of speaking it fluently! Since the last time I took French, which was about 2 semesters ago, I can only roughly read those basic basic basic sentences. I am yet to speak it correctly, let alone fluently. When I heard that I could take language for my co-co subject, I was delighted to the hope that I can further my studies in Français but unfortunately, there are no advance classes. They are gonna teach the same thing again. Aww shucks! So, I was left to take Spanish solo while my other friends are either taking Korean or not taking anything at all.

It was quite adventurous of me to go to a class alone. But then again, I do a lot of things alone, so I should get used to it. It kinda sucks to sit by myself and seeing that I was the only local in the class. I take it that Spanish is not a popular choice among people eh? Good thing the lecturer was funny but it was akward to laugh by myself too O_O” In my first class, there were only 4 students, luckily in the following week, the numbers increased to 8. Yes, and in the official name list, there were only 5 names. Gosh…. Oh well, there is always something good about small classes, we can learn things more quickly and better coz the lecturer can focus on us individually, since it’s a small group.

So today was my first class, we were learning El Alfabeto Español. My goodness, there are so many conditions! If a certain letter was with a different vowel, it would be pronounced different. Each alphabet has a way to spell them, like ‘v’ is uve, ‘j’ is jota, ‘h’ is ‘hache’. Some alphabets are pronounced in a completely different way as we know in English, like ‘y’ would sound like ‘j’ in English while the ‘h’ is always silent. Fuh! @@

It may be a ‘mouthful’ but I’ll try my best to learn this language. In my first week, the lecturer asked us why we wanted to learn Spanish. Other than the reason that I have no choice coz I wanted to take French initially, I quite like learning languages. I think it’s cool to be able to speak more than 1 language. A long time ago, when I first entered university and made friends with international students; they always praised us locals for knowing more than 1 language. I took tremendous pride in that fact. As a Malaysian, I’m glad that we learn at least 2 languages and can speak them fluently. I can speak English, Bahasa and Mandarin. That may not sound like something impressive to the average Malaysian, but it is to other people! X)

We can proudly add the languages we speak into our Facebook profile. My friend told me that ‘languages I know’ means the languages we KNOW, it didn’t specify our fluency in the language so add away with whatever language you know, even if your knowledge of it is minimal (like if you're only a good listener or you know a few phrases). If that’s the case, I know British English, Bahasa Malaysia, Mandarin, a bowlful of Teow Cheow mixed with Hokkien, a teaspoon of Arabic, a menu of Japanese, a tablespoon of French and soon hopefully, a handful of Spanish. Translator for hire with minimum wage, anyone? ;)