Eleven days and 999 pictures later, I am back from Japan!
We touched in Melbourne last Saturday, and I spent the whole weekend recuperating from the long and tiring plane rides back home. Between then and now, I have had Nasi Lemak (Singapore Airport), Briyani, spicy Szechuan chicken, a copious amount of lavender tea, a large flat white, a bowl of pho, and pasta puttanesca. Combined with the cold weather and back-to-back meetings at work, I am finally grooving back into my daily routines.
Highlights
April has been a memorable month. It started with Fafa’s birthday. Then, we celebrated with an ice cream cake from Joylati, our favourite ice cream shop (yeah, I never thought I would ever write “favourite ice cream shop” in a sentence). We continued the celebration on the weekend with lunch at Saba, our favourite Ethiopian restaurant. Finally, we ended it with the comedy pub crawl with Jik, who visited for a weekend.
A week after that, Japan happened. And in Japan, a lot happened. We started our trip with the Tsukiji fish auction and ended it with yakitori in Golden Gai. If I must choose the best part of the Japan trip, it would be the gorgeous Sakura. I feel grateful to have been able to experience it.
Lastly, Miaw, missing in action, finally reached home just in time to join the Japan trip.
Love and Found
I am seeing Osaka, Takayama, and Kanazawa for the first time.
Also, I am writing a book. Haha… But yeah. The tentative title is Tarot & Travel, as a tribute to the push to write a book from my tarot reading session. The concept is a travel journal guided by the tarot card drawn daily during my travel. Pretty cool, eh? At least, I think so. I have filled a few pages until now. Hopefully, it’s complete and ready to publish sometime next year or two. I loved Japan and almost everything about it, which I will share in many blog posts soon. For now, let me tell you about N.S. Harsha. He is an Indian contemporary artist who features India, specifically South Indian cultures, in his art. We saw his exhibition, Charming Journey, in Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. Those paintings brought me so much joy in the short hours we spent looking at them. Please visit his exhibition in Tokyo anytime before 11 Jun 2017. It will be well worth it, especially if you have a thing for India. Another honourable mention would be cold soba. The first time I read about it was from The Princess Diaries series. That time I was like, what? Why would anyone eat cold noodles?? Long story short, I had been avoiding it all my life until it was presented beautifully in front of Naho, the tour guide who sat beside me in the soba shop (I ordered hot chicken soba). Thankfully, she offered me to taste it, and thankfully I was shameless enough to try it. OMG, it tasted SO GOOD! I polished off the cold soba served on the plane ride back to Melbourne. The same one that I didn’t touch on the plane to Japan. Her simple gesture expanded my life.
📚 ━ Well, confession time. I bought a book from Osaka and two from Tokyo, one of which was N.S. Harsha’s Charming Journey, because for some reason, my brain forgot the carry-on weight limit every time we were in the Tatsuya bookstore. I haven’t finished the first one yet, so I will do more next month.
Time Machine
Read more about last year’s happenings.
Next Month
A few colleagues and I are going to Comic-Con this weekend. I am going as Kamala Khan, the teenage Pakistani American with shapeshifting abilities. How cool is that? I got the costume months ago. I hope it still fits me after the tons of ramen I slurped in the past week.
Also, the shadow guilt of buying an embarrassing amount of ridiculous face masks from a Japan tax-free shop in Shinjuku made me rethink my approach to minimalism. Or the lack of it, to be exact. Ugh!
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