Monday, December 25, 2006


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Originally uploaded by Buddha smiling.

I knew this would be a very unusual Christmas... in fact I thought I might not have any kind of Christmas at all.

I was quite ok with this when I planned to leave for this internship. Most often I have a hard time trying to enjoy the holidays at all. I am very fortunate to be invited for Christmas with friends, but I can not completely shake the sadness of not having a family of my own to spend the holidays with. So, in truth I was kind of looking forward to skipping the whole thing. Being in Kuala Lumpur, though, I have met a group of excellent young people and they invited me to their Christmas eve party. We had a secret santa gift exchange with the added component of writing a poem for your recipient and everyone brought some typical Christmas food from their country. We ended up with Turkey (although it was a very small one by Canadian standards), pasta salad, mashed potatoes, coca-cola rice (it's Colombian), bacon wrapped green beans, squash (which I brought and several people had never head of), sausages, noodles, salad, ham, stollen, watermelon, and of course beer and chocolate. There was representatives from both the northern and southern hemispheres, hence the mix of what we would consider hot and cold weather food.

The poetry was probably the best part of the night as most people took the opportunity to roast their friends a bit. My santa ended up being someone who I had never met so he was at a bit of a loss about what to write.


Florine, I don't know who are are

That's why I didn't buy you a car.

But I did look high and far

And found a gift that's up to par.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays

There is no snow, no sleighs

In this country called Malaysia

But hope you like this gift

From your secret Santa.


He followed my wish list and got me a Bollywood CD -thanks Santa!

So this morning I woke realising that I had had way too much mulled wine or, gluhwein as it is called in Germany--- or maybe it was the two champagne floats (spoom), but in anycase my Christmas day has been one of fuzzyheadedness sitting by the pool and now watching movies. And yes, I am sad to say I have a sunburn for Christmas, but all told this very strange Christmas is pretty ok.

I hope you are all celebrating in the way that you want to and enjoying the holidays to the full.

Thursday, December 07, 2006


Forgive me but I am going to take a break from blogging for a while. There are a few reasons:
  1. I am going through a rough patch and I don't want to air all of my negative thoughts on the internet
  2. Almost noone emails me any more and I attribute that to this blog
  3. I am pretty homesick and just not inspired
So, I am sure this will not last much longer. In the meantime send me an email and let me know that you are out there. Maybe you have a question or two about life in KL that I could get into writing about here.