Giant chocolate square

Abstaining from chocolate makes me think fondly of the last block of chocolate I owned. It was a massive block from Peru, a gift from Damjan’s parents. How big was it? It was around 25 cm long, 10 cm wide and 2 cm deep. Divided into around 12 squares, each square of chocolate was five or six times bigger than an average chocolate square.

In fact, someone else had the exact same chocolate and was also struck by the size of the squares. Here is a photo from thinkaholic.


I would break off one square and nibble until I was satiated. By then, I would be halfway through the square. If I was sensible, I would stop and save the rest for later. But, no, I always kept going.

Never has a single square of chocolate yielded so much chocolate yumminess! And the best thing was I wouldn’t feel bad because I had eaten only one square!

An evening at Trafalgar Square

On Friday evening, I said goodbye to my colleagues, who were staying behind to enjoy the rest of happy hour at a wine bar. I was going to walk home. The walk takes about an hour so I left while there was still light.

My walking route takes me past Trafalgar Square. A giant screen has been set up there so that people watch the BBC coverage of the Olympics.

As I walked by the Square, people were watching the women’s football quarter final and I started thinking. What was I walking home to? At home, I would probably eat leftovers for dinner and spend the evening (alone) watching the Olympics on TV.

The night was warm and there was a Tesco grocery store near the Square. So I decided to buy my dinner and sit with the crowd of strangers to find out whether or not China could equalise with a goal against Japan.

This is the kind of spontaneous decision that in the past I have not been able to make. I find that living by myself (albeit with housemates) has made it very easy for me to do whatever occurs to me.

It was very relaxing, watching football on a giant screen. I didn’t mind the couple sitting beside me making cow eyes at each other, and didn’t mind that tourists took turns blocking my view by standing in front of me.

At 9 PM, I was surprised to find out that there would be two live performances as part of the Trafalgar Square Festival. Aqua involved circus performers rolling around in the Trafalgar Square fountains and contorting their bodies on a trapeze. To be honest, that probably sounds more interesting than it actually was.

I really enjoyed the second performance, Toolie Oolie Doolie by ZooNation Dance Company. They danced a combination of hip hop and lindy hop. The show was to reflect the last time London hosted the Olympics (1948) and the upcoming Games (2012). Hip hop and lindy hop are, of course, two of my favourite dance styles. My favourite part of the performance was a particularly funny and expressive sequence showing a boxing match.

People often ask me if I like living in London. This is a difficult question for me to answer.

Some people like living in London because they earn a lot of money. I don’t because I’m not a contractor in the finance or IT industry.

Lots of people love the fact that London is a springboard to other parts of Europe. As you know, I don’t like travelling so this aspect of London/UK is not particularly interesting to me.

Other people love clubbing, shopping, eating out, meeting people, being in the middle of it all. I’m not a party girl. I don’t buy things a lot. I think the food in Melbourne is as good food in London. I meet people no matter where I’m living. I like being with friends and friends are not specific to London.

What I do like about London are:

My unplanned community-oriented, cultural and sporting evening at Trafalgar Square made me like London a bit more than I did the day before.

Chocolate withdrawal

I am going through a difficult time now. I have given up chocolate. This is the third day of no chocolate and I am wanting chocolate. I heard from someone/somewhere that after a while of not eating chocolate, the need for chocolate goes away. I want chocolate. I have procrastinated all day about doing this bit of work, and I think chocolate could let me do it. I have drunk three cups of orange tea and eaten two oranges. Orange is no substitute for chocolate.

The bird

While waiting at a pedestrian crossing, I listened to a dance track with a pumping bass on my MP3 player.

I glanced up and jerked my head back in surprise when I saw that a pigeon sitting on the beams of the rail bridge above me was bopping in time to my music.

Bop, bop, bop, flap! Bop, bop, bop, flap!

The pigeon did this for about three bars. Then it stopped and it eyed at me.

I crossed the road.

Being Chinese

From my photo, you can tell that I am ethnically Chinese. Being Chinese is not something I think about too much. I moved from Taiwan to Australia when I was three years old. I don’t usually affiliate myself with the Chinese culture except that I love the cuisine and I’ve had done some years of Chinese language classes.

I could write a lot about why this is, how I’ve met lots of non-Chinese people who are fascinated with China and how this perplexes me.

But.

I won’t.

Not now, anyway. I feel something similar to shame on this topic, which I need to analyse before I can explain myself.

I do, however, have three Chinese-related thoughts I’d like to share now, on the cusp of the Beijing Olympics.

Firstly, as I’ve explained to a few people recently, the only time I’ve been harassed in my ‘dangerous‘ neighbourhood was when two black kids, a little girl and a little boy, started shouting ‘Ching chong! Ching chong!’ at me as I walked home. To which I could shouted back, ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying!’

Secondly, I was struck by a lightning bolt of understanding a few months ago. I like accents. I like hearing English spoken by people from South Africa, France, Germany, America… Yet, I cringe a little when I hear Chinese spoken with an accent. I couldn’t figure out why I have this double standard. My mum once said to me I spoke Chinese with an Australian accent — and this was not a good thing.

Finally, I figured it out. Chinese is a tonal language. Each syllable can be said in four ways, so even small variations in pitch changes the meaning of a word. Speaking Chinese with accent sounds ‘wāi wāi’ （歪歪）, which means ‘wonky’.

Vietnamese has five tones and Cantonese has six tones!

My final Chinese thought — I have just watched a Chinese man, Ming Yun, pitch for a cash investment on the TV show, Dragon’s Den. Inside me, I really wanted him to do well. For some reason, even though I am not very Chinese and I don’t know many very Chinese people, I identify with them more strongly than I think I should. When I read about Chinese people who can’t afford to buy the right spectacles, I feel like crying. When I see a Chinese baby, I smile. A few months ago, I watched a film in which a father and mother in China were used and neglected by their children, who wanted to live Western lives in the city. It was very distressing and, of course, made me cry.

I think it’s because I can imagine Chinese people as my parents, my brother, my grandparents, my aunts and my uncles. Therefore, I am very vulnerable to tears when I hear about the suffering of a Chinese person.

Dancing in the light

On this sunny day, I walked from my home in south London to Notting Hill. It took about 75 minutes and I plotted a lovely route through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. London is full of gorgeous parks, and these are two of the biggest and best.

At Notting Hill, I had dinner with Liezel and Judy. Liezel and Judy are friends from primary school. After 14 years of zero contact, through Facebook we discovered we were all in London. Today was a little reunion.

On my walk back from Notting Hill, I did something a little bit crazy, perhaps. As I said in my last post, I’ve been feeling frustrated at not being able to dance to my current favourite song. Actually, an even greater source of dance frustration is that I now live in a room/house without any space for dancing. I was very spoiled back home in Melbourne. We had a huge recreation room with a wooden floor downstairs. The room was even big enough for me to have private dance lessons with my Latin American dance teacher.

In Kensington Gardens, between the picnickers, soccer players, people doing yoga, and frisbee games, there was green space for me to dance. Dancing in a public park is something I’ve done before, so after a short hesitation, I walked over to a patch of warm sunshine and dropped my backpack.

I clicked ‘Górecki’ on my MP3 player and started spinning. I was happy — I had so much space! But, sadly, I was self-conscious. I also confirmed that I had no repertoire and could not last the six minutes of the song. Sigh.

After that track, I switched to my hip hop playlist and immediately had a larger bank of moves! I loosened up and started really to enjoy myself.

Halfway through the first hip hop track, a man and woman wandered into my grassy patch and smiled at me. I paused, uncertain. They shook their heads, gave me thumbs up and continued walking by.

I danced this way for about 10 minutes. I don’t know how silly I looked, this girl doing hip hop on the grass of Kensington Gardens to music no one else could hear.

In the end, I enjoyed it a lot because that grassy patch was the only space that I’ve had access to for a long time. However, self-consciousness limited my pleasure. I wish I had some private space somewhere to dance.

Górecki, Lamb

While watching the Doctor Who Confidential episode for Sins of the Fathers, I heard snippets of a song that immediately grabbed my attention. I managed to memorise two fragments of the lyrics — ‘if I should die’ and ‘loving every breath of you’.

I put these phrases into Google and soon discovered the name of the song. It is called ‘Górecki’ by Manchester band Lamb. You can hear it here. Supposedly, Lamb based the song on Polish composer Henryk Górecki‘s Third Symphony Opus 36.

I read up on the song. The song has a large following — there are many, many fan videos that use this track. Perhaps one of the song’s most famous appearances was as Satine died in Moulin Rouge.

I mentioned my discovery to Jessen, one of my team mates, who said, ‘I have that song!’ I promptly procured it from his MP3 player and have been listening to it non-stop.

One of the reasons I love this song is that it makes me want to dance contemporary to it. I can feel how my body should move to it. Unfortunately, I don’t have the training, flexibility, balance, repertoire, or strength for it. I don’t know if non-dancers know what it’s like. Maybe it’s like wanting to sing a particular song and not hitting the right notes. Or knowing what you want to paint but what you put on paper doesn’t match your mental image. Hmm. It’s probably the same frustration people feel when they can’t articulate their thoughts clearly to other people.

Listening to this song and not being able to dance to it is like that, only the tension is physical.

So I looked up ‘Gorecki dance’ on YouTube and found something like I had imagined could be danced to this song.

No go zone

I don’t live in a posh part of London, like Knightsbridge or West Hampstead. In fact, it would be accurate to say that I live in one of the poorest boroughs in London. Still, it ain’t that bad! I feel completely safe, walking home from the Tube station at night time.

However, Domino’s Pizza is less enlightened and has declared our street a ‘no go zone’.

It means that whenever we order pizza, the delivery person calls us when he arrives and we have to meet him on the main street, which is 10 metres from our front door. This is the closest that Domino’s employees can get without fear of mortal harm. I don’t know where they get their information from.

Richard, whose love of tandoori hot pizza requires pizza delivery boys to risk life and limb.

See? It even says ‘NO GO ZONE’ on the box!

Sweater organiser

It’s the little things that excite me. The latest thing to bring me great joy has been the purchase of a sweater organiser from the Futon Company.

I was originally going to buy a shoe organiser to stop me from tripping over the twenty pairs of shoes that I’ve managed to accumulate in England (few, compared to what I have in Melbourne). When I realised for an extra £2 I could buy the twice-as-big sweater organiser, I did so. I figured I could store both bigger and more shoes in a sweater organiser.

Once I hung the organiser up in my wardrobe, a change of heart led me to put clothes into the organiser. This freed up wardrobe floor space for a pile of shoes. I am very happy! Only Frequently Worn Shoes are out in the bedroom now.

Look how organised it is! And it’s still like that, weeks later. That’s how you know that an organiser works!

No matter how little I put on the shelves, the organiser still arches at the top. It pains me. It looks like it’s being stretched.

Damian joins blogworld

I welcome Damian, my housemate, to the blogworld — Worldwide Rants. Damian is ruthless and entirely accurate in his opinions. He likes Jaws and bobbleheads. From his blog, we can expect to read workplace woe, praise where he witnesses (rare) competence, and bobbleheads of the week.