004 happy birthday, grandma!

DOUBLE TRAVEL POST JUST FOR HANNAH.

Busy day today, as every day in LA has been so far, much to my surprise. Woke up around 10:00 (so much for my hope of lazing around this summer), and ate breakfast with my sister. A Nutella sandwich and Milo. Boom. My grandma is adorable because she thinks I'm still incapable of making Milo on my own (there is some truth to this), and so she made it for me. Yay! After breakfast, Christine told me one of my (many) aunts, Aunty Sau Ying and her husband would be taking my grandparents out for a Father's Day lunch, and that we were invited. When you're Asian (or anyone, really), you don't turn free food down, ever, and so we left with them at around 11. The original plan was to grab some dimsum, but that was quickly given up when we saw the line for food.

Not cool.

So we headed next door to this Chinese restaurant called Happy Harbor for some wanton noodles instead. Omnomnom.

And then we ordered food.  

Boba milk tea, Hong Kong style.

Chicken porridge for grandpa.

YEAH. WANTON NOODLE SOUP. That's right.

Idk what Aunty Sau Ying ordered. Just go with it.

Cheong fun. Nomnomnom.

After lunch, we headed to Ralph's to get some bread and a bottle of Nutella for Christine. When my grandma discovers what you like, she will do everything in her little Asian grandma power to purchase it for you so can gorge yourself on it. Trufax. She's kinda awesome like that. Christine and I helped her pick some things up around the store...she's too much fun.

Shopping with my grandma is a blast.

Bread is important!

After finishing up at Ralph's, the group headed to a tailor nearby to pick up my grandma's cheongsam for my cousin's wedding in Malaysia later this year. She has sexier legs than me. That can't possibly be allowed.

We headed home after finishing up at the tailor, and I helped my grandma put the groceries up once we got back. After a bit, my sister and I started working on a birthday present for her! It's her 80th birthday today! She's such a baller. Chris and I sent some pictures to get developed at a CVS pharmacy nearby using the interwebz, and got to working on her card in the meantime. Not too bad if I say so myself...

The outside. My grandma was born in the year of the monkey.

The inside. We love you, grandma!

Once we finished up, Chris and I went to pick up the pictures and then we got them framed. We headed home soon after and gave them to my grandma, and she was happy. Mission accomplished.

Favorite gift: her picture at the Clinton house in Fayetteville.
Hahahahaha.

We had some Chinese food for dinner, courtesy of my grandma, and it was awesome. 

Chris and I spent the rest of the night watching the Travel Channel and a football game between Brazil and Mexico. Idk. A little more internet-ing, and I'll be headed off to bed! 

003 asian potlucks for the win

Travel post time! I'm in LA now, and I promised Hannah I'd updated the blog. Bahaha.

Woke up at around 10 this morning after staying the night at my Aunty Sau Kuan's place. My cousin, Shan Shan, is back in the States on holiday from med school in Prague so we wanted to spend some time with her. Snaps for family time.

Aunty Sau Kuan was awesome enough to take Christine and I out for a dimsum brunch (so much for my summer diet) at a new place called New Capital Seafood Restaurant. I'm super obsessed with dimsum because it doesn't exist in Fayetteville, so I was pretty excited.

We got to the restaurant at around 11, and had to take a number and wait in line. To those less well-versed in dimsum restaurants, dimsum is goddamn AWESOME, so there is always, always a line. If you ever see a group of Chinese people waiting outside a Chinese restaurant in the morning, regardless of whether it's a weekday or during the weekend, there is a 99% chance that that restaurant serves dimsum. If you know of a restaurant that serves dimsum, and no line exists, don't eat there. Their dimsum sucks, no question. Go look for a cluster of Asians elsewhere. Chinese people don't mess around when it comes to food.

I digress.

PICTURES OF FOOD TIME.

Fish cakes. Sounds gross, tastes incredible.

Shiew mai, chicken feet, tripe. All yummy. Trust.

Cheong fun. Le nomz.

Char siew bao - pork buns. I will literally fight you
for these.

What's in this incredible bundled treat?

Awesomeness. That's what.

Durian-flavored mochi. Idk. I hate durian.

It has occurred to me that not everyone knows how dimsum restaurants work, so here is a lesson for those not in the know. There are no menus in real dimsum restaurants - only aunties pushing metal carts around. 

Exhibit A: Aunty + cart.

Exhibit B: Aunty + cart close-up.

These aunties walk around from table to table, announcing what type of food their cart has, and then you tell them if you want anything from their cart. If so, they'll give it to you, and stamp your table's receipt card with a number, denoting the value of the food you've just selected. This is how your total is rung up when you're done eating. There is literally no way of knowing if you're getting cheated or not. Bahaha. Just go with it. 

After dimsum, we headed to a Chinese grocery store. Because this is Monterey Park, places such as these are everywhere, unlike in Fayetteville where much like dimsum, they are nonexistent. 

Random things you can find in Chinese grocery stores.

More random things.

Boba stall. Duh.

Honey dew slushie.

After we finished up at the Chinese grocery store, Aunty Sau Kuan dropped Christine, Shan Shan and I off at the Puente Hills Mall so Shan Shan could do some shopping. She'll be interning at the Mayo Clinic (wtf why is she so badass) over the next two months and needed some new swag. I, of course, bought way too much. UGH I WILL HAVE NO MONEY FOR JAPAN. My excuse is the items I bought were necessities - people need clothing, right? That's perfectly acceptable, right? RIGHT?

I digress, again. The mall was fun. 

Unfortunately, Chris and I were too fat for this.

Aunty Sau Kuan and my grandma picked us up at about 5 so we could go for a potluck at my Aunty Sau Ying's house. My grandma turns 80 this year and the potluck was planned as part of the celebration. Chinese potlucks are the bomb diggity. We arrived at my Aunty Sau Ying's at around 6:30, and a lot of my family was already there, with a whole lot more on the way. As expected the food was awesome.

More pictures of food. Geez.

Fried noodles from my grandma.

Prawns from Aunty Sau Ying.

Steamed fish from Aunty Sau Ying. 

Dog from Julian. KIDDING THIS IS BUBBLES WE LOVE HER.

Fried mixed vegetables from Aunty Sau Ying.

Chicken and some sort of chili thing from my grandma.

Fruits from my Aunty Lydia.

Meat pies from my Aunty Cindy.

We ate till we exploded and spent the rest of the night talking and watching K-Dramas. My mom would have been proud. To be honest, I wish I had spent more time with my family before tonight. I've never really spent much time in LA (only during university holidays when my family used to live here), and the more I get to know my family, the more I adore them. I'm pretty lucky to have such a large family who loves me. Yaaayyy. 

After talking and bonding for a while, it was cake time for my grandma! The cake was pretty incredible, no lie.

Check it.

It made my grandma happy, so mission accomplished!

What a sweetheart.

We took pictures with family afterwards to show my mom back in Fayetteville. I miss her! 

Family is pretty cool.

002 checkpoints vs crossings

I think it very appropriate that this be my first post. I'm not sure who is reading, so maybe if I pretend you're not there, I'll be less inclined to worry about what you think.

I've been thinking about checkpoints. In games, especially adventure ones, the hero/heroine goes through a series of checkpoints that becomes their reset default place/time in the game, designed to keep you going when you just fail. It occured to me that this move, is somewhat like that, but in a different way. See, when you hit a new checkpoint, there's no way of going back to a previous one. In a way, I have reached a point in my life where I cannot go back to my parents' house with the same circumstances as I did a couple of months ago. Doing so would be kind like making Crash Bandicoot bodyslam the little checkpoint in an effort to get the bonus play you had passed up. Idiot.

But then just this morning, I realized it is not a game. There's a choice involved, just as there is a choice in everything. I found myself thinking of what home means, and realized that even though I am sleeping 360 miles away, I don't have to change my home address on my GPS. I don't have to trade in that inexplicable feeling of joy when I punch in "navigate to home." Just as some people might choose to let that go, I can choose to hold on. Not everything has to be absolute. Or forever.

There are things in life that are worth holding onto a little longer, and things that should have been let go a little sooner. I've gone a little ways away from where I needed to be this past year. For a while, I felt broken and have tried to fix it in different ways. Maybe this is the thing that I have NOT been praying for, because really I don't think my halfhearted murmurs go past my wall. I don't know if it was six months ago or just right before quitting time (graduation), that I made a conscious decision to leave God outside of my life. If I had to pick out one regret out of the entire last year, it would be this. Because, as most of you who have known the story of my family, there is no way I would have made it this far without Him. And quite frankly, I'm done pretending I can go any further on my own.

I went to bed at 1:00 am and next checked my clock at around 4:30, and I drive 7 hours today to my new apartment. I don't know if I had been sleeping or had been awake the whole time, and it got me nervous. It was in this small moment of panic that I decided to go run this morning. Not away from, but after and towards Him... And this crazy-ass thing called His plan.

001 the beginning

A person's life is a collection of experiences, of seasons, of phases, of...dare I say... levels. And in each level, you learn the superpower, the key to the next level, the lesson that you're supposed to take with you. Now there come's a time when you face a level that you thought was nay unbeatable. Like in Megaman Legends, when the last sibling of the Tron family flies around terrorizing Uptown. Or in Legend of Zelda's Ocarina of Time, the fight with Ganondorf. Or when luck throws you one of those Koreans on Battle.net. And you go around in circles... screaming "shiiiiiiiiiiii--" in your mind. But you do beat it (or him...most likely her, cause girls can beat guys too. I've done it.) And you get to the end of the level, even the game, and you think "That was worth it." You find yourself relishing back to when you started.

...so, that was Hannah's paragraph. I only understood about half of it because I don't game anywhere near as much as she does. From what I gathered however, she was talking about leveling up while gaming, winning and then reminiscing about level one when the worst thing you had to deal with was Goombas. In a funny way, college is a lot like that. As you progress from being a freshman to a sophomore, a sophomore to a junior, and finally a junior to a senior, tests get harder, nights get longer and the effect of coffee deteriorates to the point where it has as much power of keeping you awake as water does. Note: Hannah and I have successfully unlocked this achievement - coffee now makes us sleepy. Senior year, much like the Boss level in any game, is stressful, exciting, and an emotional rollercoaster (with plenty of alcohol to help you through). When it's all over and the dust settles, you often look back and say - that was quite a ride, and you look forward to a whole lot more.
Wait for it.
Yes. That is in fact what she said.

Stacy is very good at translating. She's fluent in a lot of Asian languages, in addition to the eventual subdialect that is known as "Hannah's thought processes." But basically what we are both trying to say is, there are things that have happened, will happen, and could have happened that we'd like to share with all of you. Because as far as we're concerned, graduating is only a prequel to the rest of our lives. And the rest of our lives...well, we would like to still share with you.

Now we have that out of the way, our blog is aimed at attempting to record some of our musings, lessons learned, discoveries, stories of love and heartbreak and successes that we've encountered in college, and that we know we can look forward to in the future. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as I'm sure we'll enjoy writing it.

Cheers! - Stacy
^_~  -  Hannah