cambodia and then christmas.

blessed christmas.

after being : : far, but not away : : for most of this year, i still felt like i needed to be : : not far, but quite away : : this school break. as part of our traditional class trips around southeast asia (somehow meeting up in milan when we were on exchange doesn't quite count as a class trip), we headed to siem reap and phnom penh for a short trip this december.

our trips had taken us from thailand, to vietnam, and now to cambodia. there are certain similarities but in some aspects the differences were stark. experiencing a place tends to be quite personal though. for me, cambodia was really hot - it was crazy hot weather everyday even though it was supposedly winter, but yet it was still a great place to be because of the people. the people were quite possibly even warmer than their weather, and there was this overwhelming feeling of goodwill wherever we went. we heard a spontaneous life story out of every person we talked with and really felt a sense of 'they really don't cheat your money siah' from the generous helpings of ingredients in the dishes we ate everywhere and the filled to the brim fill until cannot fill bottled water. i hope to go back again soon and learn to be as helpful to the people there as they have been with us.

hrmm and i should also apologise for previously thinking that people who pronounced phnom penh as PPPh-nom penh instead of Nnom penh were odd, yuan lai that's how the locals pronounce it!

blessed christmas once again, and hope that you all are having a restful and inspired holiday season, with a power and meaningful year to come!

fashional seasons : things to tell time by.

you know you're in school too much when you start telling time by the way the cleaning auntie's clothes behind the toilet door in school change. and when you see the clothes change within a day, you know how long you've been in school. partly inspired by what a friend wrote on his blog about how there could be "a much better way to keep track of time than those design deadlines."

.....haha oke maybe this is not really a :much better: way, but it is another way.

in lieu of my favourite magical trees.

shot on 23rd september 2007 in lieu of my favourite magical trees which i always point out to people whom i pass them by with - on foot, in car, in cab, or on bus.

my favourite magical trees are these two trees outside sheng shiong at geylang serai, which i always look out for every ramadan season when they start putting the colourful lights up in the trees but this year there were no more lights up in my magical trees. i was quite sad. i actually once drove there at 11pm one year with tripod, cameras and films in the boot, just to shoot the trees. the pictures from that shoot were admittedly and regrettably not great lah, they are in an album in one of my blue and purple set of drawers, but it was something i just had to do.

low tech zoom in ... ...

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(because i don't know how to zhng my blog template so that the images above can be as big as and laid out almost exactly like the way i'd imagine them to be. uhm so please tilt your heads and scroll for almost full effect. heh.)

alternative places for book reading.

this is the 5th in the lifelong series with the working title of "ransom letters". all letters are individually cut by hand and used only once for each "ransom letter" slide message set. message slides best enjoyed picked up and held up by hand against natural light, complete with occasional squinting, "eh what's this", and all.

this will be up somewhere at the library@orchard from 20th october 2007 to i'm not sure when as part of the My Library and I(nspiration) project before the library closes on 30th november 2007.

i first did sets of message slides like these in june 2004 when i was dealing with the somewhat traumatic moving house from my childhood home in tanjong rhu to my current family home along haig road. between then and now, school happened and the sets of message slides made back then were occasionally lost, discovered panickally that they were lost, and then thankfully always re-found with much relief and gladness.

will post up the rest when i next get the chance to stand on the school light table with no one around to wahlaoeh me. haha. or maybe more preferably, when i next stop by the memoryful place with the wonderful window that looks out to a little backstreet and the balloon that mightaswell be a lift.