Good Dream

I woke up this morning with a smile on my face.
Looking out the window, the sky is blue, as if my good dream has decided to stay for the day.

In my dream, I was at the hair salon (yes, I need a haircut and that has been on my mind,) waiting for my turn. I was assigned to a stylist who seems to be very popular and busy, so I needed to wait for her for a while. Then there was an electric failure and the lights went out, so the stylist decided to take a break and sit at the round table, where I was invited to sit with her and her colleagues.

While I waited for the power to come on, I looked at the stylist, and realized that she was a girl who I used to play with in Africa. She was only there for a short while, visiting her American uncle, but while she was there, we played together. Then, I saw a man sitting across from me, and realized that he was a boy who I knew from Africa. Though we were never close, he was at my school, and we both played football. I mentioned this to both of them, and voila! they both remembered me. The man was a proprietor of the hair salon, and though he and the stylist worked together for some time, they had no idea about their African connection. Then we recalled a day when all three of us played in the vast open area, from day break to dusk, and looked up at the jakaranda tree as we waited for our parents to come pick us up.

We all hug each other, and I woke up.

The boy and girl in my dream did not exist, but there are few friends from the time I was in Africa that I would like to see again. My brief 2 years stay there was one of the best times of my life, and when the memories come back in full force, they arrive with nostalgic happiness.

Zambia. The name of the country still casts a spell on me when I hear it. I heard it mentioned yesterday on TV, and may be that was the reason why I had this dream.

Parallel World

Goodness how the time flies! With a blink of an eye, now we are approaching Thanksgiving Holidays!

Since the last update, the world has become a very different place; credit crunch arrived in gusto with no short-term ending in sight, and Obama is the President-elect. Privately, my traveling intensified toward the end of the year, and for the past few months, my life has been all work, no play.

Somewhere in this world, however, there are places where the time seems to have stopped, and I would like to write about such place in this entry.

When I was 10, our family moved to Fukuoka, and we spent 4 years there until we moved to Yokohama. For whatever reasons, my father decided to place my sister and I into a Catholic girl school, a school known to educate girls from the upper crust of Fukuoka society from kindergarten to high school. I don't know what got into my father's head, as we are not Catholic, and certainly not of the upper crust, but may be he wanted to join the rank, with his recent promotion to the General Manager of the branch office.

The school took few dozen students for the first years of primary school, secondary school, and high school, but in principle they did not take any new comers for other years. Therefore, it was truly exceptional for the school to accept me as a fourth year student, and my sister as the first year student, from the second term of the year. My father must have had a truly influential connection.

My feeling for this school has always been divided; I was miserable for the first two and half years, and was happy for the latter years. My misery probably had not much to do with school, but rather my wanting to go back to where I lived before we moved to Fukuoka. Looking back, this was a great school, encouraging us to learn things from experience. They had Kendo (art of Japanese sword) class once a week, tennis club for children over 10, and we were all encouraged to learn how to play at least one music instrument by age 9. I don't recall studying hard at this school...I spent hours and hours in library, reading.

Since I moved to Yokohama at 14, I only went back to Fukuoka once, an year later, for a visit.

In early September this year, our office in Tokyo organized an event in Fukuoka, and I had a chance to visit Fukuoka. As the event ended on Friday, I extended my visit for one day for exploration. My goal was to trace my commute from school to where I used to live 20+ years ago. I walked almost everyday during these 4 years, walking 40 minutes one way. I was a stubborn child, dismissing to commute with bus for being too lame, just as I claimed wearing coat in the middle of winter was lame and lived without one...I wonder what I was thinking, really.

Central Fukuoka has changed massively over the past 20+ years, and there weren't too many places that I could recognize.

But school...it stood there, solid, as if 20+ years has not existed at all. I felt like I was a girl again, with pigtails and dark blue uniform, carrying heavy black leather bag full of books and feeling quite lost in a city that I didn't belong. I wondered around, fearing that the place still tried to grab me. I wanted to escape, but wanted to stay at the same time.

Then, I started to walk home...I mean toward my old home. My body pulled me toward the direction, and my head just looked to see the changes. Strangely, only few things have changed, but everything looked smaller than I remembered. There was a memorial park along the way, with the bust of Buddhist nun and an old wooden house; a European-styled house built on red bricks with statues of two angels holding a fountain in the front; a remains of former fortress with sharp rising stone walls; a pond with floating lotus leaves...
Finally I reached my house, a tired looking apartment building that used to look spanking new and modern while we lived.

35 minutes walk from school to home, with additional 10 minutes to the nearest station with my adult legs...that was the world I lived in for 4 years, a 5 kilometer radius of that apartment building.

That world still exists, only without me. I am glad that I escaped from it, like I dreamed of escaping as a child...yet it is a comfort to know that it still exists, like a parallel world that never crosses, only showing itself like an illusion once in a blue moon.

Goodbye Noe Valley

San Francisco in the evening and the nightfall...


I was in San Francisco this week, and spent half a day to completely move out of the apartment I lived in since 1997. The apartment was in Noe Valley, still my favorite part of town in San Francisco. I kept my place there for various reasons, subletting it for the past few months, but the opportunity came my way to move into a new place in San Francisco with less hassles, so I decided to say goodbye to good old Noe Valley.

The apartment itself wasn't perfect, as it was on the ground floor with little light, and fixtures were very old, some probably dating back to half a century ago (they have their own charms, but not in the sense of convenience.) The ceiling was too low, and I could hear too much of the neighbors upstairs.

Still, it was my home, and home it was for close to a decade. So, it was with a pang of sadness that I left the place for the very last time.

It was a home for me and my two cats; one now deceased and another adopted. I have great memory of this place, especially of the first 3 years while my friends from New York lived in San Francisco (they all went back.)

Goodbye Noe Valley as my neighborhood...I will still go back there for a visit, but not to be at home again.

The Edge of the World

View from my hotel room in Istanbul
It snowed and snowed and snowed...


On my last trip to to Tokyo, I flew over Istanbul to meet with our business partner for a day. I flew on Lufthansa via Munich, and on that long-haul flight, watched a German film called "The Edge of the World". The film description on the program didn't say much, except that it was a film about a Turkish family in Germany and their journey, and I thought it was more than appropriate to watch it on my way to Istanbul.

The film was about the crimes and how such crimes are dealt with by people who are not directly involved in the crimes...in this case, a son whose father became an accidental murderer, and a mother whose daughter was killed by being too involved with her lover's affairs. I was especially touched with the process of healing leading to the ultimate forgiveness by the mother.

The film was inter-cultural, but ultimately what resonated was the universal humanity. And I thought Istanbul suited so well as the backdrop for this film. It's unique mixture of the west and the east is just what I think of Istanbul: a city with beautiful European architectures juxtaposed with impressive mosques; a very liberal party town with some women in scarfs and veils; wealthy urbanites walking alongside old men pulling garbage carts.

Istanbul may really be the "Edge of the world", in the sense that it is the "edge" of Asia and the "edge" of Europe. If that was the intension of this film's title, it could not be more true.

With few films that I've watched so far in the past few months, I thought this topped...but then, the situation could not have been more perfect, as I was on my way to Istanbul on Lufthansa.

Sofa

It's been a while since I last updated the blogs, as my personal life has been taken over by work, especially for the last couple of months. I still have few more things to take care of before things start to wind down...hopefully.

Because my life was a bit too consumed by work, I haven't done much on my flat. However, I managed to buy a sofa, which arrived last week.

I've been looking for a nice leather sofa with a very simple style, and I found this at the Conran. It's one of the most comfortable sofa that I've sat on...a bit of surprise as it didn't look so comfortable when I first saw it at the shop. It's a real pleasure lying down on this thing and watch the day passing through the windows.

Too bad, I couldn't spend more time at home...that's where I really want to be these days, not on the plane or at the hotel.

Bed and Books

The final completion date of the refurbishment was August 21, but I've officially moved into the flat on the 16th, sleeping on air-mattress and dialing-up on cardboard box. My stuff from San Francisco were supposed to have arrived by the 17th, but the custom clearance took longer than expected and I needed to wait until the first week of September for the delivery.

So, I flew out on the 22nd on a business trip, and returned on September 6th, the day before my stuff from San Francisco were delivered.

The place looks so much a home after my stuff got here, including queen-size bed that looks enormous and a dining table and chairs that I bought on the spot when I first found them at the ECHO Furniture in San Francisco, just around the corner from my former home.

ECHO Furniture was my favorite shop of all time...I bought two chests of drawers (which arrived with the bed and the dining set) there, and I could have bought entire furniture from them, if I had no space (and money) constraints. If I miss anything from San Francisco, one would definitely be the ECHO Furniture.

Among all of my furniture, the biggest obstacle has always been the bed. Compared to what the British calls a double-size bed, mine is an American queen-size bed, quite a bit wider. On top of that, my bed has a headboard and foot-board that curves outward, adding 50cm to the length. The bed-frames are made of cast iron, weighing 5 times more than the pine framed bed...and it requires bed spring under the mattress, which seems not to be common here.

While I looked for a flat to buy, one big criteria was to find a flat that could accommodate my bed. That would not have been a problem in the US, but I found this quite challenging in London where bedrooms are often big enough to place a full-size bed.

I bought this bed when I first moved to San Francisco from New York 10 years ago. I visited San Francisco few times before I made a decision to move there, and I encountered this bed while I strolled down Castro one evening. At that time, I still hadn't made a decision on a move, but I pledged myself that if I did, this would be my bed. While I lived in New York, I had a studio where I slept on a futon that turned into a sofa during the day. Owning a bed meant I was going to have a bedroom that does not function as a living room, and at that time, it was a big deal.

Few months later, I moved to San Francisco, and the first thing I did was to go to the shop in Castro. The bed was still there, but with a label "Final Sale, Display Unit Only". The shop owner told me that the manufacturer no longer made this bed, and this was the very last unit available. I've never seen this bed anywhere after that, so it probably was really the last piece, and I felt I was destined to own one.

My love for this bed never faded. It still represents the ultimate "home" for me, meaning my home is where this bed is. I slept so well the first few nights, I realized how I really wasn't sleeping for the last 2 years.

Of the total 49 pieces (mostly boxes) delivered from San Francisco, almost one fifth were bed/sleep-related, and two fifth were books. My friend Kathy once told me that when she moved, half of her boxes contained cooking-related items. It's interesting how one's priority can be assessed with the number of boxes at the time of moving.

With so many books delivered from San Francisco and more in 8 shopping bags accumulated over 2 years of my life in London, I have to place them somewhere. I have a habit of re-reading the books, and require some mechanism in place to find them quickly when my urge for re-reading gets out of control (which happens quite often.)

So I ended up with one wall of the Reception Room covered with bookshelves. I hope I wouldn't have space problem with my books, at least for a while.

So It's Done...almost

On Friday and Saturday, the builders worked until close to 8PM (not supposed to have worked beyond 5PM, but oh well...) to try to finish the work on my flat, but the bathroom basin, washer/dryer and cabinets were still not installed.

On top of that, the delivery guys who brought in the fridge/freezer damaged part of the floor, dragging the heavy stainless steel unit across the kitchen area. I could not stand having those scars on new floor, so I asked the builders to see if they could fix them. The answer was that they could, though they could not completely cover the floor underneath the kitchen cabinets. I decided to go for it, even if that was the case.

So, with this additional work, three guys are sent in yesterday to work on my flat, and by 3PM, the work was completed. There are still small things here and there that need to be adjusted/fixed (on Saturday), but it is now in the live in condition.

I love everything about my new flat, but especially the bathroom. How lovely it is to have a bath, separate shower, and a washer/dryer. It looks a bit exotic, but not too much...and definitely NOT a hotel bathroom. I have more cabinets than all 3 bathrooms I had in my past apartments combined; amazing to be able to place bath towels within the bathroom cabinets!

The kitchen is gleaming with stainless steels (hobs, microwave, fridge/freezer and bin), but with wood (cabinets) and stone (splash back), it doesn't look too sterile.

While the completion took a week more than initially scheduled, it was actually within the time frame in my mind. Having launched few websites at work, I know that doing small things, such as debugging, takes far longer than initially scheduled. I usually schedule for additional week at the launch, and I did the same here. Fortunately, it was just as I thought it would take.

As for my rented flat, my landlord still has not found his new tenant, and so it is being viewed by stream of people through 5 agencies. Now it won't matter much, as I'm spending more time at my new flat than the rented one, and I'll probably completely move out in the next couple of days.