Explorations

"I make no apologies for being egotistical..."

Apologies to Miles Franklin, from whom this quote was taken, and whose career was far more brilliant than mine has been this week. I will, however, make the arrogant presumption that there are people out there interested in my boring life and write a little update. By the way, if you do read this post, why not give my ego a boost and send me a comment to let me know someone actually does care.

Regarding what I said last week- My teeth are going well and my job hunting isn't going at all. I also feel as if the week has been thoroughly boring and am actually half looking forward to going back to (l)uni. Since my memory has not had any exercise these last three months I'm having trouble remembering what I did this week, so I'll begin with yesterday and work backwards.

Yesterday I went to church and farewelled my good friend Nicole who is leaving to take up a post-doctoral position in Sydney Childrens' hospital. She's a great and inspiring gal with a sincere faith despite hardship, a compassion for those that most people reject, and an ability to be both feminine and incredibly smart. We've become quite close and I've gained a lot from her friendship...Goodbye Nicole :-(

I also started reading a simple Japanese book. I try to do a bit of reading/writing/speaking and listening in my two non-native languages now and then to keep myself up to date. It really is amazing how quickly you forget things. It was very discouraging to have difficulty reading a children's book in Japanese, but also spurred me on to persevere since I know I need improvement. This week I also read part of the first Harry Potter book in French. This was much easier, and some of the translation choices were quite interesting. Some names have been changed: eg Hogwarts= Poudlard, Slytherin= Serpentard, Hufflepuff= Pouffsouffle, and the author of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them is none other than “Norbert Dragonet”. Another strange thing I noticed was that they translated inches as centimetres...I mean its not like the English usually use inches either, but they're smart enough to work it out.

I also translated my website into French...which I am very proud of.

In English, I've started reading Thomas Moore's Utopia...more on that later.

I celebrated Chinese New Year on Saturday night,with a number of my good friends which I consider a great privilege. Dumplings appear to be the traditional food of the season (they're actually more like miniature meat pasties than European dumplings) and the other girls had a lot of fun at my expense when I was very inexpert at making them. I got to play with lots of cute little babies that got brought along.


Wednesday and Thursday were taken up mainly with FOCUS stuff.

posted by Foodfairy @ 3:57 PM