Malaysian Wife, Australian Life

The holiday season's here. Work is slowing down a bit cos lots of peeps are already on leave. I am only taking 1 day off this time, but i'll still get 2 weeks of 4-day long weekends. Woohoo! Working whilst everyone else's on hols is always fun. Especially at this new location surrounded by shopping malls - im all set. I love my new office. Everything's new and my desk is pretty spacious with a nice view. Our team is located close to the lifts, toilets and kitchen. The kitchen's magnificent! Bigger than my living room & kitchen combined, complete with a massive 3-door fridge overloaded with different types of milk - skim, full or soy and fruit juices. All other hot drinks and kitchen appliances provided and i get to watch Oprah on the flat screen tv while having my lunch. We were dreading the move in the first place cos we'd be in the same floor as our top management. But with all the facilities and the big bosses not being such busybodies, it's been gr...

Sometimes i forget that the majority of people here don't even know that it's Ramadan. Even if they do, they don't really have any idea what Ramadan is. If they do know that we're fasting, lots of questions will be asked about when and what we can eat and we get the occasional 'that's so wrong for your body, not even having water bla bla' . Michael's answer to that, which i absolutely love is '2 billion muslims all over the world can't be wrong!' There's a lot more temptation here that im still getting used to which Im sure is a lot harder for Michael. Besides the many questions, some out of curiosity and some just a teeny bit irritating, we also get friends & family, knowing that we're fasting, showing off food in front of us, perhaps trying to be funny with 'oohs and aaahs this is yummm' comments and practically shoving food in our face. At first i was pretty annoyed, not so much for myself but on behalf of Michael. ...

We've successfully moved out of our 73 stairs house at Grays Pt after getting the keys to our new home last Friday afternoon! Straight after, Michael was already demolishing the old bathroom and had been working all weekend on the new bathroom reno. So whilst waiting for that to be ready, we're staying with my in laws at Loftus. Just like how it all started when i first got here where we spent about 5 months staying with them. I remembered in the beginning how i would try to avoid calling them by name cos i wasnt sure how to address them - aunty & uncle? mom & dad? Michael says i should just call them Tom & Imelda cos NO ONE calls their in-laws mom & dad here. Also, i'd just get laughed at if i call them that. But i thot it's a bit rude to call them by name, you know? Like, i can't imagine my sister calling her in-laws Bakar & Mimah. Apa punya menantu? :p Over time, after experiencing all other couples calling their in laws by name & mostly...

The Pope was here in Sydney last week for the World Youth Day. It was HUGE!! On the nite of the final mass, i think about 1/2 million people gathered and spent the nite under the stars at the Randwick racecourse. I dunno how they did it with the very cold weather and all, but i thought that was pretty amazing. Another thing that amazes me is the fact that these young pilgrims, aged from 13-35, from all over the world (i saw one Malaysian flag in the news at one point!) have such deep passion for their religion and especially for the Pope. These teenagers were going ga-ga over the Pope when they saw him in the Pope mobil during the motorcade and one girl even answered 'anything for the Pope' when asked about the crazy crowd that she had to go through to even catch a glimpse of the Pope. I know nothing much about the whole WYD thingy. The only thing that i was concerned about was the possible delays with trains because of the road closures and all major events happening in th...