It’s funny how even in this day and age with instant access to ways of “contact” with people, I still find it really hard to maintain a stream of steady contact with a lot of people that mean a great deal to me. For various reasons, both my sister and father live overseas, as well as numerous close friends. Worse yet, I can hardly find the time for good friends that live barely ten minutes away from my house! The balance I’ve tried to strike over the years, is the odd hours-long phone or skype conversation with my dad, and as of last year, my sister also. But lately, I’ve found that I’m most satisfied through the means of writing lengthy letters by hand and posting them; and in return, receiving either the odd (if I’m lucky) letter, or a great postcard that’s filled to the brim with travel anecdotes and things that they thought I’d enjoy and reminded them of me, so far away.
Recently, my friend (with whom I’ve traveled to Japan and Taiwan last year) visited Hong Kong and China, and concocted a brilliant way of sending me postcards: he made six of them into a series, which had drawings on either side that fit together like a little jigsaw, then labeled and sent them in numerical order. Funnily enough, I didn’t get them all in the correct order, but it was fun to wait around for the collection to be completed!
Just today, I came home from uni to a postcard from Guangzhou that dad had sent me. Although it wasn’t nearly as creative as Joel’s Guangzhou postcard, this little piece of cardboard with a generic cityscape photo made my afternoon. It’s funny how much more intimate seeing someone’s handwriting is, as opposed to merely an email. Often times I’ll send long, ranting, frustrated, angry, ecstatic or just generally overwhelming and brain-scattered emails to my ‘grrrrlfraaaan’ in Seattle or my ol’ buddy Takuma at Tulane, but when I really have something to say that’s worth taking the time for, I’ll be putting black ink to white paper. The only trouble for them is deciphering my handwriting beyond the “Dear ______”, because my handwriting – although often deemed as artistic/awesome/copy-worthy by onlookers – is a shocker to try and read.
Anyway, I really ought to finish this long overdue letter to my sister. Even though I was just saying to mum earlier about how much smaller the house seems when she came back home for Christmas (and will be when she’s back for her summer), and how the last piece of any delicious food always goes missing out of the fridge… I miss her. A lot.
Here’s some photos from earlier today. The first two are of my ferry trip into uni. I’d been meaning for ages to take photos of the city from the ferry when leaving uni, but the ferry situ today didn’t warrant for that. Plus, I’m really unhappy with these two photos because I literally had to guess and “shoot from the hip” as it’s our point and shoot camera, which is broken and I literally can’t see what I’m photographing on the screen and the manual viewfinder may as well not even exist! But it was such a lovely day I just had to post them anyway:
The marina at which parking is now a nightmare. I got dropped off and picked up today, phew.
I must say, I’m proud of my very steady guesswork… the horizon’s not that lopsided haha.
Rangitoto Island, the iconic view you get in Auckland.
See where I had double-iced half the cupcakes? I learnt my lesson… don’t ice them when they’re hot out of the oven, icing tends to melt and drip away. Although it’s never happened before, but I guess I used a different recipe.
Mum’s delicious banana cake.
They were meant to be red velvet cupcakes, but I ran out of red food colouring, so the inside colour is a bit off. Luckily you can’t see here, haha.
Tomorrow morning, two lovely people will wake up to my cupcakes which I’ve hidden in eccentric places rather than on their doorstep. This is what happens when I do late-night baking and then think “oh wouldn’t it be sweet if I…”, combined with the mentality of think of all that buttery goodness I want to share with everybody else’s hips.