So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, good bye

Farewell, farewell...

This post-final week was probably quite one of the busiest week in the past few months. Fact is, summer is coming as I mentioned in the previous post. With summer's coming, college students prepare to go back to their home countries for summer vacation, moving out/in, transferring, etc. I wasn't going back to Indonesia in a short period of time nor moving out nor transferring, but it doesn't mean I just stayed at home while my friends were moving out/in, transferring, and going back home.

Agnes' farewell was merely one out of quite many farewells I attended. Another one (out of many other farewells) took form as a graduation+prom event held by Indonesian Student Organization.

It took place on June 10, 2011 in Saint-Clare Hotel, San Jose. Remember the invitation design I showed you? Yep it was for this event.
At first, I kind of doubted whether to attend or not, but then exactly three days before the D-day, I made up my mind to attend. Later I was bothered with the fact that I didn't have dress and shoes that matched the theme: classy. Two days before the D-day, I went to the mall after school to look for a dress (it was the quickest dress hunting, trust me), and the next day, I did the same thing only that time, I looked for a pair of matching shoes.

I had quite a lot of selections when it comes to dresses, starting from bright pink, marine blue, pastel cream, to finally...black. Black is after all the most neutral color (besides matching the prom's dress code), so I was thinking I could reuse the dress for some upcoming occasions.

The proud graduates!

The transfer students were the main focus throughout the prom. I gotta say the whole graduation+prom event worked out really well. I truly saluted the committee who had worked for the event, despite only having up to six members. They surely have put a lot of effort to make it all happen. The food served for fine dinner was successfully indulging. The event itself was quite entertaining, pretty spontaneous at some points, and most importantly...organized!

After the event came to its end, we took pictures at the lobby.

Some other farewells include BBQ in Watsonville held by International Student Volunteer. The event was actually very fun but too bad I don't have the pictures. But I'd love to post about the story next time.

Well, following farewells, since some transferring students moved out, the roommates of those transferring students (they are remaining students) moved out as well. These remaining students looked for some other places to live, possibly even sharing apartment with other remaining students. At least it's better for them rather than leaving alone after their roommates move out to the university.

Anyway, I helped these remaining students move out as well. I did help by loading furnishings into the car. So yeah, it was quite a busy week.

And...the last farewell that concluded the whole farewell weeks just happened yesterday.

This week, I'd been informed that Kevin Halim, Aymee's boyfriend, was going to take off to Jakarta on July 1 midnight. I had anticipated to take him to the airport along with my friends, and especially he's one of the transferring students (he's going back to Jakarta for summer vacation before going to his university on August).

After finishing my early evening class on June 30, Elda told me that Jessica, another friend of mine, was going back to Indonesia the same night as well. I thought of taking Jessica and her sister, Sharon, to the airport and leaving Halim's farewell plan.
However, it turned out that Halim's flight would be nearly at the same time as Jessica's (despite having different flights). So there was a chance for me and Elda to meet up with Halim and his party at the airport. at the same time of Halim's flight, despite having different flights.

From school, I took off straight to Jessica's apartment after picking up Elda at my apartment's bus stop. We had dinner at Krung Thai with Kak Ijan and Kak Rocky in Santa Clara before taking off to San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

We arrived at SFO at around 10.00 pm and immediately took Jessica and Sharon to the check-in counter. Elda and I helped them to load the baggage.

After they got their boarding passes, we all got to meet with Halim and the party in another aisle.

See you on August in Jakarta, Halim!
(From left to right: Ray, Nancy, Halim, Aymee, me, and Elda)


Awwww.....you'll see him again on August, Aymee dear.


The home-comer and the non-home-comer


Roomies and the couple.


The sisters are ready to embrace hometown
(From left to right: Elda, Jessica, Sharon, and I)

After a short chat, Jessica and Sharon entered the scanning place, although it was still an hour before the boarding time (12 am). Halim still wanted to stick around for a while before 12 with the others. Elda and I decided to go home since it was already late and we didn't want to make Kak Rocky wait for us any longer.

So the farewell at the airport concludes the whole farewell week, as mentioned. Right now, I'm looking forward to seeing SFO on August 6, which is (OMG) only a month away. Seriously I never expected time would fly this fast.

Have a nice trip/flight for transferring students, whoever's going somewhere for summer vacation, or moving out!
Safe drive, have enough rest, and enjoy your summer!

SFO farewell pictures are credit to: Elda

Sweets have never been so tempting

Apparently I don't have enough spirits to post any stories significant to my recent life. Right after spring quarter was done, I only had about four days to take a deep breath then another tense life waited after the weekend.

If you ask, I've been doing just fine. Good news is...

Picture by Martin Neuhof

summer is
h e r e ! !

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Say yay, beacheessss!!

So, hello sandals, shorts, T-shirts, tank tops, BIKINI (dude, I'm saying this as if I have one), and uh thin-layered outfit. I guess I've said this for zillionth time but if I have enough time, I'll definitely post some stories here. Hopefully that time will come pretty soon, cos writing stories indeed takes up a lot of time. So full dedication is strongly required.

In the mean time, I'd like to show you guys some of my latest artworks. I'm doing this cos I don't know what to post aside of stories. I simply want to keep you guys posted.

This is the final project I have for Web design class. I gotta say it took up a lot of time and hardwork on it but I'm satisfied about how it turns out to be! Well, the professor actually only allowed max 3 pages. But I ended up making 4 and had no idea which page I had to eliminate in order to meet the qualifications!

Homepage


Premade cake selection


Cake information


Customize cake

Anyway since the theme of the final project is making a fictional self-established company website, I came up with the idea of making a unique pastry/cake shop! Apparently there was someone else in the class who had a similar idea, so I decided to alter the concept a little bit. My cake business is a bit different since I allow visitors to customize their own cake and order it.

Even the professor said this to me:
"You should open up this shop. That's your next assignment."

Ha. Right on, sir. First I need investments and I'm gonna need a couple of people to help open this business. First and foremost, the most fundamental thing ever to do is: I might need to change my major to business or culinary arts haha.

Anyway, what a fun thing to do, right?

Back to spring-summer transition. I had a great time on the weekend. Okay, I know I said I wouldn't post stories but it wouldn't be such a big trouble for me to post one of them briefly. With spring's done, a lot of my friends are transferring, moving out, moving in to a new apartment, graduating, or going back for summer vacation. I attended like 4 farewells over the weekend.

One of the farewells I attended is Agnes'. Well, she's going back to Hong Kong for summer. My friends and I planned to hang out with her before she went back.

Right after finals, we went to have lunch at KFC (we were actually going to have lunch at Curry House but then it was packed with people so...), then we had karaoke.
While waiting for the bus, we took bunch of pics.

...even the bus wasn't able to stop our narcissism mode.





It took a while for us to get to Music Tunnel. We stopped by at KFC near the bus stop. Before choosing KFC, we were thinking to have late lunch at Curry House, but unfortunately, it was still closed. So, KFC is the alternative choice.

Afterwards, we went on to release our tension in Music Tunnel! We sang songs in various languages. Mostly Chinese, Cantonese, and English for sure, but other than that, we also tested our multilingual skills through Korean and Japanese songs







Guess what song we sang to below. It's pretty easy, so if you're a fan of music, you should know about it.



Get it?

We finished our karaoke quite later than expected, but that didn't stop us to continue hanging out. I remember that Agnes also wanted to see a movie. After all, it had been planned before Karaoke, so we decided to go to AMC to check what was on cinemas.

It was such a pain to wait for the bus. It took hella long time. We were quite in a rush because we were planning to catch a movie before 9pm, otherwise we'd have to walk our way home at around 12 (by the time the movie finished, cos there were no more buses operating at that time). We got there pronto. The line for the ticket box was quite long, considering it was Friday and Friday was always the premiere day of new movies.

It was Cars premiere screening day. As a fan of Pixar movies, it's one of the most anticipated movies for me. I was kinda sad at first since Terry already watched it, but we quickly found the solution: Super 8. We all haven't seen it and I checked the rating on internet and the movie received positive reviews (It even beat up Xmen in Box Office Chart!) So yeah, we went on with it.

Overall, the movie's quite interesting. At first I thought it was quite predictable, but seeing it was produced by Steven Spielberg, I gave it an excuse and changed my mind. We were practically entertained with it. I love the storyline and the acting, especially the grown up Elle Fanning really pulled it off.

After the movie, it turns out that I needed to walk all the way home since the bus was no longer operating (it was around 11pm that night, and I was only wearing shorts, slippers, and thin, 3/4-sleeved cardigan). Good heavens my apartment is located nearly two blocks away from the cinema, but with all the darkness surrounding me, it was quite a challenge.

The night was still seemingly young, as I crashed into a neighbor/friend's party and thankfully managed to stay myself sober. My neighbor was transferring to SoCal, so it was going to be her last weekend before moving out.

Anyway, I don't know why but I'm always having this identity-crisis. Nothing big or whatsoever but a lot of people have mistaken me as a Vietnamese, Thai, Filipino, Taiwanese, and Chinese. Never Indonesian, despite that's what I really am.

It really struck me when an international student I met in Anthropology class went on to me and said. "Are you a resident here?" I don't know why she could identify me as an American. Not just once, but I've encountered quite few people saying that. I feel flattered though, maybe it's a sign for me that my English has slightly improved (yay), but still, I'm proud of being an Indonesian!

Speaking of nationalism, I've got one story I really feel like sharing.
So stay tuned yo! XD

H-5: Ice cream and steaks

Five days before departure, yet it's a great day today.
So yeah, I got to attend farewell meet-up with my nine best friends at Plaza Senayan. It feels good to finally hang out in a large group again, especially we came from different classes at school. So imagine that us, from Science Department, Social Department, and Language Department got to meet at one place and chat. It was E-P-I-C.

Before others arrived, me, Elda, and Mita arrived first and we sort of met at Kinokuniya bookstore, where Mita - in contrast of me of being a Kpop fan - is a Jpop fan instead and showed me some magazines featuring Arashi and Hey!Say!JUMP (Oh how I miss these cheerful-sounding boys).
It feels good to spazz on cute artists aside of Kpop. Besides, Arashi boys are easy on the eyes too (especially Kazunari Ninomiya, LOL)

Then we decided to have lunch while waiting for six others at the food court. We happened to choose the same food from the same restaurant, which is sirloin steak from Fiesta Steak.

The steak was tasty. It was a local sirloin one. I decided not to pick the NZ or US one since I thought the local one would be, yes, cheaper, but it tasted darn good!

The first plan was to have lunch and then continued with playing bowling, but somehow, we cancelled the bowling plan due to some problems occurred. We planned to replace the activity by watching a movie (we were about to pick Shanghai) when some of us preferred to just continue hanging out and find a soothing place just to chat.

So we decided to just stroll around the mall and windowshopped. Zara is having a sale though right now, and I'm falling in love with a cardigan which cost ridiculously expensive, even though it already has a discount.

It's hard for us to capture the picture of all of us, so we gotta ask someone to do it for us. Sorry if it's low quality :)

Did I mention that this mall has a giant clock in the middle of it, where at every hour, six golden statues would emerge from concealed compartments to perform some music (like cuckoo clock always have these wooden birds emerging and sang 'cuckoo cuckoo' before they clasped back into their places), with each holding an instrument?

It was like a small show occuring at every hour and hardly gained attention from the visitors.
Since we stayed at the mall for like five hours, we saw the performance once when the clock struck 2, and heard it for the next three hours. The sound of the music is quite loud and it could be even heard from the corner of the mall. So you can guess how bored we got after five times listening to it.
Anyway, the music is nice though.

In fact, we ended up munching on ice creams at the food court, chatting, gossiping, you know what would girls do. It seems like gossiping is something you can't avoid in a same-gender engagement.
The meet-up ended at 5pm. I was later picked up by mom and headed home.
What a day!

Seven days and counting

Seven days to go!!!
Arrgh can't believe I'll be leaving in a week!! I've started packing today and guess what, I just didn't feel like doing it. Even it came to my realization that I won't be spending Ramadhan days in Indonesia.

How sad to know that I won't be able to feel the whole vibe of Ramadhan, the fasting breaking occasions, the food...I'm so going to miss everything. but anyway, I just found out that the college does have a moslem community. Hopefully they'll make some sort of event to welcome the holy month

Gotta be excited, gotta be excited, gotta be excited

One thing I need to think right now aside of my departure is, none other than the concert coming up on the 5th.

Also, I need to finish Trip to Taiwan before leaving. This week is going to be a little tough and I'm talking about farewells. I have a solution to keep people not sad about my leaving. Here's what I tell them. "Shoo me!" Haha but in a good way of course, to motivate me so that this urge of my going abroad will somehow emerge.

Anyway...

HAPPY FRIENDSHIP DAY GIRLS/GUYS!!

We may go on separate ways, but promise never to lose touch