Project 365

One day You will take my heart completely and make it more fiery than a dragon. Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet.

— Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own.

— Henry Rollins

Yes, it is painful. It’s killing me everyday but I gotta move on. I gotta find the light. I cannot be stuck in this tunnel forever.

The truth is that, since I arrived from Jakarta 2 weeks ago, I never cooked. I always ate breads — except if I was invited to a friend’s house, of course. I ate only once a day. I could feel my stomach shrinking! I could feel the lightness of my body. I guess, my eating habit was affected. If I was stressed, I didn’t want to eat.

So today, I decided to cook ayam kecap (chicken with sweet soy sauce). I’ve made it several times and it’s quite easy. It didn’t require a lot of ingredients. It just require me to get up and start cooking.

It wasn’t so bad, indeed 🙂 . I’m quite satisfied. Alhamdulillah.

Ya Allah, please help me to move on. Please don’t leave me alone. I’m desperate.

When sadness was the sea, you were the one that taught me to swim.

— I Wrote This For You

My future husband is going in with the commitment of traveling around with you & your husband, or else there will be no marriage! And ur husband has to deal with the same commitment!

— Jessie

I have been traveling with a good friend of mine, Jessie for few times and we’re planning for more: Spain, Italy, Egypt, and Indonesia! We’re just so addicted to traveling that every time we go back from vacation, we’re already planning where we should go next! No matter how broke we are, we still travel! LOL!

So today, I chatted with her over the YM and suddenly we were talking about marriage and I was like… “Sigh, I can’t imagine what we’ll be like after we’re married.” Will we still be able to travel again freely? People change. Most people change after they’re married. Well, that’s for certain because they’ll prioritize family first on top of anything else. So Jessie and I made this kind of commitment, which requires our future husbands to agree on any traveling plans we have! Woohooo! We rock! 😛

* Continuing this project again, after 3 months of hiatus — due to privacy concerns. Now this project is powered by WordPress! 🙂

There was a very interesting presentation today at the mosque about card fraud, known as “skimming”. Skimming is the type of card fraud which copies magnetic stripe cards to produce duplicates. Honestly, I’ve never known anything regarding this type of scam! I was quite shocked that this could happen. I was even surprised to know that the Netherlands is one of the European countries most targeted by skimmers, mainly from Eastern Europe. There have been over 900 reports of skimming in this country according to this website. It’s indeed scary!

I’ve never paid attention to this honestly. I mean, every time I take money from ATM or buy my train tickets from the ticket machine, I never be suspicious of anything. Now that I know, I should have been more careful!

So, how can we avoid to be the victim of skimming?

• Always use an ATM inside a bank. Never use stand-alone ATM machines. If you have to do it, then make sure you familiarize yourself with the machine. Does the card slot look different, perhaps?
• When entering your PIN number on the ATM machine, make sure you cover it with your other hand. That way, no one (camera, stalker, or people behind you) would be able to see the numbers you’re entering.
• Avoid using debit or credit cards to make transactions in the restaurants. You never know what the waiter would do with your card, right?? (As shown in this video)
• Don’t take your card off your wallet when waiting in a queue for the ATM machine (lesson learned from the video above)

Hope it’s useful 🙂

See you soon.

🙂

One afternoon chat with my lovely brother. How I miss him so.

This is a video titled “Jakarta in Jeopardy”. It was uploaded about 2 years ago but I’ve never watched this til now. It’s very interesting. I always heard about how Jakarta could be sinking in few years time and I didn’t know if this argument came from experts / scientists or from people speculating on those issues 😛

But in this video, my doubts were cleared. Jakarta is indeed sinking. The city is expected to be about 1 meter lower than the current position — thanks to the ground water extraction done by most households and business as well as industrial giants in Jakarta. When a city develops, it gets heavier. As much water from the ground gets extracted, the whole city gets pushed downwards. So this can also be the reason why Jakarta is flooded during the time when no rains fall. Because of the sinking Jakarta — it sinks below sea level, unfortunately.

The flood that frequently occurs in Jakarta is also caused by two main reasons: urban development and rubbish. Development can’t seem to stop, every 2 years I go back to Jakarta, I always see new huge buildings or malls built. It fascinates me how fast Jakarta grows. But unfortunately, the rate of Jakarta’s maintenance runs slower than its development. And our government doesn’t seem to care about this. Can we safe our Jakarta?

According to Wikipedia, The Netherlands is a geographically low-lying country, with about 20% of its area and 21% of its population located below sea level, with 50% of its land lying less than one metre above sea level. But somehow, the canals and rivers are clean, free of garbage, and most importantly have never caused any floods for the past 40-50 years! Amazing, isn’t it?

I myself think that Jakarta is not “livable” anymore. It’s waaaaay too crowded! Let’s just move to another city then 😛

Love is the cure, for your pain will keep giving birth to more pain until your eyes constantly exhale love as effortlessly as your body yields its scent.

Jalal ad-Din Rumi

My day started with meeting with a friend to do our assignment for 3 hours. Not fun, but it was combined with good talks and laughter. So it was not as bad as I thought 🙂

Then I decided to go to centrum to find a birthday gift for my friend Ian. I seriously had NO CLUE what to give to him. I wanted to give him something special and unusual but my budget obviously didn’t support it. So I went to Mediamarkt (an electronic shop) to find something that I could buy. As I was searching for something, surprisingly I met my former Macedonian teammate Goran! It was such an unplanned encounter! He was nice and friendly as usual; even invited me for a coffee or something to catch up! Probably we’re going to meet up this week; gonna wait for his email or call. We’ll see.

Anyway, as expected, I left Mediamarkt with empty handed. I found something that I liked, but apparently they didn’t have it anymore — the stock was finished. I went to other electronic stores in the centrum and was very disappointed that the price was waaaaayyyyyyyy out of my budget. It was already 4pm and I still had to go for grocery shopping. So I thought I’d continue this gift hunting thing tomorrow.

I went to Kruisstraat to do grocery shopping and I suddenly remembered that there was indeed another electronic shop in that area. So I went there to check out the stuff that I wanted to buy. Turned out that it was on discount!!! 40% discount! Wohooo… and this was a good and well known brand. So I was so happy about it! This was probably my best gift ever hahaha… I really hoped he would like it 🙂

My day didn’t stop until there. There were too many things happening and I was surprised myself too. I couldn’t reveal it now though. Haha. Well, I’m just still shocked that I decided to do it.

A friend of mine, Ikram called me over the YM and we talked for more than 1.5 hours! It was the longest ever! hahaha. It was fun, I really enjoyed it.

Alhamdulillah for everything 🙂