“So you’re Lan Zi,” my tea specialist concluded in her broken English. She was suspiciously staring at me as if I had just poured hot water all over her delicate hand. I just finished explaining my lame excuse for not being able to talk in any of the Chinese dialects fluently - the ability to speaking Chinese stopped in my generation because I was born in the non-Chinese-speaking country of Indonesia. That, and I now live in the United States. “Lan Zi, what’s that?” I thought. I just innocently blinked at her, while sipping my precious Ti Kuan Yin Oolong Tea. [View Full Entry]

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Macau - Most Americans would raise their eyebrows upon hearing the name. For us, Macau is almost as exotic as secluded Timbuktu or legendary El Dorado, but in reality, it is more accessible than those two aforementioned places. Unfortunately, Macau is not going to be on traveler’s top list places to visit anytime soon. Its proximate location to mega polis Hong Kong dwarfs the importance of this region - and one can’t help but comparing Macau with Hong Kong. Yet, Macau holds many fascinating gems that are worth checking out - UNESCO just added its thirty historical structures and plazas into [View Full Entry]

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Within only 85 miles north of the equator line, Singapore is wickedly humid. Lush tropical trees and exotic plants are thriving and covering most of the island - along its roads and in between modern buildings and historical structures, making it even hard to breathe yet comfortable for having the shades over human habitation down on the ground level. After receiving a bad news from my brother-in-law, I scrambled around to find a plane ticket to Singapore, and some twenty-eight hours later, I stepped out from Terminal One of Changi International Airport to meet up with my immediate family, who had [View Full Entry]

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A three hour driving from Atlanta to Columbia in neighboring state of South Carolina is considered as a very close proximity travel in the Deep South. And as a gift to myself and to attend my fraternity’s Charge of Rho Proteron’s installation at University of South Carolina - Columbia, I spend this year’s leap day on the road and visit South Carolina once again. ‘Columbia’ is derived from the poetic name of the famous Spanish Explorer Christopher Columbus, who claimed to ‘discover’ the new land of America. Located in approximate center of State of South Carolina, Columbia is crowned to be [View Full Entry]

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Mazel Tov! -- ‘Good fortune’ - a phrase that is often said frequently and loudly at Jewish celebrations. The excited exclamation brings me back from my brief daydream, after a couple of minutes listening to a foreign speech that I can not understand. I look around and find myself sitting among a hundred enthusiast worshippers inside Baron Hirsch Synagogue - an intricate American Orthodox Judaism synagogue in the City of Blues - Memphis, Tennessee. The congregation hall is inviting, with stain glass windows hanging high, depicting several bearded men and various Hebrew inscriptions. High above at the ceiling, the familiar six-sided [View Full Entry]

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Monday, October 1st, 2007 - Sydney, New South Wales, Australia I have to admit that I have not found any negative things about Australia so far. Beautiful nature, stunning harbors and an easy going culture - what else one might want? It seems like the whole continent has a good gene pool - everybody is fit and athletic, and the only obese people I have spotted so far are international tourists (and unfortunately most of them seemed to be Northern Americans). After another twelve hour coach overnight ride from Melbourne’s Southern Cross, I was excited to be back in Sydney CBD. [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 - Sydney, New South Wales, Australia After backpacking and moving to one new place to the next for almost a month now, I started to understand the importance of having a home base. A place where you feel belong, a place where your heart is. Thus in my case, I am becoming an unofficial bum in Australia, of which I can’t complain much anyway. Homesick started to hit me pretty hard, and I came to a realization that as much as it sounds fun and exciting, traveling can also become a difficult adjustment with no sense of [View Full Entry]

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Friday, September 21st, 2007 - Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Fauna of the Down Under are unique to the region, concluded a nineteenth century British biologist named Alfred Russell Wallace, after noticing the distinctive mammal species that can not be found anywhere else in the world upon his visits to Australia. Back in our Indonesian high school, we always learned about the Wallace Line which defines the zoogeographical region between Asian and Australian faunas, thus put the archipelago of Indonesian islands into one of the highest concentration of biodiversity in the world, by having both Asian (west side) and Australian (east [View Full Entry]

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Monday, September 17th, 2007 - Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Sydney, Australia. The name of the city conjures up many world known landmarks located in the area - Sydney Opera House, the coat hanger Harbour Bridge, and Bondi Beach, to name a few. And some tanned Australians wandering around in their funny hat saying, ‘G’day’. Surprisingly, the more I read about Sydney, the more I realized that I had scratched only the surface of this bustling modern city. Sydney’s rapid expansion has only started in the past fifty years, with claiming to be the biggest city in Australia with 4.2 million [View Full Entry]

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Saturday, September 15th, 2007 - Milford Sound, World Heritage Fiordland NP, New Zealand Queenstown is named after the fact that 'it was a city that was fit for Queen Victoria'. It also happens to be the adventure capital of the world; the world famous bungee company A.J. Hackett's first bungee jumping was born here, just outside Queenstown in historic Kawarau Bridge. The aforementioned facts combined, I could only imagine Queen Victoria is dangling upside down doing bungee jumping. Queenstown is a premiere world class visitors destination on the South Island of New Zealand, and around this time of the year, there [View Full Entry]

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