A Crystal Across the Seas

I WAS at Waterford looking for crystals. Waterford, situated in the southeast region of Ireland, is renowned for its crystal-making industry. Gazing at the beautiful crystals displayed in showcases, I was reminded of a cookie stall back in Malaysia, where there was a sign that read "Free Smells". In this case, I was entitled to a "Free Look".

Feeling hungry, I decided to sniff out some Chinese cuisine in Passage East, a little town in Waterford, off the beaten track. The search was not futile as tucked away in a little corner was a very impressive Chinese restaurant named Howay. (Possibly "good taste" in Mandarin.)

I am still amused that Chinese restaurants here have all the symbols of Chinese culture: red lanterns, images of the eight immortals, pandas, dragons, bamboo and other paraphernalia which make them distinctive. The menus are almost always similar. For example, there is a section on chow mein (noodles), where there is a list of chow mein with prawns, chow mein with beef and chow mein with chicken. Now, would it not be simpler if the menu had read chow mein with any meat of your choice?

The meat or fish served is always fillet-style and I miss sucking on a tasty chicken bone or sinking my teeth into a sweet-and-sour garoupa. I also observe that a plate of rice is always served with a fork, never with a fork and spoon. In some restaurants that I am familiar with, the waiter would also present me with an "insider's" menu, whereby the curries will be hotter and the fish or chicken will be cooked with the bones intact, the way we do it in Chinese Malaysian restaurants.
Walking up the carpeted stairs of Howay, Mr Charming with a broad smile said, "Welcome". I replied in Mandarin, "Liang wei", literally meaning table for two. Whenever I reply in Mandarin or Cantonese when I see an Oriental in a shop or restaurant, the effect is profound and I suspect the service becomes better because we are on common ground. Immediately, the smile was transfixed on the young man's face. It was the same when I spoke Malay to the owner of an Indonesian shop in Amsterdam.

After we had ordered, Mr Charming was curious and asked where I was from. I said, " Ma-lai-xi-ah" and there was a split-second silence. I could hear a pin drop. Then he said, "I am from Terengganu" to which I replied that I once taught in Dungun, too. After that, there was no stopping the questions and answers as we exchanged in Mandarin trivial information about our commonalities.

He told me that he had been in Passage East for six years and his customers came from near and far. I admired his tenacity and spirit of entrepreneurship. I wondered why anyone would travel across mountains and oceans to start a restaurant in a predominantly white area. I believed the reasons must have been good and well thought-out before a brave move like that was made. It could be for economical or educational reasons. It reminded me of how my father came from China to Malaysia to ensure that his family had a better life. It reminded me of practicality, love and sacrifice -- the extent that we would go to secure a brighter future for our descendants.

I wondered what his family did after the restaurant closed for the day. Who did they meet up with for a game of mahjong? Did they go to the cinema or did they buy DVDs to watch at home? Did they go back to Terengganu on a regular basis? Did they mingle with the local white community?

Mr Charming suggested that I go to Tramore, a nearby seaside resort, after dinner.

"Who knows you could be lucky and get five sevens," he said.

Not trying to expose my ignorance, I had to go to Tramore to find out what "five sevens" was. I laughed when I discovered that if I had five sevens on a one-armed bandit machine, I could win myself E2,500 (RM 10,000) at least. But what was winning euros compared with the best dinner I ever had?

The food was good and the service excellent. The Chinese music that filled the air reminded me of my mother singing in the kitchen. But most of all, it was the beauty of finding a crystal of similarities in a far-flung corner of the world.

Wishing all Chinese Malaysians a happy and prosperous New Year.

SAVOURING A WINTRY CHARM

AS the arctic weather descends, I find myself walking across a bridge paved with snow and ice at snail’s pace lest I fall. The cold snap is the result of high pressure over Iceland and low pressure in the south which is feeding cold air over Ireland.
The first snowflake fell around midnight about a month ago and I roused my daughter from her bed because she had not seen one. When we opened the front door, we found that we were not alone, as others had also emerged from under their cosy electric blankets to catch the wintry charm. Soon we were making snowballs and pelting at each other, right at midnight. Others were taking photos of the snow and the footprints left behind.

Every season has its own beauty.

Winter by far is the last season of the year and makes a grand entrance, like the fat lady who sings at the end of the show.

It is after all the culmination of all the days that had been and the promise of better days to come.
Winter spells a white landscape and a different living style.

A white landscape is something that takes everyone by surprise overnight even if it happens every year.

I went to sleep when the leaves were still golden brown to find them suffering from premature aging the next day for they had turned completely white.
Rooftops looked like they had been covered with royal icing and snow people dotted the gardens that were once green Snow people would be the politically correct term these days as we have the traditional snowman with hat, carrot nose and twigs for hands and the avant-garde snowwoman who wears a broad smile and a bra.

I heard over the radio that a woman had called the police to investigate the fact that someone had stolen her snowman because she had put coins where his eyes should be.

I thought it sounded ridiculous and ludicrous.

Truly, winter brings a different lifestyle.

Temperatures have plummeted to as low as minus 5º C. I cannot just hop into my car and drive away without checking the weather forecast first.

Snow showers, ice and freezing fog are the order of the day. There are strange terms like black ice and grit and salt that pepper conversations.
Black ice refers to a thin, unexpected and nearly invisible coating of ice on a roadway or walkway surface. As my house is on a slope, we are advised to park our cars elsewhere on level ground when brakes will not work on slippery roads. Then when I saw town council workers busy working in the freezing cold with luminous safety jackets, I asked them curiously what they were doing.

“We are putting grit on the roads, so the people won’t fall. We have enough grit in stock to keep the country’s road network accessible as we brace ourselves for a bitterly cold snap.” He said and showed me the bits of grit which looked like small stones. People are also buying salt to help melt the snow on their driveways. In Dublin, winter maintenance crews would use in the region of 100 tonnes of salt every night when the snow is severe.

My car is covered with ice every night and I pour warm water over the windscreen in the morning.

Clothes that are partially dried would be draped over the radiators to take advantage of the heat. I have learnt how to start a fire in a fireplace and images of Enid Blyton’s characters and toasting marshmallows in the fireplace all seem so real.

Being a clothes horse, one of the nice things about winter is I can wear beautiful coats, woolen scarves and hats that would otherwise have made me melt under the Malaysian heat.

Sewing one's life experiences into a comfy quilt

I ALWAYS believe the best asset a woman can have is a pair of hands. So one Saturday from 9.30am to 4pm, armed with a sewing machine and materials, I began a serious affair with patchwork and quilting, drinking hot creamy vegetable soup and eating salmon and cheese sandwiches in-between at Winander House on Park Road, Limerick -- a quilter's haven.
Patchwork has evolved into an art from the time my mother pieced together remnants of cloth to create security blankets. This time round, I had to purchase cotton material and coordinate the colours and cut them into angular shapes and sizes. It sounds ridiculous to purposefully cut a good-sized piece of cloth into smaller bits and then sew them back together again. But therein lies the mystery of many lessons learnt.

To begin with, I had to coordinate the prints and colours of the cloth to reflect the theme I had in mind. This reminded me of the friends I had made during my sojourn across the globe who are as different as night and day. There are those who swear by eating potatoes and others who will not survive a day without rice. Then there are the sago eaters and those who chomp churros.

Greetings also differ. There are some who shake hands, some who hug and some who prefer to kiss the cheek. A motley crew indeed but every single one of these friends added to my wealth of knowledge and understanding.
Then I took the stance of the master cutter, cutting the shapes and sizes of cloth that I needed. The image it conjured was of the gardener pruning his rose bushes, usually in winter, so that the roots would grow deeper and new shoots would sprout in spring. The pruned rose bush is nothing attractive to behold and if plants could talk, probably the sharp pruning shears hurt. Like plants, we are often pruned by our experiences so we can develop into better beings.

The cut pieces of cloth, on the other hand, are like pieces of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope. Each piece of glass is beautiful in itself but when combined with other pieces of glass they form unique patterns, each one different from the other.

Surely, we all, too, have our pieces of glass that cut and make us bleed. Classic quotes concerning the lessons learnt from experiences abound: experiences mould character, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, every cloud has a silver lining. The list goes on. Yet when we are caught in a bad moment, character moulding is the last thing on our mind.

Most times we think that our bad moments are the worst in the world until we hear of the predicament of another in a poorer state. There is this interesting exercise usually held at group therapy sessions where everyone is asked to pen his problem on a piece of paper and drop it into a bin in the middle of the room. At the end of the session, each person is given the choice to pick "another problem" from the bin to take it home or take his own problem home. The outcome is always similar: no one wants to take another person's problem home, for fear that it could be worse.

The next step in making a patchwork quilt is to sew the pieces together. Again this mirrors life's actions. If anyone has gone through surgery, he can agree with me that when the anaesthetic wears off, the pain is excruciating. Stitching is part of the healing process and the scars that remain stand to remind us of the experience. People say we should forgive and forget but being human, scars do remain and we may not forget but if the sting is no longer attached to the memory, then the healing has begun.

The final process is to put the batting under the completed patchwork to form a quilt. The batting gives it body and keeps someone warm while he watches his favourite television programme during wintry days. As the Christmas quilt now proudly drapes the back of the three-seater in the living room, I cannot but admire the big picture. Truth be told, I had my doubts whether certain strong colours would blend with the pastels, but I was proven wrong. The overall effect was spectacular.

Have a blessed Christmas.

WINTRY CHARM

When the snow falls
On the icy ground
And the wind calls
A curious sound
It’s a mystery
That every snowflake is unique
And everything flies in a flurry
As we shuffle our feet.

When the snow falls
And the robin goes and hides
Behind the walls
That are frozen and white.
The branches are bare
The leaves brittle and light
In the cold thin air
Through the long dark night

When the snow falls
Wrapped in warm coats and mittens
We hurriedly open the doors
With our wooden tobaggans
We scoop up some snow
Partially hidden we lie
No weapons, no arrows or bows
Ready to pelt snow balls at passers-by.

The sweet returns of card making

BUYING and sending greeting cards is like a treasured memory, now that there are phone calls, ecards, short messages and video messages.
Ask anyone below the age of 15 whether he has sent a greeting card and you will feel like a dinosaur when he says: "Who sends cards these days?"

Although the occasional card still arrives in the mail, what we generally find in our postbox these days are bills and junk mail. Gone are the days when we eagerly waited for the postman to arrive on his red bicycle to hand over to us, personally, postcards, birthday cards or festive cards.
We bought cards for all occasions, hand wrote the details and penned them off with warmest regards. For those whom we were particularly fond of, we enclosed little mementos. Then we cycled or walked to the nearest post office to buy stamps of different denominations. We selected the stamps with care, especially if the stamps came in a sequence.

I have just joined a ladies' group and our last activity was not just buying and sending cards, but actually making them and sending them to perfect strangers.

The leader of the group came armed with a list of names, card paper, envelopes and lots of embellishments to decorate the cards.

We were to come up with our own designs and write thoughtful lines to those who needed encouragement and living in far-flung countries.

I thought that was a perfectly lovely idea.

The last time I made a card was about a month ago. I designed a Hari Raya Aidiladha card for my Asian Muslim neighbour as I could not find such cards on sale here.

He was surprised because that was probably the first card he had ever received since he emigrated to Ireland. Shortly after I had given him the card, I went shopping.

When I returned, my daughter said my neighbour had called and given us a tub of payasam, a traditional South Asian sweet dish, made by boiling rice or broken wheat with milk and sugar, and flavoured with cardamom, raisins, saffron, pistachios or almonds.

Indeed, making and sending a card goes a long way.

First, we put our creative juices on paper. The array of felt pens, stickers and knick-knacks, like ribbons and plastic googly eyes, were enough to spur even the uninitiated into a world spiced with colour, patterns and originality.

Some took to drawing immediately, while others mulled over what to write and how to decorate the cards. For once, we felt like amateur Da Vincis with blank canvasses before us.

Next, I was sitting among friends, mothers and grandmothers. Female bonding, a term that is used in ethology and social science, spells patterns of friendship, attachment, and cooperation in women.

We came from different backgrounds and countries but we shared the same goal for the day.

It reminded me of the movie Letters to Juliet, a 2010 American romantic comedy film where a group of well-meaning volunteers sat down to answer thousands of missives left at the fictional lover's Verona courtyard.

Finally, just as in Malaysia, no meeting would be complete without the eating of comfort food.

We forgot about the carbohydrates, let down our guards and traded personal details and experiences. That was what hot aromatic coffee and custard creams did for the souls. Very welcome treats when the biting cold of Autumn winds continued to blow.

By midday, the group managed to whip up an impressive batch of cards all ready to be posted.

We may never know the responses of those who will receive them, but we all went home knowing that a specially-made card carried with it a lot of love.

'Newspaper' bricks to brag about

AS I sat shredding old newspapers, I was reminded of the "old newspaper man".
He was not exactly my best pal because he would disturb my sleep on weekends.

To make matters worse, I had a niggling suspicion that I was shortchanged every time he took away a towering stack of newspapers and left me with a paltry sum of money.

But that was yesterday.
Like the time-tested tale of the ant and the grasshopper, I am actually enjoying my new-found hobby, making paper mache bricks out of old newspapers to light the fireplace in winter.

Sure, we can go out and buy bags of turf at the convenience store but nothing beats creating your own fuel -- soaking the paper, compressing the pulp in a simple machine bought from eBay and drying the bricks.

Recycling is big time in Ireland. Surprisingly, many household items that end up in the bin each week can be recycled.

The whole idea is to divert rubbish from landfills. In just five years, the country has brought the average electric recyclables to 9.5kg per person compared with the European Union average of 5kg.

Every bag of rubbish to be thrown away has to be taken personally to the dump and the cost is E5 (RM21) per bag. If you want the local council workers to come collect the rubbish for you, then you have to pay E8.

Thus, it only makes sense to recycle here.

Convenience is priority where recycling is concerned. You have to sort out your trash according to the labels on the banks.

Everything is welcomed except food scraps, wet clothes and carpets. The recycling services provided by local authorities are mainly free, although there might be charges for certain items or for large quantities.

There are three types of public recycling facilities -- "bring" centres, civic amenity centres and recycling centres.

Throughout Ireland, there are almost 2,000 "bring" centres. These are collection points for recyclable materials like glass, paper, textiles, food packages and drink cans.

Civic amenity centres, on the other hand, are custom-built, staffed and have specific opening hours.

There are about 100 civic amenity centres in Ireland and they accept more items, including electrical equipment, fluorescent tubes, waste oil, DIY waste and construction and demolition waste.

Like civic amenity centres, the 80 recycling centres around Ireland are also staffed and gated, and have specific opening hours. But they accept a smaller variety of items than civic amenity centres.

Finally, there is the kerbside collection of separated waste (known as a "green bin" collection) which may be run either by the local authorities or private companies.

Some local authorities even provide a "brown bin" for organic waste. If the organic kerbside collection service is not available, it is not unusual to see compost bins in backyards.

The passion to recycle is catching on here and if you are not recycling, you certainly do not belong to the people of the earth, so to speak.

Come winter, as I savour my cup of tea and apple pie by the fireplace and hear the crackling fire hungrily devouring the newspaper bricks, I will feel the pride of my hands glowing and know that I have done my bit for the environment.

MUCH SOLACE FROM WORDS

LOOKING at the Cliffs of Moher, I stood inspired by the unspoilt beauty of nature. The 214m high cliffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean take their name from a ruined promontory fort "Mothar" which was demolished during the Napoleonic wars to make room for a signal tower. The Cliffs of Moher are also home to one of the major colonies of cliff nesting seabirds in Ireland. Indeed, nature has a calming effect on the soul and spirit.

If we think back to when we were young, we can always remember the people who have encouraged us: dad, mum, teacher or friend. Even in adulthood, a pat on the back by a boss or coach does wonders to the soul and spirit.

Other than the usual "awesome" and "fantastic", I picked up a number of interesting local phrases of praise and encouragement. "You are no daw" means you are smart, "you are deadly" means you are seriously earth-shattering. The power of words is unquestionable. Being encouraged gives a boost to our confidence. Uplifting words can come from anyone: a security guard, a priest or a car salesman.
It was late in the night when I visited a loved one at the intensive care unit of a hospital. I was thirsty and decided to get a cup of coffee from the vending machine. However, the glass door that led to the vending machine was closed and a security guard signalled to me on the other side of the door to press a button to open it.

The door opened in a jiffy but I noticed that there was no button on the other side of the door for me to get back into the ward. "How am I going to get back in?" I asked. He said, "Just holler, and I will come running." Then some small talk ensued. As I was making my way back into the ward, he said, "You speak very good English." I smiled and thought that was nice.
Then I saw a very elderly priest making his rounds hoping to encourage the patients. He approached an 84-year-old Catherine, held her hand and instead of saying the usual "Get well soon", the witty priest asked, "Are you ready to go back to the hurling field after half-time and continue the match?"

The elderly lady laughed and I thought that was hilarious. Hurling is an outdoor team sport of ancient Gaelic origin, played with sticks called hurleys and a ball called a sliotar. It is somewhat like hockey to the uninitiated.

The priest held her hand and prayed for her. Then before he left the ward, he said, "Now Catherine, no more hurling for the rest of the season, okay?"

As I walked to my car after the hospital visit, I was reminded of the salesman who sold me the car. He told me I would have to buy insurance online. Apparently, the quotes differ greatly from company to company. One of the determining factors would be age. To the average Mat Salleh, all Asians look alike and it is difficult to tell how old they are. So I asked him how much it would cost to buy a year's insurance for a particular model.

He sized me up in my jeans and T-shirt and very seriously without batting an eyelid said, "That depends on your age. I won't ask you how old you are but I can tell you for a lady of 25 to 30 years, it would cost..." I guffawed within. Call it sales talk but if that is what he thinks I am, so be it.