february 2013 | project 52

For January 2013 pictures (#1 to #4), click here.

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[#5] Red Filter.

[#6] Smile

[#7] Hurt

[#7] Dream

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I’ve been able to shoot weekly and have them posted up on Facebook every week, so I’m really proud of this achievement. It’s my first creative project spanning throughout the year, after all. I do hope, I’ll get more inspirations as the weeks come by. February flew by, and before I know it, March will to. I hope life has been good to you, and if it hasn’t have faith, it’ll come around soon. Love, Carmen.

21st December 2012, in Genting Highlands

Note: This post was from eons ago, but it was sitting in my drafts and I never got to posting it. Haha. Finally went through my drafts, and voila, I’m posting it up now.

My brother being the naive boy he is, wanted to spend the supposed ‘Doomsday’ day in Genting. Guess why? Because it was the nearest highest point we could get to in such short time. If the world ended by floods like how the now a comedy movie, “2012” have shown, it would hit us later than if we were in KL. And so, we spent two days in Genting. I can’t remember when was the last time I was up there, it must have been years. I did kind of missed the theme park and I was looking forward to that, only to have Danny telling me how long the queues were when he was up a few days earlier. I decided it was better to just chill than to wait eons for the rides, cause there is nothing worse than that to kill off the holiday mood.

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Started the journey there with delicious comfort food at Pan Heong Restaurant, near Batu Caves. The porridges there is good and worth a try, pictured here is the Frog Porridge.

But the winner for us is hands down, the ‘Wat Tan Hor’; Cantonese Fried Flat Noodles in Egg Gravy. This is really too yummy-licious, it’s so smooth and the eggs, you can taste the glorious egg gravy. It’s really so good.

The next stop was Gohtong Jaya, which is on the way up to Genting Highlands. There used to be a few shops and restaurants, I used to think it was a dead place. But turns out, there is strawberry farm and a lavender farm too! I almost died from joy when I was at the lavender farm. :) Such a gorgeous place, flowers flowers everywhere.

Took a picture with mom, haven’t had one with her for some time. :) Oh, that is how the farm looks like, it’s a pretty small farm but still pretty nevertheless. I must visit a lavender field when I travel to Europe!

Selfie with my phone camera and the lavender! :)

While we were in Genting, we actually visited two vegetable farm there. One of the farm was known as a Mini Cameron Highlands and I somehow find that funny. The vegetables were really fresh and surprisingly gorgeous, that I did a photo set for them (I’ll post that up in another post, look out for that).

At the vegetable farm, you can pluck/pick your own vegetable. Which actually was a pretty simple process, just lift it up from the container. Haha.

Just like how my mom did!

They will take off the black container and this is how it looks like. The vegetables were the freshest I ever had, so tasty to eat it as salad. 

They had a strawberry farm in Gohtong Jaya as well! You can pick your strawberries, but personally there weren’t a lot to pick. Easier to buy the plucked ones, unless you want the experience of picking your own strawberries.

Huge sunflower! :D It was really freaking huge! There wasn’t a sunflower farm, just a dozen of really tall sunflowers stalks.

Just realised that I’ve been posting more about the farms and what not than Genting itself, but I’d pretty much lazed and walked around in Genting. Nothing worthy of a mention except that Genting was super duper foggy in all the two days we were there.

On the way up.

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Would it be too late to say “Thanked God the world didn’t end” ? Haha, but there was a super freaky heavy thunderstorm that night though. And together with the brother and sister, we actually walked out, looked up to the skies and shouted “Bring it on!”. Self amusement, to a whole new level. :D

That’s all for this post! I really need to stop having backlogs. :/ It’s getting annoying.

CNY: The Snake Year 2013

It’s Chap Goh Meh today, which means it’s the last day of the Chinese New Year already. Happy Chap Goh Meh, to all celebrating and good luck with the tossing of mandarin oranges? Haha. I personally don’t celebrate this day. So, it’s a pretty quiet usual day for me and so I managed to sit myself down to come up with a short post of what went down during my Chinese New Year.

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As with the Chinese New Year, the reunion dinner is one of the most important meal for the family. :) It’s sort of the grandest meal we would have, or one that would be prepared. This year, we opted to eat in, with the parents cooking up a storm and my aunt made a huge ass delicious Yee Sang. This year, no fancy designs for the Yee Sang but we had abalone slices, instead of salmon.

The hugest Yee Sang who can possibly get.

Our 6 course meal with close up pictures below. :D

‘Pak Cham Kai’

Braised Mushrooms with Brocolli

Fried ‘Nam Yee’ Pork

Fried ‘wantans’

Curry Butter Prawns

Leeks with ‘Siew Yuk’, in ‘Nam Yee’ sauce.

That was all the awesome good food I had for reunion dinner, homecooked by the parents. Then, we headed to the temple to pray after dinner, it’s an annual thing. Came home and there were fireworks played in the neighbourhood. So much, that it almost sounded like a warzone. The brother wanted to have a closer look at them, so we walked around until we saw this neighbour with huge boxes of fireworks (x5). Yes, five whole boxes. Since I had my camera with me, I tried to shoot them. Which was pretty easy to shoot with an S90 because there was a scene mode for Fireworks. Basically point and shoot, and gorgeous pictures! Ta-da. Haha.

On the first day of the new year, I did my nails with a CNY theme in mind (here is the post; CNY nails!) and I shot #6 for | project 52, taking inspiration from my favourite peach wired headband and my curly hair. Here are some fun shots from that mini shoot.

Met my cutest, favourite nephew, the handsome Darren on the second day. So adorable he deserves a blown up picture.

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This post pretty much sums up how the Chinese New Year was for me, being able to celebrate on the first three days only because I started working on the fourth day. I wish I have been able to see my college friends, it’s been some time since I last saw the girls. :/ I’m still trying to get used to this whole work life balance. Wish me luck on that, and till next time! Will try to keep updating the blog whenever I can.

Swatch: Essence’s King of Mints

About a few months back, I was going nuts trying to find the right shade of mint green polish. I have fallen in love with the colour, especially after seeing the colours on lookbook.nu. But somehow back then, the mint green colour trend hasn’t hit off here in Malaysia yet, and so, none of the usual nail polish brand carried this colour. :( Then, one day while I was at Watsons, I went over to the Essence shelves (This is the only way to get Essence products after the Coci Coci shops in Mid Valley and Lot 10 closed down). The products left for sale was almost miserable, Watsons rarely stock up on Essence’s products. :( But here I saw a polish which was named as King of Mints.

And in that moment, I thought I found treasure, literally. Haha, even though the colour wasn’t too promising from the bottle I still got it because it was named King of Mints and I, Carmen Hong has been looking for a mint polish since forever. There was only two bottles left and I knew I didn’t get it now, I wouldn’t ever be able to. So, I thought why not give it a try, it was only RM8.90 after all.

The colour was, frankly disappointing and isn’t anywhere close to being a minty green polish. It is a very dull colour, but it was actually a rather unique polish actually because it had a glazed effect after applying it. This effect is not obvious under normal lightning conditions, but once in the sunlight, you could see that little glazed sparkle.

I have always been amazed by polishes from Essence but for Kings of Mints, I am afraid I can’t say the same. Putting the colour aside, the brush itself is different from the usual polishes. This is probably because King of Mints is from a limited edition collection called Rock You, released way back in 2011. (See how slow Malaysia is? =.=’)

As you can see the design of the bottle is square-ish which is strikingly similar to Butter London’s design of bottles. I quite like a square bottle which is a nice change from the usual designs. But what I really hated was that Essence made the brush for this polish so ridiculously microscopically small. It was so difficult to apply the polish with such small and short brush. The second time I applied this, I learnt that to apply this polish smoother, you’ll have to take up more product to apply it evenly.

Overall, I don’t really like this polish as much as I liked the name, which was disappointing really. But nevertheless, I’ll still get more Essence polish when I can, because I know the brand has been usually consistent with its other polishes.

Nail Art: Chinese New Year nails!

What is Chinese New Year without loads of Mandarin oranges? Once you see these oranges, it can only mean that the Chinese New Year was around the corner. :) So, I thought it would have been appropriate to pose my nail with a Mandarin orange. Haha.

january 2013 | project 52

(pre-posted, i don’t blog at work.

I spent my first minute of February 1st, 2012 looking for my promise rings. Love & Hope; I had them as a promise to myself that I will always remember, to have faith, to accept and to believe. I thought I lost them, but then again, you don’t lose Love or Hope. Then, I spent the next 15 minutes lying on the floor, something I love to do after a long day. Having spend 16 hours outside and at work, it pretty damn well was a long day. That pretty much happens everyday, such is the nature of my job.

Before I know, 31 days in January have passed. I knew, I would feel this way and this was bound to happen. How not to, when you spent 6 days working and then with that precious other day, you squeeze as much as you do in that day? And so, my life becomes a somewhat predictable routine. I don’t mind, in fact in some ways I am thankful to be able to concentrate my time and energy into something better than what that could drive me crazy.

Of course, I have insane days and days that gets too overwhelming. But the first step is always much harder, so is the first few months on the job. And to pretty much stay sane and keep my creative juices flowing, I decided to commit myself to a | project 52, which a year-long weekly photo challenge. There are websites that sets a theme for every week that goes by, but I personally prefer to pick my own theme. I won’t say what my theme is but I think it’ll be pretty obvious from the pictures.

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[#1] Headshot

[#2] Monotone

[#3] Graphic + Print

[#4] Inversion

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Starting this project have been pretty amazing for me, pushing my boundaries and having to come up with a picture for every week. I have been really happy with #1, #2 and the best of all would have to be #4. For #4, it’s one thing to have an idea in your mind, to imagine it how the picture would or should turn out to be and having to go and shoot with the result being just as you have imagined if not better. But then again, not every picture or shot will be just like that. There will be a photographer’s block, when what you imagined no matter what wouldn’t turn out as you wished. So, #5 ended up being the picture I didn’t visualize or imagined. I don’t like it because it doesn’t match the set. But this doesn’t matter, the process of taking the pictures was what is important.

[#5] Red Filter.

When I took #5, I had a horrible day before that and also after that. I was so mind screwed, in fact the whole day should be called the day-we-screw-Carmen’s-mind-day. I hope next week will be better. It will, I have faith. The pictures are also up in Facebook and uploaded into that album, with captions and lyrics that I feel most when I took the picture.