Book of Sakura

There are a few NY resolution. One of which I have shared is to bring my family to Japan. This time, my wife will be following me to help realise one of my dreams. I rem that I need to provide her a book of sakura next time we go Japan - the last trip was cherry blossom Tohoku and we wanted to ID the sakura trees.

There are many species of Sakura trees. As a beginner, I read that we could easily distinguish them by a few simple rules - no. of petals, colour of flowers and the shape of the trees. For petals, there are common 5-petal flower, 20-petal ones and even 100-petal ones. Each type of petal has its own Jap name which I have yet to comprehend and rem. For colours, we saw white, pink and yellow ones before and this also helps differentiate the species. 

There are also shapes of the trees that ID one from another. The weeping ones are quite different from the V-shaped ones. By "weeping", you can image how the shape of the tree look like, tears dripping down in divergence. There are much more to learn and I will try to "teach" my wife and even my family for the coming trip if the sakura season is still on. This time, maybe not the sakura "cake", but more of the "sakura mood". 

~Sakura Sakura~   

恭喜发财

Happy Lunar New Year. This new year a bit different - Visiting relatives in a new status as married persons. New year visiting has changed over the years since I was born. As a child, new year meant to be visiting many relatives and I usually dun like to wear new clothes as they kinda uncomfortable for me. As a youth, visiting became comparing height, studies & acting "cool" in front of all my cousins. As an adult, visiting became a rare get-together, visiting my beloved granny and my papa's auntie. We started to skip CNY visitings on day 1 and 2 and rather go overseas on these two days. Visiting became a chore as relatives tend to ask about when would I be settling down and about work....

As we progress, visiting relatives' places became "consolidated" i.e. all will just gather at a particular place e.g. granny's place and we will just "tumpang" the red packets and request granny or uncle to pass them to our relatives. This year, we did the same. Just that granny had left us and we went to auntie's house with auntie as the "elder" liao. Granny's stuff all kept already, a bit different and strange. Dunno why but I started to miss visiting relatives during CNY. We used to eat sumptous dinner at granny's "Circuit Road" house. All of us would be there, played and made noise whole day. Now, all our next generation are not so close anymore. Perhaps, we dun even recog one another on street. I recalled once when I was on the road, I had to horn the car adjacent to mine to make my eldest cousin realise I was just besides them! I pray and hope our families will be knitted together and sis and family and my wife and our family would have warm and happy lunar new year every year. I will make an effort to knit the family together, with our kids building strong kinship. New year should be memorable for them. The "Chia" tradition of slotting red packet under the pillow will carry on this generation, next generation and many many generations down the line.  Gong Xi Fa Cai!