Be Courageous!

minbunny:

Thank you <3 
Thank you for being a reason for me to be happy for the past couple of years <3 Last year we were disappointed, but I’m glad we all picked ourselves up and realised that we had each other’s backs, now winning the deserved Daesang again <3 One day all of you will stand on stage, just like that photo, holding another award. As you said yourselves, 13 stars shine the brighest in the night sky.
Congratulations to the record-setting, bubble, childish, adorable, beautiful, mind-blowing, sexy, amazing, life-changing Super Junior <3

Türkiye Part 4 : Yemekler (foods)

Jump to another topic.

 One of the best things about Turkey is the freaking dessertssssssssssssssssss. YES. We finally reach this point. There are so many kinds of Turkish desserts or snacks that I would like to recommend. I love baklava, sutlac, helvasi, lokum (Turkish delight), ekler, puddings, and this stuff that is so chewy and cold and sweet and milky and all nice and nothing hurts but I don’t know the name, it is made from flour and milk and we put some nut toppings on the top of the chewy dough. They are all so nice I guarantee. I am even willing to pay you 50 kurus if you find it not.

I’m going to describe to you how some of those foods I mentioned above look like and taste like as best as I could, sorry if I can’t satisfy you with my description, the best description always comes from experience after all.

The  first dessert is Baklava. Despite being not really known internationally compared to lokum (Turkish delight), baklava is indeed Turkish national dessert. Everyone loves baklava and even though I’m not the type to judge people by foods they don’t like, your brain must be upside down if you don’t like baklava. Baklava is made from dozens layers of flour baked with various kinds of nuts. In my opinion, the best kind of nuts they put into and onto baklava is this green nut from Gaziantep. Once it’s baked and ready to be served, it is poured by a fair dose of thick sugar water. I’ll probably inherit diabetes from my father and I still couldn’t care less. Baklava is very sweet and able to make you think of nothing other than the pleasure it gives and I regret nothing eating it regularly. You must try it if you get the chance to go to Turkey, I don’t care if you hate sugary things.

I graduated from a Turkish high school and therefore I at least knew one meal or dessert in Turkish cuisine, and from hundreds kinds of Turkish dessert, I happened to know this one called Sutlac. We had this Turkish culinary extracurricular back in high school and its most popular dessert was Sutlac. It is made from rice and milk. It’s basically milky rice or should I even call it rice-y milk considering the milk is dominant? Well, I don’t really care. I don’t know how to make it but I guess it’s pretty easy considering the fact that many amateur chefs from Turkish culinary extracurricular made it when they were given task to make desserts. They usually made it as a part of the catering when there’s a special occasion involving all aspects of the school. Once you’ve tried it, you will forever never be able to resist the chewy and juicy sensation of sutlac. It may be easy to make, but it’s still extraordinarily good nonetheless.

There’s one more kind of dessert that you might not have any idea about how much I love it and how I’ve been addicted to it since the first time I tried it. It’s helvasi. For Indonesians, you may be a little familiar with the form of helvasi. It looks like arum manis (or cotton candy). The only differences it has are that it tastes 100 times, oh no I start to exaggerate things, 10 times better than both arum manis or cotton candy and that it shapes like a cube and is more solid. I can’t describe it no more. You have to taste it by yourself.

One more thing that is actually very good in Turkish cuisine (I’m going to try it in Indonesia) is the rice. They put coconut milk and some salt into the rice when it is being boiled. It adds the savory feeling to the rice. In Indonesia, I only ate rice once a week due to the blandness of its taste that I didn’t quite favor. But here, I am willing to eat it thrice in a day. I feel like eating it not only because it’s necessary to support the glucose stock in my body, but also because it fulfills my need of the nice salty flavor to complement the taste of the dishes in satisfying my taste buds.

The Turks drink tea a lot. They drink it while studying, reading newspaper, chatting, in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, before going to sleep, at lunch breakfast and dinner. They basically drink tea every time they get the chance to stop from their busy activities for a while. (Note :  They drink hot tea). The craziest example of this tea-drinking habit is the one I witnessed when I was in Istanbul. I was walking down the street at Taksim (a very busy shopping district in the centre of the city) in the middle of an afternoon of a very hot summer. The temperature was 40 degrees Celcius at that time and I nearly fainted due to the hotness. But there was a man sitting on a chair (it’s a chair that he probably personally brought from somewhere) on a pavement, reading a newspaper while drinking a cup of hot tea. He even brought the thermos with him. I swear there’s no any sane people I know drink hot tea under the sun in the middle of a very hot summer. It was seriously crazy.

A weird experience about the Turks and their extraordinary habit related to foods happened when I was in Eskisehir. It was probably 4 degrees Celcius at night. One of my ablas (the way we call an older woman in Turkish) asked me to go out with her to the nearest mall which was only 2 or 3 kilometers from home. We didn’t travel with transportation a lot in Eskisehir because everywhere was reachable due to the fact that my house was in the centre of the city. So we went out walking to the mall, seeing around and looking for stuffs. Due to courtesy, she asked me whether I wanted to eat something and I answered no (not without mumbling “I just want to go home now that it’s 10 pm and 4 degrees celcius” to myself). She then dragged me outside the mall to look for some restaurant and eat some snacks. Apparently, we were suddenly inside a café, eating two scoops of ice cream. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it that she treated me ice cream, I just found it extremely unusual to eat ice cream at night while freezing and trying hard to not grind my teeth altogether.

To be continued (not really sure when I will update it.)

Türkiye Part 3 : (a little) Trivial Facts

One trivial fact about Turkey is that, as you all may already know, Turkey is a country which majority of the population is Muslim, but instead of calling Turkey as an Islamic country, I’d much prefer calling this country as liberal. The fashion here pretty much reflects it all. Many  people wear hijab and Muslim clothes and all but there are even more people who go everywhere like they’re going to a night party or even marathon competition when they go to school. Not that I hate it though. I like this fact because if I don’t feel like wearing something nice or matching, no one would really stare at me at judge me. Even if you wore something which you consider very hideous, no one would really pay attention unless you drove a jeep on the pavement while wearing those stuffs. And I’m not even kidding.

There is a huge mosque near my campus which I visited to pray after taking the placement test, and for a girl who comes from Indonesia, I found it really interesting. The mosque is four or five times bigger than the one that my neighborhood had back in Indonesia but… the place where we can have wudhu (washing up your exposed body parts before doing the prayer) is not directly proportional with the size of the mosque itself. It’s so small, and rather looks like a normal toilet, and to make it even weirder, it is so hidden as if the architect of the mosque didn’t want people to have wudhu before praying. I nearly thought that there’s no such place to wash up after 30 minutes of searching and finding nothing. Well thankfully I found it though.

Türkiye Part 2 : Günlük (Diary)

First, I’m going to warn you that this is only part 1 of a very long diary. 

Don’t worry, I’m gonna share you some of my experiences in Turkey, whether it is its culture, its people, its foods or some other things that are different with Indonesia, but for now I’m going to write it in diary format first :D 

So sorry friends for abandoning my blog, I guess I’m going to start updating it weekly from now on.

So, where do we start?

I am now in Ankara, studying in Tomer, a Turkish course as a preparation for college (though I’m not planning to take my college courses in Turkish). Actually, I’d studied in Anadolu University taking Economics as my major before I decided to go to Ankara to attend Tomer. It is not my initial intention to attend it, but since I applied and succeeded to get another scholarship from the government (which offers twice of my initial allowance), it is required for me to attend Tomer in the first year.

During the three months of my stay in Turkey, I’ve been moving from one house to another like dozens of times and been moving from one city to another thrice. I’d lived in Eskisehir for one and a half month before I half-heartedly left for Ankara.

Life was good in Eskisehir. My faculty was in English so school’s not much of a problem. My house mates were so nice (though they hardly knew English and it kind of made my life hard when I was there). Once we had to reserve the water because it’s nearly finished and we’d still got 2 days to go, they tried to explain to me that I should pour the water into a bucket before using it and it took me 10 minutes and nearly a teardrop to understand it. I felt so retarded (I can’t help but using this term I’m sorry) because they talked so fast and I couldn’t just understand them in an instant. We made so many good foods in Eskisehir, ate so many kinds of tatli (dessert) and my house mates taught me many Turkish phrases like “Adanalıyık Allah’in adamıyık” or saying “Elirini sağalık” after eating, or other phrases like “Su gibi azis ol” and “ Lop lop et olsun”. I went playing with Aylar (a Turkmenistan-Russian close friend of mine) every weekend and talked with Birdal and Taewoo and Ilknur during the classes.

*The next two paragraphs will be about my Korean friend and Super Junior, you can just pass it if not interested. I’ve warned you.*

One of my most interesting friends on the campus was Taewoo, he’s from South Korea and he’s unexpectedly so updated about Korean entertainment industry. He likes indie music to the root but he knows Super Junior well (not more than know though, he’s not an exact fan boy). At first I hesitated to tell my attraction towards Super Junior cause I was afraid he would accuse me of befriending him only because of Super Junior (lol trust me I am not trying to sound so dramatic, everyone in Eskisehir knows that I like Super Junior, and am willing to use people to fulfill my needs of Super Junior’s newest news), but when he brought some paper with Korean letters written on it, I absentmindedly read it and he put that annoying shocked expression which pretty much meant “HOW COULD YOU?”. And ta-da. I told him I liked Super Junior, like so freaking much, and I admired and cared about Heechul, like so so much I could just describe it by going to Korea in instant if ever I heard news about him collapsing or something, I don’t want it to happen though. Then there came the silence. And a chuckle afterwards. And a big laughter in the end. I was laughed at, just like usual.

Despite him being annoying and all big laughs when I told him about my open secret, I liked being his friend. He practically helped me with everything. Helping me when I was about to choose the classes I was going to take for the semester, giving me information and brochures about the occasions I could attend for the culture class, choosing a group for me in the Research Methods of Social Science (THAT DAMN CLASS I AM FOREVER DEPRESSED IN BECAUSE I CHOSE IT BY ACCIDENT AND IT TURNED OUT TO BE A CLASS FOR STUDENTS IN THEIR 3^rd YEAR). Okay, he’s a very nice friend, after all.

Have I told you about Aylar? I met her on my first day in Eskisehir. I called her ‘abla’ because I thought she’s at least 2 years older than me and it was all awkward. She went to Samsun to pack up her things and came back to Eskisehir after three days. We lived in the same room with one other friend (she’s just  16 and she’s a Filipino) and we gradually became closer. Aylar was actually a year older than me, she’s in my class in university and we just clicked. She’s very sensitive girl whose nationality is Turkmenistan but knows Russian better than her native language. I liked talking about Indonesia with her for she always seemed to be interested in visiting my country.

* I mean, to be honest, I’ve been telling about the beauty of Indonesia and the diversity and the tolerance and all to many (neither all nor most of them, just many as like many in my own parameter) Turkish people but most of them just shrugged it off and thought that it’s not a big deal, that their country was better, and in some cases where there were some shallow-minded people (I can’t even..), they thought that Indonesia was a very poor country and when I told them it wasn’t true, they INSISTED that it’s true and began to boast about how they helped Aceh in Tsunami 2004. I mean (I’ve been saying this several times I noticed) it’s not that my country a very rich country either, but my nationalism (I swear nationalism works the best when you are outside your country) refused to acknowledge it as poor.  I was both enraged and resisting to burst my anger encouraged by my pride as an Indonesian.

Okay, enough about all the rendezvous and let’s go back to Aylar otherwise I’m not going to stop blabbering about how Indonesia and Turkey this and that. Well then, Aylar is a very nice girl, and a shopaholic one at that, and I swear I’m gonna bring her to Indonesia in relatively near future if not next summer.

My Indonesian friend, Melly and a Turkish friend, Amine picked me up at Ankara Gar just two weeks ago and we immediately headed to MEB to register myself and to get some papers to be handed to Tomer and the dormitory. Of course it’s already autumn at that time and the coldness it caused couldn’t be hindered. In spite of being shivering and all, we kept going to Tomer and took the placement test. Voila, I and Melly were placed in the basic level. But instead of being disappointed, we felt relieved. At the very least, we would get to learn Turkish more thoroughly and would probably understand the language much better.

To be continued…..

Eating too much and can still manage to be thin is an illegal thing in my country, you know. You’ll be fined for that crime alone.

— Ana, a Romanian friend. Lol no I gain weight in Turkey T_T

speech of silence: Orang Besar →

dolansemantik:

Ada beberapa orang yang mengira, dia harus selalu melakukan sesuatu yang besar untuk menjadikannya besar. Harus punya titel, entah titel struktural atau kultural. Harus punya karya yang dapat penghargaan dari semua orang. Kalau enggak, gak mau buat apa-apa. Harus jadi ketua, baru bisa membuat…

Türkiye Part 1 : Turkçe.

So hey, hello!

Long time no see everyone! A month since I last wrote something which is appropriate for Super Junior non-experts. (I don’t promise that this will be one, but, let’s see..)

Alright! So I’ve been in Istanbul for more than a month right now, I’M IN LOVE WITH THE CITY, basically have been used to the food (FYI some foods here rather have an extreme taste, like how it’s extremely salty, or sweet, or plain bland), have been used of fasting 17 hours each day, have been used of the extreme weather change (35-40 degrees celcius when it’s not raining and 17 degrees celcius when it is raining), have been used of getting checked out (a rather inappropriate phrase, but I insist.. ) by many ones because of looking different and being asked “sen neredelisin” and some other friendly yet curious questions everyday, and surprisingly have been used of sick drivers who drive like each of them had 9 lives (well it’s not all of them are those kind of drivers, but let’s just drop the topic, I’m gonna tell you some more important updates :p).

AND one thing I haven’t been used to is………………………….. the language, the most important thing to socialize, which is the basic need of human as a social creature, I can proudly say that I’m now feeling so tortured.

Yes you get the point right, I am now trying to tell you my difficulties in learning Turkish. 

First of all, I want to tell you that Turkish is very different from English and Indonesian, so if you have learned those languages before you learn Turkish, there will be a huge huge twist of rules. 

To say that Turkish is one of the most complicated languages is basically not true since the pronunciations are easy (a total different case for accent, though), the language itself is rather logical, and so on. The problem comes when you meet these points : 1) you don’t know about the language at all when you first came here, I regret those times I ditched Turkish, 2) you’re in a rather old age to easily adapt to a new language, 3) you still live with Indonesians even after a month since your arrival, and 4) your native language has a total different order and different rules and of course different grammars compared to this language.

I have this Turkish teacher whom I call hocam abla (hocam : Teacher; abla : older sister. Grammatically wrong, but it is funny, so yeah). She is extremely friendly and helpful, she likes talking to me, appreciating simple jokes that I tell her in Turkish, tolerating me when I am sleepy in morning classes, and paying attention to my Turkish development. I have also been taking notes in my mind every time I watch the Turks communicating, paying attention to the grammar things I’ve learnt and try to implement it in basic conversations. But really dear…. 

I have come to this point where I write so many buts in a post. /sigh

When English has this basic pattern (if I’m not mistaken) :

Subject - verb - object - some other necessary information 

Turkish has this different pattern :

Subject - Some other necessary information - Object - Verb

or sometimes it goes with this pattern :

Some other necessary information - Subject - Object - Verb

It depends on the context of the sentence.

When you try to say “I’m eating döner with my friends” your brain will be forced to mix all those words, translate them into Turkish, change the words order so it will be like “Ben arkadaşlarımla döner yiyorum” which literally means “I’m with my friends döner eating”. Yes, I haven’t been able to fully understand nor speaking Turkish in impulse without doing those orders.

Another factor that makes it harder for me to comprehend Turkish is… living with my Indonesian friends.

Of course I still chat and joke with them in Indonesian, and in Turkish if Hocamabla is around. Some things that advantage me the most from living with my Indonesian friends and seniors are, first, I know exactly where to ask help from without having to think about the language barrier, second, they help me to get used to Istanbul, third, they help me soooooo much (I could cry!!) to manage my documents here, especially when the things make me deal with Turkish people like activating my phone-card, asking for the living permission and so on. I am so thankful for them T_T

There’s always a bad thing behind every good thing. I don’t feel the necessity or urgency to talk in Turkish with my Indonesian fellows. I fail to improve much. But I don’t really regret this point and I already told you the reason. 

It’s now 6.18 in the morning, I have a Turkish exam in 4 hours and yet I’m still writing something to share, aren’t I nice? 

Well, I really have to go to sleep right now but I promise I will come with an update about people and places here as soon as possible in other ‘Türkiye-part’s. Thank you for reading fellas :)

PS : Another unique thing about Turkish is it doesn’t have ‘W’ so we get to replace ‘W’ with ‘V’. How you pronounce ‘V’ is also a little different when you pronounce it in English. ‘V’ in Turkish sounds between ‘V’ and ‘W’. Same goes to Ü which is pronounced as ‘ew’ and Ö as ‘eow’ and I as ‘eu’ in terminate not in eureka.

PS 1: I’m sorry for being diary-ish.

PS 2 : I’ve been accepted to Faculty of Economics Anadolu University (I’m so happy and relieved) :DDDD I’m still waiting for the announcement of Istanbul University but I will enjoy it wherever I end up in. Thank you so very much for supporting me :)

I just need to let this out. Unless you’re an ELF or Petals, no need to read this.

(photo credits to : petalicious.tumblr.com)

So, it was already announced that Heechul is going to the army in 9 days.

In freaking 9 days. I don’t even have any idea how unprepared I am for all these not-so-good news.

An idol which much or less has been filling a little spot in my heart will leave. My virtual best friend. The one who tries his hard to entertain people, who doesn’t let himself being dictated of what to do and what not to do. The one who has involved helping me to stand up in those hardest times I had to go through.I haven’t known him for so long, but his presence has already been important since the day I first noticed him.

For those who don’t know and yet still reading this, I do feel silly for being sad and moreover crying over a person whom I don’t even know personally, and perhaps, I won’t know. When people around me are sad because of complicated things like their mutual love problems, or even family problems, or world peace, I’m freaking sad because of a particular person who knows that I’m here, but doesn’t know who I am.

This post is dedicated to all my ELF and petals fellows. Who cried together with me this morning on twitter and tumblr and allkpop. Those people whose lives have also been affected by this person.

I’m just very used to his antiques, the way he talks, the way he defends his friends despite the world judging him, the way he always gives an honest answer, the way he smiles, the way he creeps, the way he entertains people in shows, the way he fights for things that he knows are right, the way he becomes himself, the way he tweets like there’s no tomorrow, the way he befriends all people in the industry, the way he doesn’t give a fuck for people who hate him. All inspire me. And two years are just long, man. Okay he’s not going to die. I may be exaggerating. But yeah, I don’t even care. I just need to let it out.

If now I can be myself, and be who I am, he did a quarter of the work. All those amazing people like Mother Theresa, Dalai Lama, Soekarno, Sri Mulyani or others may affect my mentality and my feelings for bigger things like humanity or nationalism. But him, this Kim Heechul, has taught me to be my self, to be human, to be proud of myself, to be loyal to my friends, to basically survive in dealing with people.

All that I can say right now is, I feel relieved just because I have a chance to know you. I think I love you like I love my own best friends. You inspire many people, and you better do the best and work hard in doing the public service. All the best for you, oppa.

PS 1 : Don’t ever say things like “you don’t have to wait for me” to your fans. because we will, bitch.

PS : People may call me exaggerating, some of my friends even said so, but if I were to have a set of criteria for people to be my best friends, I would call them who understand and tolerate my feelings and even cheer me up right now are my best friends. Because those who don’t, I’m quite certain, don’t know me that well.

allrisejewels:

Thank you for loving me unconditionally over the past six years.
I won’t, however, ask for you to wait for me.
Instead, please support me again ...
if you still like me when I come back with a heart of starting anew.
- Kim Heechul to ELF  ♥

nothing in the world could win your position in my heart

This might be a very late birthday not-even-a-blast but I won’t bother to care.

To the mom who wakes her children up almost every single morning, to the mom who still cared enough to make me breakfast despite my morning tantrum attack, to the mom who refilled my phone credits every month, to the mom who is incredibly patient, to the mom who dedicates herself to education and her family, to the mom who has made me used of not using disrespectful ways to get me what I want, to the mom who picked me up and fetched me nearly anywhere until when I was in junior high, to the mom who is not really shopisticated so that she needs to ask almost everything about her blackberry features, to the mom who likes to be the one to find when someone has the urge to tell something, to the mom whose heart also breaks every time her children’s hearts break, to the mom who always checks her children’s school papers and marks to make sure everything is fair, to the mom who fully supports her only daughter whatever her decision is, to the mom whose worries cannot be hidden, to the mom who does practically everything, like everything in everything, for her children. To the mom who sincerely takes care of her children’s stuffs even though that means she has to go drive the car or ride the motorcycle a hundred of times despite her not-so-strong body to guarantee the stuffs are finished, to the mom who is daily teased by her family members for her silly remarks, to the mom who is having not a very big cholesterol problems and make a big deal about it, to the mom who likes to yell to a certain father who eats sugar every night despite his diabetes and be laughed at of being paranoid and finally retort, “you still have children to feed!!!” “there’s insurance for each of them” “Bapak iki lhoo!!! Ojok mati ndisik (YOU DON’T DIE!)”, to the mom whose spirit is stronger than physique, to the mom who is so modest and plain and simple and sincere, to the mom whose birthday is on July 26, 1961, to the mom who celebrated her 50^th birthday last Tuesday without me being close to her, to the mom whom I dedicate my first post in a new country for, to the greatest mom and woman in the world whose name is Mentik Hulupi.

Happy birthday to you, so sorry for the wrong things I did to you, I wish you every best thing in the world, I’ll try my best to make you proud, thank you so much, I love you.