Crave.

I miss Leuven, so so much.

There isn't a day that goes by without me thinking of my lovely little room in 17 Ierse Predikherenstraat.

And running in the wind in my blue tracksuit to Origin O' Leuven to get my fix of organic chocolate and hummus.

And walking up Naamsestraat to get tofu and oyster sauce from the Asian supermarket.

And getting plastic-bag burns from hurling all my grocery shopping back from Delhaize @ Heverlee.

And bringing my bound readings and a highlighter to the laundromat and (making an attempt at) reading while waiting for my laundry to be done.

And "ein warme waffle, austublieft!" choruses I'd echo each day at the stall on Dieststraat.

And running on gravel and grass in the tiny park down the hill.

And the dreary wooden doors of the auditorium.

And the gothic structures on every surface.

And my heart skipping a beat while walking in the rain to the train station to pick the visiting boyfriend up. All the while worrying about whether the banana cake I'd baked for him was cooling well by the window sill.

And the rain, oh pitter patter.

I want to be there. Be home. Be there, and not here.

And so it is, just like you said it would be

I'm the sort of person who begins things never thinking of the end; or that the end will come anytime soon, for that matter.

But it's been six months and tonight is my final night in Leuven.

The floors have been scrubbed, the photos peeled off the wall, the fridge emptied, the bags packed. Everything's ready for its vertrek, it's departure; everything except for me.

I don't want to say goodbye. I don't know how to bid this perfect life farewell full-knowing I will never have it again.


Can't take my mind off you

Peas in a pod

Beso grande from Salamanca!



Universidad Salamanca has got to be the most beautiful university in the world. Romanesque columns and façades still fresh with a million engravings, none identical to the other. I think if I went to school here, I would voluntarily go to all my classes and sit in a corner just behind the Cathedral Vieja staring like an idiot at my beautiful beautiful school.

Tomorrow we go to Porto. And it will be 9 days before we land on Spanish soil again, but I already am feeling that familiar tug in my heart at having to leave Salamanca. Perhaps it´s largely due to the fact that this university town reminds me of Leuven more than any other town I've visited so far.

And that only reminds me about how much I don't want to leave Leuven. My little Leuven. Mine.

Ask me something else

I said goodbye to,

Heidi
Nath
Ruben
David
Kin Yew
Lucia
Groel
Stefanie
Ania
Mathilda
Nathan
Esther
Bram
Jan
Maarten
Hendrik ...
.
.
.

And it still doesn't get any easier the more times I bid yet another person farewell.



Where did all my borrowed time go?

Snippets

Okay I am officially the world's worst blogger because I have no coordination whatsoever over my pictures and sequence of experiences.

Not that I really care anyway. Hurr hurr.

But now, every single day I say goodbye to at least one person, local or Erasmus-stamped like me; and every farewell dinner I attend draws me closer to my own departure date, I do feel a little more urgency to chronicle my little life in this town I've called home the past 5 months.

So here goes nothing; snippets of Leuven over the past 2 days. I smell a series coming along.

-

A noise outside my door led to the discovery of a crumpled note and a can of Mae's. Ruben thought it would be too difficult to say goodbye face-to-face, but when I eventually ran down the street just in time to catch the boy and his backpack, he had tears in his eyes.

My favourite Belgian and second boyfriend he will always be.

-

And a dagschotel with Uncle Bob is never dull, especially when it involves ritzy vegetarian food.

Probably the best bread in the world!

Eh do you think I can ask for more?

If my girlfriend ate as much bread as you, I, errr, I... ...

Grilled seitan gratin.

Eh can I scrape your dish? I like the charred bits.

One for the book, neighbour!

-

A happy Nath sparklers on a chocolate cake maketh.

Did you know that when Nath was born, it was the longest day of the year? 20 hours!

So said her mother to the rest of us.

Singaporeans unfamiliar with the concept of Midsummer are quite prone to misunderstanding that that means it was quite difficult to give birth to her.

No I didn't speak that thought out loud. Thank heavens!

-
Post-Cecemel and pre-dinner afternoon walks home, seem to bode for quirky finds.

-

Origin O' Leuven; why did I not discover you sooner? Organic and vegan are right up my alley; I know I ain't both things, but I sure as hell can try. I am more than fascinated with seitan and hummus, and if you can make quiche taste kickass for half the calories, I'm sold.

What is this?

And what is this?

What about this?

What's in this?

Chocoladeknapper? Yes, this one!

Origins, you really shouldn't put your yummies behind a glass casing. Because I can see them. And I can ask questions. And I tend to enquire what ingredients you used to make them look so yummy. And I can't read Dutch so I need you to translate for me. And my indecisiveness increases the more delectable food porn is.

Oh god Celest, stawwwpp.

Mom, Dad, Celest, and a thousand different words

Well-thumbed, my sidekick, well-thumbed.

Mommy takes a bite of Belgium!

Back in Leuven, Rossi's nondescript interiors pack a mighty fine punch,

and if you don't believe me, you have to believe my pasta. The thinnest tagliatale ever known to man and black truffles, y'all!

and if you still don't believe me, you have to believe Roberto Benigni; he of La Bella Vita fame. He whose famous face is tacked up on the wall behind that of my famous father.

Hell, if Rossi's is good enough for Benigni, it's good enough for me.

But okay, there's always a rotten apple in every basket. Here, my mother's dinner demonstrates that fact quite well. All that glistens is not gold; and in this case, it's oil.

Besides that little glitch and the mad scramble all day, I sit here feeling on top of the world :)

HAPPY IS MY NAME!

Zee parental unit is here! I'm the happiest girl in the world!! Mom burrowed me into a monster of a hug at the train station and I couldn't stop talking the entire time after that, a close competitor to Mommy because she had even more to tell me!

And looky at Mommy's loot from Paris!

A-hem! Add 3 Longchamp bags to that and errrr.... well I think you can just say that I am my mother's daughter! I was beyond ecstatic when she pulled the bags out of their velvet casings.

Beeeeeeeyond ecstatic, I tell you!

And Mommy got me a present too! Longchamp I love you! Mommy I love you even more!!

The tin, not just the packet!

It's 0215 in the morning. My textbook is more wide-open than my eyes are.

But all I can think about is


Why Umami, why!

Lithuanian cuisine

I am quite familiar with the smell of tuna; I use it quite often in the quick-fix pasta meals I make.


But judging from the smell that is wafting through the house now, it appears that my flatmate has done gone and grilled an entire ton of tuna, sprinkled it with an over-generous heap of salt and then left it in the oven to bake for 10 hours.

It might be a while, darling

This lazy blogger has become very very weary from blogging about her crazy travel tales. Most of all, Blogger is driving her crazy with its erratic picture-posting functions, and after having lost 3 full posts with peek-tures and a lot of time in the past 24 hours, she is THIS close to snapping.

A very needed hiatus will come in place of the dizzy and too-comprehensive travel posts she is now too tired to pursue.

SO. Check back only if you are interested in random nuggets of stupid things she has to say and of course, for her rants and raves on FOOD. (Ah, this, she cannot give up) If you're looking for shots and prose on castles, bridges and various historical places, nada. Not for now honey.



Buhh-bye! :)

Look how the Swedish winds blew

Hello (single) ladies,

I have a prime candidate here to end your spinsterhood, and he is none other than Mr Ng Rongwei. You should trust me because for four days, I was living in the room next to him and we spent an average of 16 hours together daily.

Let me give you the Top 10 reasons why he should be the one and only candidate on your mind.

#1: He navigates when you are too lazy to. You never have to lift a finger to even find the general direction; good for lazy girls like Lirong and me and for hopeless navigators like our dear Jo Yeo.

#2: He subscribes to old school methods of love! Like throwing coins into the Lake of Love in Bruges to make a wish for love. He was unfazed even when I told him that the locals fish out coins people throw in at the end of the day.
#3: He subscribes to all your culinary recommendations, and always returns a resounding thumbs-up even when the afore-mentioned doesn't taste even remotely close to perfection. (Applies to waffles, limp cream gauferes, pasta, and cookies that you baked)
And he is easy to please too; a simple mua chee satisfies his chinese food craving. (This means a hole will not be emblazoned into your pockets should you decide to give him a rare treat)

#4: He zeroes in on your cravings and pays for your eventual enjoyment of said desired food. (Sometimes, you even have to fight him to pay for half the bill)

I was whining about how good all the chocolate looked in the little choc'lit shops in Bruges and he immediately bought a pick-and-mix box and insisted I choose most of the chocolates to put in them.



And of course I was the one who wanted ice-cream. Once more, he obliged.

#5: He believes in snail mail! 'Nuff said.

#6: He remembers how to make hearts out of bus tickets and the lo-mantic way of folding letters. On request, he can make cranes and boats too.

As demonstrated here with the placemat and napkins of a budget Italian restaurant.


#7: He trawls old towns to look for musical boxes for ahem-ahem. And he searches between rows of wooden puppets, porcelain dolls and fondue sets for that elusive toy zee entire day. And he buys bags for his 3 sisters and agonizes over what to get his mom. Dayum, you say!

#8: SPG alert! His looks allow you to boast that you snagged yourself a boyfriend of Peranakan/French/Portugese/Indian/Javanese/Whateverchapalang descent. You'd be lying, but he wouldn't be so mean to expose your little white lie.

#9: And best of all, HE LEAVES THE TOILET SEAT DOWN!

#10: Because I say so.


So look no further, really. This is YOUR man! You can apply by emailing either Lirong or me at sellingourindian@h10f.com.

Kind regards,

The friendly Management at H10F

Love in my tummy

So much for getting motivation from Daddy's sorbet-resolve. Yours truly went trooping into the land of desserts and sweet nothings once again; but this time, I baked! :)

Ok I had to finish the bottle of peanut butter I bought on a whim a month-and-a-half ago to make the fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches which made Elvis' arteries pop too, but there's never a bad reason to bake right? That, and my craving for soft cookies which has never been fulfilled since visiting Jie in Milan and gobbling down her Sains' cookies meant that soft peanut butter cookies were the way to go!

What I didn't count on was the fact that I had to mix everything by hand and brown sugar doesn't seem to like butter very much. But after all that arm-work,

First batch!

The cookies were softer than I'd have liked them to be. Ah well, nothing a little refrigeration can't solve :)

Mini Dolce e Salato cookies I made after getting tired of big cookies. These are topped with nutella butter icing. I think I hold a torch for things that are sweet and salty at the same time. Think Reese's.

Baking makes a lazy Saturday afternoon in Leuven even more a-okay than it already is. Big chocolate smiles. And hands that smell of cookie dough. Who's complaining? :)

Because this is too funny not to post

Celest* says:
my friend hendrik looks like a younger version of josh hartnet
and a better-looking version too

*sueee: has a postcard from Vienna says:
but they need to be rich
poor ang mos are as useless as chinese ones
haha

Celest* says:
yeah hendrik is rich!!
ooh, should i have an affair?? HAHAHA

*sueee: has a postcard from Vienna says:
haha
well then
YES
AFFAIR AFFAIR

Celest* says:
oh man, i must snap a picture of him
he spent the whole lesson yesterday talking to me
and i earnestly had to give up listening to horizontal mergers to talk to him
HAHAHA

*sueee: has a postcard from Vienna says:
lol
yes snap a pic of him
so weiming can eat his heart out

Celest* says:
HAHA
eye candy every single class

*sueee: has a postcard from Vienna says:
I WANT
what wldnt i give now for a hot affair.
sigh.

Celest* says:
me first!!!

*sueee: has a postcard from Vienna says:
haha

Celest* says:
but babe
good news
HE HAS AN IDENTICAL TWIN!!!
hoho, a beefier version
but i prefer lean so you can have the beef

*sueee: has a postcard from Vienna says:
i'm not into beefy guys
i want lean
swap la
haha

Celest* says:
TOO BAD
me first
haha

*sueee: has a postcard from Vienna says:
damnit
now i seriously shall think abt gg for Belgium Homestay

-
BEEEG Sidenote: B, you know I still love you! I just have eyes, that's all! <3

We're going to sing 'You Belong To Me'

The Godfather VI, starring Yeo Junmei.

But seriously, I'm glad she took her bottle of Gueze very seriously. Because it's the one type of Belgian beer I can't put down.

There's really no better time for some best-friend loving; no better time than now.

CARNAVALE!

The carnavale came to town on Saturday, and it littered the streets of Leuven with (too much) confetti, sweets, lollipops, and packaged waffles thrown by painted faces on multi-coloured floats.

Time sometimes stops when little boys catch up with the moment. Because the next it is gone and replaced by an impish act or two.

And this little fella was holding out his red cap to catch the goodies they were throwing at us revellers, but height has an advantage and I've never seen so many leggy teenage girls step in front of a kid to catch candy that really should find its way to his little tummy. He was delighted when I offered him 2 packets of waffles I had caught.

The Carnavale is for kids from 9 to 99. Bad aiming and too much zoom on my part, but I really like this picture :o)

And of course, what's a carnavale without an orange-haired Viking? ;D

Jun is here!

Separate your whites from your colours

So Heidi and I had to contribute half a load of whites each to take up a whole machine, Nath had to wash a massive load of predominantly blue laundry, and Anja had to wash her carpet of a towel, so off we went to the laundromat for the worse half of the afternoon.

But not before running into the funniest form of vandalism I've seen thus far. Outside the biggest Delhaize in Leuven, which is a supermarket well-known for its cheap meats.

Besides amusing ourselves with a jumbo pack of chocolate waffles, Anja whipped out her camera, as did I, to document some fun with the washing machines (Don't they always look so happy climbing on top of washing machines with short skirts and knee-high boots in MTVs?).

And today is a good day for funny signs and labels. Ever thought the fable of the tortoise and the hare would be immortalised on an ironing machine? Or in this version, the snail and the hare.

Or in my warped little head, it looks something like this.

I think doing too much laundry is bad for your sanity. So Belgian landlords, please take pity on us poor students and start putting washing machines in the homes you rent out. Thank you.