satisfied... almost

Ok lah. I am satisfied... haha. I just returned from dinner with friends at a restaurant which serves authentic Malaysian food and is raved about by practically every M'sian/S'porean student here, or so I heard.

Out of all the mouthwatering menu options (it's tough when you haven't eaten hor fun and laksa and chicken rice and fried kuay teow and etc etc etc for more than 2 months and you have to make ONE agonising choice) I finally chose the 'curry laksa'. Mmmmm.

But then, when it came, I was like 'er, yellow noodles?' After some clarification with my friends who brought me there I realised that it's actually curry noodles, so... it IS curry laksa, but m'sian style. Ohhhh... I see. I would be lying if I said I wasn't a liiiiiitle bit disappointed, that it wasn't the laksa I had expected - Katong style. But really, I think I must be dreaming lah. How to expect Katong laksa in my ulu-nated suburb here right...

All said and done, I must say that it was nevertheless good curry 'laksa' overall! I typically don't eat yellow noodles - just don't like the 'yellow' smell, if you know what I mean. (Fellow yellow-noodles-disliking pple will understand exactly, haha). But thankfully this yellow noodles didn't have the yellow smell. And surprise surprise, it actually has bee hoon inside too! In s'porean cuisine lingo I'd prob call it Combination Curry Noodles-Bee Hoon (cuz it has a whole myriad of ingredients like chicken, char siew, brinjal...).

Oh btw, for the uninitiated, s'pore laksa uses 'chu mi fen', which is literally translated to 'thick rice noodles'. Basically it is about as thick as yellow noodles, but it's white. And s'pore laksa doesn't have things like char siew (which is roast pork) and brinjal inside. So yeah, you can imagine why I was a bit taken aback when I saw the curry laksa just now.

But yes, it was good still. And I'm satisfied. The 'almost' bit is juz that tiny lil part of me who is still yearning for katong laksa. :P

Amazing how cuisine is so much a part of one's culture, so much a part of one's sense of utter familiarity, comfort, solace.

Another academic week has flown by again. Gosh!! So so so fast. Tomorrow's Friday again and yay! That means I'm meeting the rest (some of the CU-ers) before my 9am class to pray tomorrow again. I really look forward to it, so much so that I usually bounce out of bed bright and early on Friday mornings to have my leisurely breakfast and still be on time/early to meet them (in contrast to... in particular, Thursdays haha... where more than twice I woke up so late I couldn't have a proper breakfast sitting down at the kitchen *sigh*. I'm trying to recitify it don't worry. It's JUST thursdays.).

It's great when we gather in unity to pray over the campus. No we don't 'say prayers'. No set prayers to 'go through'. Among other things, we pray that the people around us and all the strangers we see milling around the uni, will begin to seek for something that will fill their life and that what each will find will be something that will satisfy in an eternal manner - a relationship with the God who is yearning for us all to return back to a relationship with Him. As opposed to temporal things that satisfy perhaps for the moment or for a short while (drugs, food addiction, smoking, sex, booze) or even for a longer while but nevertheless ultimately temporal (academic achievement, fame, glory of achievements after achievements). Not all these are good, not all are bad. But they're all temporal.

Last week we also prayed earnestly for the situation in New Orleans post-Katrina.

Tomorrow, what God leads us to have a burden to pray for, we'll unite in prayer over. Looking forward to it!! :)