The Kumkuat Korner

Macau reminded me very much of Hong Kong and Las Vegas at the same time. Where Hong Kong used to be governed by the British, Macau was governed by the Portuguese.  The primary language is Cantonese and Portuguese. Even the dialect sounds like some weird fusion of both Cantonese and Portuguese. You can see the influence of the Portuguese everywhere. The buses, the streets, the restaurants and the buildings. It's everywhere. Many buildings and businesses had Macanese names that showed their Portuguese and Chinese roots How did the Portuguese get Macau you ask? Around the year 1535, Portuguese merchants quickly settled and somehow took over as a Portuguese colony. The Ming Dynasty literally LEASED Macau to Portugal because it was a great port for trading. 200 years later Portuguese arm twisted  forced made a treaty from China agreeing to let Portugal keep sovereignty over Macau. China was, during this time, unstable and the Portuguese government knew that and use...

So let me summarize these past TWO(? THREE???) weeks in a few sentences. My parents left then came back from their vacation in Paris, France! I heavily underestimated the amount of hair I'd bring back home from work I heavily underestimated the amount of hair I'd get up my nose....(YUCK!) I disabled my OkCupid account on the basis that I have to stop kidding myself on ever finding Mr. Delicious (a.k.a Mr. Right) on a dating website that most guys use to try to HOOK up... (bleh) I still don't know what I'll BE for Halloween!!!! Yup. Story of my life. Pretty awesome right? On the bright side, I am still awesome. And because I'm in good spirits, here's a picture of what I value the most above all of the things I possess.

When I was a kid, my summers would be spent in Mexico with my mother's family. I would stay at my grandparents home and we'd spend endless days spending with my aunts and cousins. My mother is the youngest out of six sibling s, you see, and the eldest is my Aunt Sylvia who pretty much lived to her title as the big sister, the ring leader, the head honcho, whatever you want to call it, she was it.  Now my Aunt Gaby, the fourth sibling, always invited the whole family over to her house. It wasn't mandatory for my Aunt to do this big meal for the whole 30 of us (very close aunts, uncles, grandparents, nieces and nephews) since, every weekend my aunts, Sylvia, Lupe, Gaby, and Yasmin, (sometimes my grandma too) would alternate, so the cooking wouldn't fall onto a specific relative, but it was my Aunt Gaby’s house that I remembered the most fondly. My uncle, a tall and kind man of a few words, was a truck driver, and he had more tha...

We have all been there. Shattered and left picking up the fragments of our hearts. And while people say "Time heals all" it really doesn't, does it? For example, its not that easy to get over a broken heart. You try to put the pieces back together after someone leaves you,  some one dies,  someone hurts you,  some one betrays you. You feel exposed. Raw. Vulnerable. You opened yourself so much to another being. You had kept no secrets from them. It was only you and them. But now its just you, after them. Because life still continues, even when we are stuck, slowly drowning in quicksand of emotions. Anger. Hate. Sadness. Regret. Guilt. Back to sadness. Back to hurt. And it continues all over again. Viciously sinking us to a deep dark place in all of us no one has ventured into. That place makes us see the ugliest part in ourselves that we fear show others. And when you finally surface from the pit of solitude, You start to see the world differentl...