Saturday 29 June 2013

Black Swan : The Hoarder

Remember my Yard Sale entry? It actually have to do with this entry, which is a continuation of an entry about our dear friend that is going to study abroad in Australia next month. I'm happy for her being able to pursue her dream, but I'm not happy for her for being a hoarder. No offence my dear, just teasing. But that's the problem when you live in a place for a long time, you tend to collect a lot of things. Some can be very useful, and some can be expendable.


Before she fly to the Kangaroo Land, she needed to pack up her stuff and send them back to her hometown. Although she had done most of the packing by herself, there are still the nuisance of having to throw things away. So, Faiz and I, her 'swan princes' as she would call us, extend our feathered wings to help her clear some of the things away.


But before anything, we need some energy boost to do some heavy-lifting. Kindly enough, she took us to her favourite Nasi Kandar spot in Subang and treated us lunch there. Man, it was delicious. Sorry that I've forgotten to take a picture of it. I was starving at the moment. You'd understand right? Anyway, I love all of the combination of gravies that 'flooded' our rice. It was delicious. You could even still smell the gravy later till the evening. Though I don't really fancy the chicken. It's quite dry and tasted quite bland. Thankfully, the gravy is so good that it makes up for the chicken being tasteless.


Finally, we were able to venture into her nest. Do swans live in nest? I thought they kind of live in lakes. I don't know. I'm stupid when it comes to general knowledge. My weakness, as I would say. So that was the first time we were invited to her house and also the last. My jaw dropped to the floor when I saw how many things she owned. Though the house have a lot of space to make up for the items she had, I can't believe that she had bought all this using her own money, earned with honest-to-god hard-work.


Since she had packed most of the stuff, we only had to do help her with tossing away some of the larger, bulky items and furniture that she weren't able to send back to her hometown.  We were bathed in our own sweats when everything was finished. But I really don't mind because I wasn't able to do my daily routine of walking in the park that weekend. I was caught up with lots of work events and was too exhausted to wake up early in the morning for it.

After all the hard work, we sat back in her house, lounging about while puffing cigarettes after cigarettes, talking about a lot of interesting issues. I guess it's common for us now to talk about serious matters of our life (political views, educational matters, guidelines for better living, etc.) than nonsense rubbish and counterproductive chattering. We chatted around for quite some time until it was already 8pm over. We started to pick up the rest of the furniture that was given to us (for free!!!!) and shove it all into her car and went to Subang once more, to play pool.

She really is a woman of multi-talent. She can teach, she can play tennis, she's an incredible linguist and translator, and one part of her that I've just encountered on that day itself, the Queen of Pool.

You should really see her in action. Once she holds that cue stick (is that what you called it?), she was totally immersed in the game that nothing else mattered. Her precision strikes, and excellent technique shows how passionate she is to the things she love. It was actually quite scary to play a round with her. She was determined to totally beat us to shame with her great pool skills. We tried to put up a great front by blocking her shots (myself), and scoring points (Faiz is good at that). But ultimately, we couldn't bring down the Queen herself.

Finally, after our game of pools, we ventured straight back to Sentul, delivering our 'free gifts'. We stopped by a mamak place in the Sentul Boulevard for supper before she drops us off in our apartment. Thank you, once more, Black Swan, for the furniture and the rest of your crap. We really appreciate it. Our room actually looked a teeny bit more organised as opposed to messy clutter from before. Thank you, arigato gozaimasu, and merci.