Showing all posts tagged achievement unlocked

In Life on the Equator

Travel, Work, & Life Recap: Late 2022 to Early 2023

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Travel, Work, & Life Recap: Late 2022 to Early 2023

In the past few months, I had tried to sit quietly and start writing again, which all led to multiple failed attempts. It wasn’t even an effort to write something worth posting publicly – just anything in general. Whether it’s in my laptop’s drive that will never see the light of day, or in my phone’s Notes app, let alone this blog. I was always either in the middle of something that required a lot of attention, or was never really in the right mindset to pour my thoughts and heart out even though what I did most of the time were thinking and feeling.

So this is me, attempting once again. In the days leading to Eid Al-Fitr, where naturally my desire to do work has diminished significantly and I probably couldn’t be bothered to catch up with things I know I eventually will do post-Eid, so one of the few things I could do to avoid feeling like a complete trash is to be back writing again. Here’s me sitting down in a rented apartment I just moved into around three weeks ago, still in the heart of the city I have never been a fan of despite all the positive thoughts I’m trying to “delude” myself with i.e., South Jakarta, with my husband.

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In Adventure of a Lifetime, Wanderlogue

10 tips from my solo travel as a non-Spanish speaking hijabi in Peru

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10 tips from my solo travel as a non-Spanish speaking hijabi in Peru

This would be my last piece for #PeruMarathonSeries🇵🇪 that I wrote in the spirit of Peru’s upcoming 99th independence day, by refurbishing some draft posts that I made back in 2017 but never really got the chance to finish and share.

I first came up with this article because, at that time, I had been receiving quite a few questions from my friends regarding how I managed to dare myself to travel solo to South America, and also how I actually execute the travel. Most of these questions seemed to have stemmed from the fact that I am merely a brown hijabi female who does not even speak Spanish, and probably doesn’t even look as “adult” as I actually am (which truthfully does not imply that I don’t look as aged, it’s just that my 155 cm or *nearly* 5’1″ height is way below the average height of most 20-something-year-old females, lol).

Also, South America isn’t typically a common tourist destination for most Indonesians, and I guess for a large proportion of the Asian community as well. Even to some extent, for the western population too.

Therefore, I thought I should perhaps compile some tips on how I dealt with any uncertainty that might arise before and during the travel. Even though I realize that there are many way more experienced women who can talk about this topic better than I do, I think it just doesn’t hurt to share my experience. In particular, because I always felt that at least for Muslim communities, we only have a few hijabi solo travellers slash influencers whom we could look up to in reference to this topic.

Without further ado, here are some tips I’d recommend for your seamless solo travel!

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In DIY and Artsy-Craftsy

Day 5 of My Creative Streak: 21 Poems Later

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Day 5 of My Creative Streak: 21 Poems Later

If anything, this quarantine period has got me bouncing around from one “extracurricular” activity to another. The first couple weeks, I felt so heavily invested in some technical office work that I had to complete for my first-year promotional review. The following couple weeks, I found myself programming until past-midnight, trying to finish two courses on C and Python at the same time. Strangely enough to me, I surprisingly… enjoyed it? But unfortunately, before it even finished, somehow I was already overwhelmed by a surge of inspiration to get creative and start looking into my dusty websites to make changes here and there. Yes, websites in plural, as in all three of them that I currently try to maintain, lol.

In the last five days, I had re-curated some of the photoworks that I held most dearly, that I felt connected with the most, to be showcased here. Not only that, I had also committed that I’d write a poem for every photoset there is. After all, the website was supposed to be called Photographs and Poems initially, which I eventually had to change because apparently I never had enough time and motivation to write poetic captions for every single one of them. But with this quarantine, look who’s starting to get all the time in the world to do so! Welp, partially owing to my having my period in the past week so I couldn’t practice fasting and other forms of Ramadan prayers as well, thus being kind of unsure on how to waste my time a bit more productively. Long story short, the original title of the portfolio has come back with some edits, hence poetry and selected photoworks.

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In Adventure of a Lifetime, Thoughtful Enlightenment

A Decade Rewind

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A Decade Rewind

Hi, there.

It’s been quite a hiatus, isn’t it? A year and a half of not being present here, where a lot had happened. Too much, almost.

With the year of 2019 – and basically, the whole decade – is coming to an end, I thought I could maybe write something just so that the blog does not skip a year. Plus, isn’t it basically the most perfect timing? A piece to recap what had been said and done or left otherwise, not only for the past 1.5 years, but also perhaps the whole decade altogether. Crowds on Twitter and Instagram have been doing it anyways, so I guess I might as well jump on the bandwagon.

And so here goes.

My search began on Facebook, so I definitely went a little too extra as usual. Google Photos and gazillion pictures from my external hard drive also brought back endless streams of memories. Spent several hours rambling through those photos, trying to salvage pictures that define each year, or at least resembling it. And it’s amazing how I could still remember much, if not most, of the feelings that I got from those events that were passing by.

Like the lightweight, neutral, and completely undisturbed feelings when celebrating one of my high school classmates’ birthday in a pizza place one afternoon, even though it was gloomy outside;

or the excitement when having a sleepover with my college girls, gossiping about the threads on the Secret app back when it was still the bomb (and available);

or the burdened, heavy mood when I woke up a bit too late sometime in November 2017, realizing that I still had one more year left to pull through before I could come back home.

What a decade it has been, with all those emotions, events, actions, faces, stories, memories, episodes.. And I have nothing but gratitude indeed.

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In Thoughtful Enlightenment

Tentang perjalanan spiritual

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Tentang perjalanan spiritual

(18:103) Say, (O Muhammad): “Shall We tell you who will be the greatest losers in respect of their works? (18:104) It will be those whose effort went astray in the life of the world and who believe nevertheless that they are doing good.

Berhubung udah lama gak posting dalam bahasa ibu sendiri, jadi kali ini saya mau coba ya bercerita pakai Bahasa Indonesia. Selain itu juga karena mungkin kontennya akan lebih relevan buat Indonesian readers sih, hehe. (Sebetulnya bakalan banyak bilingual mode-nya deng karena kagok cuy kalo every single word diterjemahin verbatim. Monmaap in advance yak.)

Tulisan ini diketik pukul 6:39 AM. Ceritanya saya baru aja balik dari itikaf pertama selama di Kanada sini. Ini Ramadan kedua saya disini sih, cuman tahun lalu ada aja deh tantangannya buat meniatkan diri untuk itikaf. Jangankan itikaf, sejujurnya Ramadan taun lalu aja gak begitu berasa ibadahnya buat saya. Jujur, cuman ibadah default kayak hari biasa (shalat 5 waktu, itu juga kadang–atau sering?–pake mepet-mepet batas jam, ngaji juga boro-boro ngejar khatam) ditambah puasa dan bayar zakat fitrah. Udah. Tapi tahun ini, terutama setelah melewati bulan-bulan setelah Ramadan 2017 tersebut berlalu, alhamdulillah saya merasa ada peningkatan sih. Tapi, merasa sedih banget sebetulnya.

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In Days in Edmonton, Thoughtful Enlightenment

“Befriend” them, even if you’re scared to.

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“Befriend” them, even if you’re scared to.

Awhile back, I came across a blog post that was becoming somewhat viral at that moment, particularly among the Indonesian students overseas. It was written by an Indonesian student residing in a European country, who was describing how she always finds that the majority of Indonesians in that country seem to have always been only socializing with their own communities of Indonesians and rarely seem to be engaged with either the locals or the more internationally diverse communities. P.s.: she belonged to the opposite group.

For her, maybe her comfort zone is indeed in the circle of the locals. For others, maybe their comfort zone is people who share the same background, thus easier to pass along the jokes with or relate in any way. While it’s probably cool that someone enjoys being in the company of a diverse group of people just because not many people might even like that idea, it also makes the most sense for someone to be the happiest when surrounded by a rather homogenous society which shares the most similarities with them. Especially when it comes to the cultural or religious background that further defines our core values and general perspectives about life, which really accounts for who do you pick as your comfort friends eventually. Who would enjoy feeling constantly challenged just because they’re surrounded by those who do not see the world the way they do? It is absolutely just easier to live with those whom with we could be at peace together, is it not?

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