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

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…

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

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

This would be my last piece for #PeruMarathonSeries๐Ÿ‡ต๐Ÿ‡ช 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…

Day 5 of My Creative Streak: 21 Poems Later

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…

A Decade Rewind

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…

Tentang perjalanan spiritual

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…

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

“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…