today after i stepped into my classroom a fellow classmate offered me some sweets... but they were not ordinary sweets! If you've watched Grave of the Fireflies, you might be able to understand my surprise and excitement... remember the little sister had this can of fruit sweets she kept with her throughout? which she kept shaking to see if there was any left? So this classmate of mine actually handed me a 'duplicate' of that! apparently his colleague went to Tokyo's Ueno market and bought that, among other things, for 1000 yen. :)

i also attended my first Malay wedding earlier this afternoon. a Malay colleague whom i don't even know personally invited me to her wedding ceremony and since i was free, i just showed up. I was told that her wedding was actually a more 'posh' Malay wedding, because the decorations and tables were more lavishly done up... i didn't really stay for long, but somehow i can't help but feel a little ashamed that despite having lived in a so-called multiracial multicultural society for a good part of my life, i had little understanding of Malay marriage customs... and among the guests invited, 90% of them were Malay... with little or no intermingling among the Malay and Chinese/Indian guests... i mean i suppose we do 'co-exist' peacefully, but somehow most of us have yet to really step out of our comfort zones to better understand the other races?