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Memories you can eat
Dec. 20th, 2003 08:54 pmEver noticed how sometimes, some senses trigger off a whole avalanche of memory?
I just found a hidden cache of munchies, and I'm wandering back down memory lane again. The bag is full of pink haw sugar flakes - round, flat discs of chewy sweet stuff, that I remember from when I got taken to Springvale for Yum Cha as a little kid.
In Australia, they were called Yan Yans, and sold in yellow and red rolls of paper about 5cm long, with each flake about the size of a ten-cent piece. For a rare change, the present-day version are bigger than the memory - this bag came back with me from China, after I found them in a street stall in Beijing. 10 Yuan worth of instant memory rush was well worth it, even though I know the locals probably paid a fifth of that. Some of the others on the trip (from Singapore, Mauritius, or other aussie Chinese) went into flashback mode, too. Amazing what a bag of lollies can do for sharing a childhood memory - and weird that so many of the others remembered them too. Either I had a more normal childhood than I thought, or my friends were warped in the same mishappen mold :)
It's been a slow day, which suits my slow brain well. Luckily, I haven't had to move too much - last night's wushu has woken up all the muscles I forgot I had, in my legs. Note to self: if you double the time you spend in each stance, to make up for missing the last week, expect it to hurt...
Empty Step stance is noticeably lower than I could get it a month ago, though, so that's encouraging. I'm only a quarter of the way I want to go, though, so I have a summer project to work on. Nothing worth doing was ever done easily, and nowhere worth staying is easy to find...
I just found a hidden cache of munchies, and I'm wandering back down memory lane again. The bag is full of pink haw sugar flakes - round, flat discs of chewy sweet stuff, that I remember from when I got taken to Springvale for Yum Cha as a little kid.
In Australia, they were called Yan Yans, and sold in yellow and red rolls of paper about 5cm long, with each flake about the size of a ten-cent piece. For a rare change, the present-day version are bigger than the memory - this bag came back with me from China, after I found them in a street stall in Beijing. 10 Yuan worth of instant memory rush was well worth it, even though I know the locals probably paid a fifth of that. Some of the others on the trip (from Singapore, Mauritius, or other aussie Chinese) went into flashback mode, too. Amazing what a bag of lollies can do for sharing a childhood memory - and weird that so many of the others remembered them too. Either I had a more normal childhood than I thought, or my friends were warped in the same mishappen mold :)
It's been a slow day, which suits my slow brain well. Luckily, I haven't had to move too much - last night's wushu has woken up all the muscles I forgot I had, in my legs. Note to self: if you double the time you spend in each stance, to make up for missing the last week, expect it to hurt...
Empty Step stance is noticeably lower than I could get it a month ago, though, so that's encouraging. I'm only a quarter of the way I want to go, though, so I have a summer project to work on. Nothing worth doing was ever done easily, and nowhere worth staying is easy to find...
