My parents’ home is quite old, probably built around the 1960s.
It’s built in the style of a tropical bungalow. My parents renovated it with an extension in the late 1980s. I believe it used to be owned by an expatriate physician.
House fixtures from when I was growing up as a child.
The design of the wooden doors has remained unchanged ever since we moved into the house in the late 1970s. I remember spending much time tracing the embossed design with my fingers over and over again.
We have an old hills hoist, but there isn’t enough room on the lines for the household’s washing. Mum got a whole stack of bamboo poles made for hanging out laundry and now she suns all the washing in front of the house where the car porch is. Malaysian car porches aren’t enclosed like the ones in Australia. Most houses will have their compounds surrounded with a fence.
Mum doesn’t peg the washing directly onto the lines. She prefers to put each clothing item neatly onto a hanger so that the shape is retained, before carefully spacing out the hangers onto each bamboo pole, maximising ventilation space. I think many local folks do the same, as it requires less line space overall.
Laksa leaf - this is the magical herb that gives JB laksa its trademark flavour and fragrance. I wonder if I can find this in Brisbane somewhere…..
Our family house is located in a very old suburb which used to house mainly expatriate families. When I was little, there were many Korean, Japanese and Caucasian families living nearby. Over the years, each family packed up and returned to their home countries and the suburb gradually fell into decline. At least half the houses here were owned by a large company which refused to sell the properties individually; instead they wanted a potential buyer to purchase all the houses en masse, which is totally impractical. After a few decades of having no buyer, the houses gradually fell into ruin and disrepair. Opportunistic squatters dismantled the unoccupied houses for copper wiring and steel grills that could be sold.
There are still a few local families living here, but the young people have grown up and moved away, leaving the few households here made up of mostly folks of retirement age, like my parents.
There’s an eccentric hermit living a few houses down from my parents. He fancies himself as an environmentalist. This is the state of his home.
Exactly. No one can see it. It’s totally overgrown.
What was once a pretty little bungalow now looks like a tropical jungle. He doesn’t believe in trimming any plants. Malaysia being an equatorial country, gets a lot of rainfall, and hence vegetation grows incredibly quickly. Within a few months, you couldn’t see his house anymore. He wouldn’t let anyone trim the shrubs on his kerbside either, with branches pushing onto power lines. I shudder to think of the mosquitos, lizards, frogs and snakes hiding in all that. Not to mention how unsightly it makes the neighbourhood look. Apparently, this strange man also has a tendency to walk barefoot around the housing estate. This is not something that Chinese people do outside of the house, especially when there is a great risk of contamination with animal waste, sharp rusted bits and other unpredictable nasties.
I tried out Grab for the first time today. It’s the Malaysian equivalent of Uber. So simple. All app-based. Transport picked me up at the door and dropped me off to a shopping mall of my choice, about 15 minutes’ drive away. All for the princely sum of AU$5.
Refreshing shaved ice dessert with seasonal fruits.
I can never walk past any shop offering shaved ice as a dessert. This little pop-up store offered small hot meals of noodles, cold fruit teas and shaved ice dessert. My choice came with a small jug of condensed milk, chopped up seasonal fruit (watermelons, mangoes and longans) and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Delicious.
