Flower postcards from Sweden

Spring is here! ... or may be it has already arrived a while ago. I never know, as it is always summer here. Anyway, I was really happy to see that spring has reached the far north!

Beauty mark

I painted this for my special friend Maryam, as an early gift for her wedding. I can confidently say she's the sweetest and most beautiful/gorgeous girl ever. It's always so hard to capture the personality of the person in a painting, but I wanted the hair and the beauty mark to do the trick!

Mani Pedi

I went to get my nails done yesterday. It's called Blossom Nails and they have three stores located close to whereever the Japanese community exists in Jakarta. This one was in the basement of the Intercontinental Hotel.

It's around $30 for both manicure and pedicure and an additional $1 to $2.5 per fingers for adding nail art, which mind you is high end in Jakarta. But this place would do it over and over until you absolutely like it, so I love their willingness to make you feel happy.

Next time I go, I will ask for designs from my Japanese magazine. It will serve as capacity building too (win-win).

Now that you see a picture of your hands and feet, I respect the body part models... I feel like I barely have the right number of fingers.

Ugly Ducklings

My friends and I went to a theme park in Jakarta called Tamanmini that has all the different houses from the different Indonesian islands. Apparently it was Suharto's wife's idea and property. We were there for a mere hour and completely entertained by this duck ride. Sometimes it's good that the main entertainment is so shabby that you are forced to ride ducks in a scary green pond.

The retired bunch... probably from the Suharto days.


This was really, amazingly fun - definitely the highlight of the day, and after riding this we were so satisfied that we left happily without looking at anything else.

Tree Peony

My dad just sent me these photos from a beautiful place called Aizu in northern Japan. It was my mom's birthday. They visited a peony garden.

Back in Jakarta

I wonder if this was a day for all kids in Jakarta to dress up... old. This girl looked very pretty.