Some Asian Snacks 亚洲食品

Hello,

A couple of weeks ago, my sister's boyfriend bought me a couple of Asian snacks he used to eat when he was younger. Awesome. Thank you ( ﾟヮﾟ)!

Here, let me show you the food haul:

Except for the Pocky, the egg tarts 蛋挞 (dàntà), I've never eaten or tasted any of those.

So I took pictures and decided I should post some here. :D

I had to ask someone what was this, because my sister could not tell me.

He said to me it was a sort of  rice cake 米糕 (mǐ gāo) or also called 团子 (tuánzi).

Said texture was sticky because it was made of sticky rice 糯米 (nuòmǐ).

I have to be honest, I ended up giving it to my sister. I had put it in the refrigerator before, because I wouldn't eat the whole rice cake in a day. But the cake stayed in for too long, I believe... so two days later, it was hard as rock... and did not look that fresh. I don't think I should have put it in the refrigerator?

My sister seemed to like it.. I think fresh, this would have taste good.

I shall try it another time, but eat it in one day.

Really good, feels like strawberry flavored-air.

Reminded me of other wafers I ate when I was young.

Didn't know Yang Guifei liked Lychee.

(FYI Yang Guifei was Emperor Minghuang's favorite concubine during the Tang dynasty (618–907). She's considered to be exceptionally beautiful, but is one of the reasons of the country's (and dynasty's) downfall... But yeah, I really like the lychee flavour too. （・∀・）

It's really cool that it's packed individually

(maybe not good for environment though...)

So good!

Lychee flavour is really good~

When I went to Taiwan, I bought Hi-Chew candies for my sister, thinking we didn't have those in Montreal. Found out one day we actually did have Hi-Chew candies in Chinatown supermarkets. ^^'

I have only tasted Grape, Peach and Lychee flavoured Hi-Chew, but Lychee is definitely my favorite one out of those three.

From the packaging of the cake, it is from the Asian bakery Harmonie

(FB page here)

I've seen this type of cake a lot in Asian bakeries, but never bought one, so I was really happy to try it. The taste is good, it's like vanilla.. the typical white cake, but because the cake is pretty dry, it makes A LOT of crumbs. Don't bring this cake to eat at school or the library, it will be a mess.

When I saw this cake, the texture, shape and little white cream line in the middle reminded me of the Japanese strawberry sandwich/cake:

[x]

If you've read other articles on the blog, you may already

know I really like egg tarts. These were amazing (◎o◎)

That crust though (ﾟ∀ﾟ)

In the Harmonie carton box, there were three snacks:

Deep-fried sesame seed balls 煎堆 (jiān duī)

Had never tasted this before - better than I expected (oOo)!

Had to google it after to know the name of it.

I don't know the exact name, I guess it's kind of a coconut Asian bun/bread.

It was good, since I like coconut, but the taste is quite strong,

so if you don't like this flavour, I don't recommend it.

(or maybe it was my bun that tasted particularly strong)

I'm sure this would have tasted way better if I had thought of heating it in the microwave before eating it... It's a bun with meat (I believe), onions (I believe) and some type of tomato sauce (I believe...) The filling tasted salty but also pretty sweet... I don't really like it when my food tastes sweet except for desserts, so I ended up eating most of the bread... haa.

But again, I guess it's better when it's eaten hot (than cold like I did). D:

Dyeing Light Hair Dark Brown (almost Black)

So... I decided a couple of days ago that I should change my hair color. And my mother dyed it for me yesterday.
And it's not that I'm thinking dyeing my hair dark brown was a huge mistake, but I think dark brown looks better.. in my imagination. It's not that I thought I would end up a bombshell with dark brown hair, but I definitely thought it would suit me better than my light hair. I've always liked light hair. Alas, being Asian, my natural hair color is black (I know there are Asians with naturally brown hair, but I mean, most of Asians have black hair).

A year ago and a half, I decided to go to a hair salon get streaks of my hair bleached. I actually wanted all of my hair bleached, but the hairdresser told me this would be very damaging to my hair, so I agreed to have a lot of hair streaks bleached instead.

This was my hair color before getting my hair bleached (after repetitive blonde hair dyes for about two years):

My hair with bleached streaks. The color turned out nice, light as I wanted. Hairdresser was right about making me streaks only!

And then three months passed, and I 'realized' black roots on blonde hair did not look good at all.

I also learned of the existence of toning shampoo, but was not a fond of using it. But yeah, eventually my beautiful blonde streaks started to turn yellow-orange. ヽ(ಠДಠ)ﾉ

So I went back to the hair salon to fix my roots, but also lighten my hair again (bleached streaks).

First time bleaching made my hair quite dry, but the dryness must not have been that bad, because I don't really remember having excessive dry hair. Second time bleaching though was another thing.

This time, my hair was so dry. It's when I look back at that moment that I realize how dry it was. But at that time, I wasn't really conscious of how damaged my hair was after that second bleaching job.

Actually, I loved my light hair, despite the ends that were so dry for days (eventually it went away).

Hmm I don't really know where I'm going with this, but all this to say that I always loved light hair.

I kept light hair like this for a good one year and a half. And I got used to seeing myself with light hair. Since I was 14, my goal was to reach a very light color. I had actually half-reached that goal when I was 15 and bought Revlon Frost & Glow which really did a decent job in my opinion), but then one month later I got tired and dyed my hair very dark brown, and then jet black. JET BLACK. Can you believe it.
I never really stuck to my hair color when I was younger. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Then I had no choice but to keep jet black because it's practically impossible to go from jet black to light hair. But I didn't and ended up at the hairdresser to fix an uneven foam dye I had tried on my jet black dyed hair ft. natural black roots.. And two years later (2012) I restarted dyeing it, but this time, I sticked to my goal; going lighter and lighter each dye (to end up with hair you see on the first picture).

So I've been used to seeing light hair when I looked in the mirror for about three years. And I liked it!
I felt ~special~ because I think even though there are Asians out there that dye their hair different colors than brown, not many Asians have light hair.

Anyway, back to the present in 2015.
Having light hair is cool~ except for the roots. I actually had huge black roots in April 2015 and then dyed all of my hair red, which was a fail because only the roots turned red (which is the top of my head) but the rest stayed blonde?!
A couple of weeks after, my mother dyed my hair a blonde color to kind of blend both colors together. Improvement observed.
September 2015, dyeing my roots again with blonde dye. Ends up kind of copper light-brown (it's darker than the tips), not much of a surprise.

I absolutely love this color, but sometimes,

it just looks ugly on me because of my skin color.

Then, some things happened; and it made me consider my hair color.
Dark hair = going back to boring. But if I can make my face stand out, maybe I'd be less boring-looking.
October 2015, starting to think about going back to dark hair (for a couple of reasons).
October 17th, my mother dyes my hair very dark chocolate brown....,!!!!

With flash

I don't love it, but neither do I hate it.
I do miss my light hair, but only in certain lightings. Sometimes, it would look nice, but other times it looked very unnatural because of my skin color, and some bleached streaks would fade to yellow overtime. When I took selfies, my hair would usually look great with my face, but then I'm in a group picture and it looks hideous. lol.
And also, my hair is so damaged. I really want to not dye my hair excessively or bleach it again. If I had kept light hair, I would have had to continue fixing the roots regularly. I'm kinda tired of this now. If I want light hair back, I'm gonna buy a freaking wig (I'm serious). But the thing is, my hair is SO thin because of all it endured those past years..... my hair have always been thin, but they definitely thinned out a lot since I started dyeing them. So I really want to grow out healthy hair again...

Anyway thank you for reading. Or just looking at the pictures.
:-)

Changed Blog Design, Language Switch, Blog Name etc.

Hello,

A couple of weeks ago, I started writing my articles in English rather than in French. I really enjoyed writing in French because it's my first language, but a switch was necessary. Nearly every blog I am subscribed to is written in English, and I feel it can be easier to access my blog if it's not written in French.

Anyway, today, it was the finalization of a new blog design. I had started yesterday to draw a couple of doodles and do the header, and I think it's now finished. Not perfect but I like it!

Here's how my blog looked like:

I kept this blog 'design' for about two years... I liked its simplicity, but it was time for a change.

Of course, I did not do everything by myself when making the new design (well, except for the drawings I guess).

First, I just googled something like 'how to make your own blog design blogspot' and stumbled upon this page.

The author of the blog makes lovely designs, and I really liked the style showed in her tutorial. On top of that, everything seemed to be well explained. So I decided why not jump into it. :D

I started by drawings some cute stuffs on Paint, and make my cookie header and borders on Gimp 2.

After, I followed the steps in the tutorial to assemble everything into a blog design.

Sounds pretty simple like that, but it actually took me a whole day and a half, especially because the little drawings took me quite a while (and I had no idea what to do), and dealing with the CSS part was kinda difficult and long.. (a lot of trial and error) but all in all, I made it through hehe.

One problem I had that I still haven't found a solution though is moving the whole article text more to the right..

This is the bottom part of the article, but everything higher is the same.

But I did find a solution on a website where they told us to add a column on the left, so I added one (now I have one column on the left and one on the right (but the one on the right was always there)).

Even though it's not perfect, it's still better than having the text over the left border!

I am still not yet finished with this blog's design, as I want to add other cute pastries all along the top header. I also want to do a background for the blog. Although, this will be done another time.

For now, I am quite happy with how my blog looks, and I thank Blog Designs by Dani for all the help making this design.

Byebye!

* ­¯`~-._.-~` ­¯*¯`~-._.-~` ­¯*¯`~-._.-~` ­¯*

Update 2015.08.30

Looks like this design is not really optimized for the mobile version of Blogger, sorry!

Besides leaving it as it is, you can always click on

'View web version' at the bottom if you believe your mobile will handle it:

Bling My Flip Phone (part 3 of 3)

You can see 'Bling My Flip Phone (part 2 of 3)' here
and 'Bling My Flip Phone (part 1 of 3) here.

Hello!

Finally, the final part of 'Bling My Flip Phone' has arrived.

I added the last stuffs the day before yesterday and yesterday.

Day 5: Silver chain

After looking into necklaces for chains, I found one that had an adjustable chain, so I just cut that little part off and stuck it to its respective place on the phone.

I wouldn't say the result is striking, but I prefer the silver chain to the gold one a lot. And as expected, the chain covers the transparent gems without hiding them completely, which gives a nice effect.

After, I stuck different sizes of different colored gems in the heart contour screen. I forgot to take a picture of the result, unfortunately, but you will see it in the next pictures. They don't shine a lot.. but they don't look that bad, and it looks great when the phone has its little front lights turned on.

I also found that the Hello Kitty face was starting to look greyer and even yellow in some lightings, which was definitely an issue that had to be taken care of.

Day 6: Finishing touches...!!

Yesterday, because that Hello Kitty was annoying me, I bought some white glitters. I thought that not only would it make the Hello Kitty shinier, but it would also hide a bit of its grey color.
I also decided to put some glitters on the gems in the heart, on the two little heart charms on top, and tried on the gold chain around the bow (the last one was a fail, and I ended up removing as well as I could the nail polish and glitters stuck on)..
After waiting a little bit, I just slightly blew on the glitters and dusted them with a small brush.

And... my phone was done...!!

With the front lights on

Kinda went overboard with the glitters on that Hello Kitty..

As I tried to remove some excess on its right eye, I removed some black. :(

With the flash

Still have a long way to go before that phone is 100% completed...

Concerning the back of the phone, I have no idea what to do (yet). Only thing I know is I want the phone to stay flat on that side, so I do not want to put 3D stuffs on the back. But I will probably not start working on that part any time soon, and when I do, I shall post some pictures here!

- - -

To conclude this journey (separated in three parts total), I wanted to say that I am overall very satisfied of the outcome of this bling phone (but not perfectly).

As I said it in part 1, I always failed trying to bling something before, ending up disliking it after. But this time, I am proud to say I love my phone much more than before blinging it! I do not regret it at all.

Even though this is definitely not a budget savvy bling phone, I love it, and that thought will certainly make me take care more of it. Furthermore, that phone has a truly unique look.

Thank you for reading!

Byebye~

Bling My Flip Phone (part 2 of 3)

You can find 'Bling My Flip Phone (part 1 of 3)' here
and 'Bling My Flip Phone (part 3 of 3)' here.

Hello!

In this second part, I will show you pictures of the evolution of my phone getting a new look.
This article will be separated in four short parts since I bought the furnitures one day, did two big center pieces another day, did the bottom of the phone in two days, and just finished the upper part today (and also did some modifications to parts that were already done). It will be long, and there will be lots of useless details, so I do not expect you to read it all lol.
I just think it's cool to show the progression, and it kinda gives me a reminder of what to do/not to do..
Also maybe it can give you ideas if you want to decorate your stuffs!

Day 1: Buying deco

Just before starting, just thought I could show you the decorations I already had and bought.

What I found in my room:

What I bought:

Before, I would only buy a couple of gems and pearls, but this time, after looking at pictures on the net, I thought it was necessary to buy a huge variety of decorations all sizes to make the phone look prettier.

Since I did not have that much deco to start with, I bought so many things. At least I can use them more than once..

Some of them were quite expensive. T_T Like the bracelets at $10, but I absolutely needed the little jewels because it just gives such a nice shiny look. And thinking back, I do not regret paying the price for the quality (compared to the cheap gems on the far left, these are the ones I used to always buy..!)

I could have ordered everything for cheaper and maybe even better quality on eBay or Amazon, but I was too impatient to start blinging and did not want to wait for the shipping..

Anyway, I will probably next time because I saw many cute decorations I could not find in the stores.

Then, I started to remove the little jewels and pearls from their sticky sheets.

This was longer to do than I thought it would take...

After unsticking the last set of gems, I was so bored (I had started after supper) I did not even started blinging my phone like I had planned to... I just went to bed eh.

Day 2: Starting blinging (heart and bow)

I couldn't wait to start doing more concrete stuff, and actually do use of what I had been fed up doing the day before = unsticking gem off their sticky film.

I had seen on Youtube a video about decorating a phone case, and the girl was doing a plan before... so I thought I should do one too! But actually, mine ended up not very well-planned.

Well, I did the heart AND the bow, which is kind of a start. But after, I just started sticking them on the phone without continuing the plan. I just couldn't imagine continuing to put gems and stuffs on the sheet without these two pieces being stuck. And I was not really inspired by my plan (maybe it's better to make one while you already have an idea of what you are making... which was not the case at all for me).

Hm, the heart looks a lil bit less lean than the previous pic, but it was impossible to do the same heart on the phone as on the plan. I had to put in a pearl heart because I was too tired of trying to fix the jewels so the heart would be symmetrical. And I had to concede hiding a bit of the clock on its right. Oh well.

Really, shaping that thing was so heart (heart, hard... ha!). But it was definitely worth it. I was really proud after.

As you can see, the bow has some white in and a bit around it (I stuck the bow first before making the heart). Well, that's because when I stuck the bow, I thought it was not well placed, so I removed it and re-stuck it two times. Sadly, the glue (a different one than the E6000 one I would also use later) had already stained the phone. At that moment, I thought I would again really mess up another blinging attempt.

Added a little more deco, and then my mother persuaded me to stop (which was a really good idea, because I would have probably screwed it from being tired and less concentrated if I had continued to work on it).

I was a bit sad of the slow progression I had made (I had started decorating right after lunch, but had finished after supper). Only this result after a whole afternoon of work?!

But besides being mentally tired, I was still looking forward to continue working on it the day after.

Day 3: Continuing blinging

Sticking gems and pearls to fill in the spaces. Don't have much to say other than that. :)

A bit later, I saw pictures of bling phones with chains on them while looking on the net!

source

source

These immediately inspired me to put chains on mine. It gives the phone so much more bling!

That bow looks even more awesome with the chain around it.

Thanks internet! (and the pictures' owners) 8D

And then, I kinda got dry of ideas for the top.. had no idea what I should do, so I decided to call it a day before screwing things up. Sticking these by the way took me an afternoon.

Well, actually, I'm lying. I did have an idea, but I had no idea how to do it, and if I was going to do it. When I discovered that chains made the phone look much snazzier, it all became about putting chains on my phone, like this picture (hanging chains on the bottom):

source

As for my phone, I thought about putting part of a keychain on the upper part. I imagined it would look spiffy and I needed something big on the upper part to balance the chained bow.

At the same time, that is when I realized that transparent gems did not look that good on my phone. This always happened before, but I still hadn't learnt my lesson yet.. I actually thought that with some new glue (E6000) and gems (though not all) bought at Michaels (which I thought were maybe better quality but nope), the effect would be prettier than the one on previous attempts.

Sadly I did not snap a close-up of the transparent gems to show you the effect, but I am sure you have already seen it before anyway. It becomes kind of fuzzy (like it loses its shininess a while after being stuck on?) Also, the gem becomes opaque and not shiny anymore the minute you accidentally put a little glue on..

Therefore, putting a big chain with charms hanging down seemed perfect for me to hide all the imperfections of the transparent gems that I would have to stick on the next day (I could not put only pearls still).

So I took some of the charms and chain on the necklace I had bought from Claire's (the one which had the pink bow), did some modifications, changed charms, shortened the chain, changed charms again, and then got tired (that was the moment I called it quits). However, I was still quite proud of the work done on my phone that day and how it looked.

Day 4: Starting the upper part

I am making progress.

Started early in the morning because that keychain issue was bugging me. After a good moment of trying to figure out how I could do something satisfying, I removed two charms, put a new one (the pink heart), and shortened the chain. I put a pink flower with the chain attached to it. It does not really look like the hanging keychain idea I had in mind at the beginning, but I am so glad I actually took this idea instead of the first one. I don't have pictures showing my old idea, but I swear it was not great and would have looked so complicated to do (the chain was supposed to move freely, be longer and kind of in diagonal starting from the phone strap hole on the left side and going a bit down where the other extremity of the chain would be stuck on the phone (which is weird because I do not think the extremity would have stayed stuck on). And the charms were hiding a part of the upper heart which did not look good at all, and I realized that when flipping my phone open, the chain would move down and be noisy..

Also, I had tried to put a chain ring in the phone strap hole, but kinda screwed the strap hole (because it was so tight, the chain ring could not move and it was ugly, but when I tried to remove it, it did not want to, so the strap hole is all damaged because of the pliers squeezing the chain ring to get out).

So that is why I do not regret giving up the keychain idea (even though that meant not hiding the ugly transparent gems).

The idea before sticking the three pieces

After sticking them (and adding other things like the pink ice cream)

I actually forgot the gold heart was supposed to be a bit lower,

so the chain would make a hanging effect, but it's ok~

Now I needed to fill in the spot with gems... but this time, I put some more pearls than usual, and found the result to be prettier than what I would have imagined and very girly-like.

So I ditched the transparent gems, and just continued on with pearls and bracelet rhinestones (they shine a lot it's amazing).

Unfortunately for the bottom part of my phone, the transparent gems seemed already well-stuck, so I thought it was impossible to remove them and start over. T_T

Also, my mom cut for me a pearl in half (it was actually supposed to be a charm in my first keychain idea) so I could put it on the phone! I feel the cutting job was really hard to do (and dangerous a bit) so I'm really thankful because I wanted that pearl cut in half so badly..!!)

As you can see on the bottom part, I gradually added more and more

pearls and bracelet rhinestones to hide the bad transparent gems.

It really does improve the look of the bottom part.

Was my phone done at that moment?

...

Yes, I removed a big chunk of the bottom part...

It all started when I thought putting a chain right above the bracelet gems would make my phone more blingy and prettier. But because of the big pearl right under the left bow tail, the chain was not leveled. It was going up and down (also because I had stuck other pearls on top of transparent gems earlier). It looked weird.

So I decided to attempt removing that big pearl. If I was going to succeed, it was so worth it.

And after succeeding to remove the pearl, it finally encouraged me to remove the transparent gems I really did not like (at the same time, I stuck the pink ice cream cone directly on the phone instead of leaving it resting on the gems, so it looked MUCH better from profile after).

^O^

Maybe you don't see a big difference (especially because the whole line of transparent gems is still there), but just right above, I changed pearls, put more pearls, put bracelet stones, removed a lot of superposed gems, etc.

I thought I would leave the line of transparent gems there because I would be putting anyway a chain over it, and the chain would be hiding all of the imperfections perfectly.

I believe that lighting makes my phone look 10 times cuter

But looking at it more, I found that if I put the chain, it looked a lil bit too yellow/gold on the bottom part, so it was out of balance. So I tried putting a whole row of white little pearls, but was still not satisfied. Then tried a whole row of bracelet gems, but not better. Finally, tried alternating pearl-bracelet gems, but it was worse.

So now I guess I am stuck here. As I am writing this, I still haven't found an idea. Well, thinking about it, maybe I should try a silver chain?

After looking at the picture, I found flaws. No!

1. random small pearl that got stuck (there was no glue on fortunately!)

2. bracelet gem that fell off

3. a stain on the pink gem that I figured the chain or whatever over would not hide.

Ok so after solving these little mistakes, this is how the phone looks like.

So now, what is left to do are the inside of the 'heart contour screen' (fill in some gems to cover left and right borders), and the line at the bottom of the phone which leaves me undecided..
For the inside of the heart, I think that tiny transparent silver gems would look nice, but if only they could keep shining once put on... I am stuck with pearls again, and even though I am really satisfied of how they look like, I think silver gems would look better. I will think about this.

I will continue updating my journey in the last part, but for now, I will end this article here.

Byebye!