Melbourne winter has entered its villain phase, and I have entered my electric blanket. The only things that could lure me out this June were hot pots and performers, and thankfully, both delivered. But first, the month…
Highlights
👩🏽🎓 —My CPA graduation ceremony was made ten times better by Fafa, who got me flowers before, Cifu (the CPA graduation bear) during and treated me to a Japanese teishoku dinner at Norrisong afterwards.
👩🏾 — June started with the amazing The Supposed To Be at Footscray Community Arts Centre. It’s a play, performed excellently, about the dilemmas of a brown immigrant woman. It hit a little too close to home and brought up all kinds of feelings. I am so glad I went, and I am curious why they haven’t expanded it beyond Melbourne.
🎪 — On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I took myself to Cirque du Soleil’s KOOZA, which I first read about last year in my exam paper and had on my Bingo card for this year. Before the show, I genuinely could not tell whether I had ever been to a proper circus, or whether my mind was playing tricks on me after reading an entire series of Goosebumps, the Mandela effect at work. Alas, I was so glad I went, even though I was surrounded by families with kids. The show was amazing, and, to tell you the truth, it felt like an inner-child-healing moment for me.
💃🏻 — What was a treat for the adult child in me was Blanc de Blanc Encore, which I watched with two friends on a weekday night. We met for the first time at Shanghai Street Dumplings, the OG site in Chinatown, and ordered three types of dumplings (xiao long bao, mini fried pork buns, and peanut chilli wontons). The dumplings were good, but I also had a revelation mid-dumpling: I don’t actually love dumplings. Alas, the show itself was amazing. Two hours of unbelievable performance: a hilarious host, a girl who floated through a ring with a perfect body, and a beautiful red-haired singer. Oh, the show is also a bit crude, and I mean that as a compliment.
🚶🏽♀️— One afternoon, I joined the Sips and Signs Walking tour in North Melbourne, starting with a quick first-time stop at the North Melbourne bookstore before joining the group at the Leveson Hotel. From there, we set off on a walk where I learned about and documented some of Melbourne’s ghost signs, with a mini pit stop for an alcohol fuel-up along the way. I had a winter sake at Benchwarmers, garnished, I think, with a dried red chilli, and a beautiful Christmas gin at Here’s Looking at You, Kid.
🌟 — After an amazing Reiki session last month, I went to a chakra balancing session at Assembly Yoga. It was comforting, nourishing, and oh-so-interesting! Something the teacher said that stuck with me: instead of working on rebalancing your chakras again and again, find out what is causing the imbalance in the first place.
🍲 — I took a miso-making class on a Saturday morning. I started the day with a classic Japanese brekkie and a hojicha pear tea before getting into the session, which was mostly an hour of squeezing soybeans by hand. I am so proud of my baby miso, whom I have named Miyumi, now waiting in a dark, cold corner of the pantry to be opened next June again. Fafa, wait ya!
👯 — Girls’ night at Sharon’s beautiful home. She started us off with yummy Bang Bang Prawn, a Gulf staple snack, followed by a full Korean spread. It was excellent. We talked about everything and anything, including how reckless and wild we were when we were young, how many bad decisions we made, and how it was only our mothers’ prayers that kept anything truly bad from happening to us.
🛕 — I made a terrarium with two baby plants, a monkey mask monstera and a syngonium, and named it Cindersap Forest (iykyk).
🐈 — One of the best things I saw this month: a stranger stopped their car near a turn, got out, and took off his jacket to save a lemur. The whole thing warmed my heart. Small acts of kindness are keeping me warm this winter.
💇 — After coming back from Asia, I got that itchy feeling to cut my hair, so I booked an impromptu same-day haircut at the place where Fafa gets his. There is something deeply satisfying about acting on a hair whim within hours of having it. I am adding this as a highlight because, one month on, I am still loving the new look. This guy might just replace the British hair dictator I had grown to worship before he abandoned us to go back to England during Covid.
Foodie Guide-Y
🫓 — The biggest food-related highlight for me was realising on the spot that Yeshi, an Ethiopian restaurant, now sits in the former home of Saba (my fave Ethiopian restaurant in Melbourne and easily one of my fave restaurants ever). Having started the night at Pendant Public Bar, which I hereby announce is one of my fave bars in Melbourne, we made our way to Yeshi for the ultimate Ethiopian platter: Beyanettu, a traditional feast of slow-cooked, richly spiced lentil stews and vibrant vegetable sides, along with two meat dishes, all served on a bed of fresh injera.
📖 — We hosted our neighbour with a Thai dinner. I made papaya salad, pad ka prao with mushroom, tom kha, and mango sticky rice with blue rice, served alongside jasmine rice with Thai pork chilli paste. I am pretty proud of myself this month as I made a rice dessert, a complex dessert, a dessert I love, and sticky rice, which is well outside my rice norm. Also, I think I love tom kha because it is the Thai version of sayur lodeh, and easier to make.
🥖 — A French oldie date with the same neighbour, but just us gals this time. We went to the newly opened French Bulldog for their $14-a-plate dishes. I loved the smoked butter on bread, but my absolute fave was the blue swimmer crab cake. We moved on to Mill Place Merchants — a place I love so much that it’s on the list, competing with the bar above — where I had two mulled wines. We talked about love, lost love, and love lost. It was foggier than I had ever seen when we took the Uber home, which was so cool!! Even though I couldn’t capture it with the camera.
🍲 — Hotpot dinner at Liz’s. As usual: delicious food, free-flowing red wine, and random chit-chat. It was so good and nourishing to spend time with her and baby L.
🤒 — I was sick the whole week last week, and nothing beats the comfort of Indo food, so alongside karmic juice bone broth, there was a lot of it: nasi goreng ayam terasi and teh manis from Ayam Penyet Ria, bakmi ayam (mi ayam Wonogiri) from Pondok Remah, and Nasi Pedas Melbourne.
🍗 — Cooking highlights this month: green chilli pork, baked madeleines, mutton chukka with rasam and rice, a last-minute ikan teri dish because Fafa wanted it and had been looking forward to it, and shakshuka. And one humbling failure: I was inspired to make spring rolls, used rice paper because we didn’t have spring roll paper, and they came out badly.
🍪 — A new-to-me non-Aussie food: caramel hot cross bun, shared by Nikki and eaten with a generous spread of butter.
🛍 — Fafa and I went to Highpoint a couple of times. Once we had Dragon Hotpot, but it was too spicy, and I couldn’t finish it or enjoy it. Another time, I had sambal pepper rice, which was excellent, plus a random weekday date night at Villas for biryani. Another biryani this month was the Hyderabadi Nawab Biryani, which was so good and yum. Other memorable food moments: I went out for a midweek doughnut only to find the Krispy Kreme kiosk permanently closed, so I came back to the office with a bag of kaya marble cake instead and ate two, heated.
Read, Watched & Browsed
🚀 — A discovery this month: I love sci-fi. Books, movies, all of it. Add that to Audible in the kitchen and cooking and travel shows on the couch, and you have my entire media diet.
📚 — I sat and read Celestial Lights in one evening. A gorgeous book. I felt so good after finishing it, and that feeling is the one I want to chase forever. I am now reading Merantau.
👻 — Horror movies of the month: Exhuma with Fafa, though I suspect I would understand it in far more detail if I knew more about Korean and Japanese history and culture. Hokum, 4/5. Do Not Enter, an urban-ex horror that is better than expected, even though public opinion goes the opposite way. Flight 3509, for what I believe is the fifth time. Lastly, Iron Lung: I broke it into three sittings and still didn’t get it, tried again, and fell asleep. It’s not for me.
🎬 — Non-horror watching: 3022, Maternal Instinct on Netflix, 29 (a Tamil movie) with Fafa during our yurt stay, and the second halves of Elsbeth‘s and Matlock‘s seasons.
🎧 — I finished Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential on Audible, all of it listened to in the kitchen while cooking my way through June, which feels right. His Tokyo chapter is, unsurprisingly, my fave. I also finished Taste by Stanley Tucci. If I follow his reckoning of age (60 as mid-to-late autumn), I am in the late summer of my year. Now listening to Toast by Nigel Slater.
🔖— The fascinating stories of the last of Albania’s ‘sworn virgins’.
Tiny Joys
❤️ $5 promotion ❤️ Avo and bread with chilli oil ❤️ Chinatown ❤️ Coffee walk with Nikki ❤️ Fafa got me a cupcake from Paolo ❤️ Journaling over coffee with a dash of milk ❤️ Kerupuk ❤️ Low-key doing low-key work while watching YT commentaries ❤️ Munching on Pumpkin seeds Munch Me ❤️ New moon class with Natta ❤️ Passionfruit ❤️ Peko Peko lunch with the whole team ❤️ Pho lunch from downstairs ❤️ Saying “a dash of milk” to Fafa ❤️ Knowing some ppl starting their day at 4 AM, like the Woolies delivery driver ❤️ T’s homemade us scones ❤️ Thai leftovers, Indo leftovers, ikan teri leftovers with rice ❤️ Tofu bánh mì ❤️ Yan Yan ❤️
Time Machine
🌴 ━ The happenings of this time last year and last decade.
Thank You, Next!
💡 — Tarot of the month is The Hermit, which, given that July is one of the coldest months of the year, seems fitting. The Hermit is the card of turning inward: stepping back from the noise, walking slowly with your own little lantern, and trusting that the answers you are looking for live in solitude, not in the crowd. For July, I am reading it as permission to embrace the hibernation rather than fight it — to reflect, journal, and let the quiet of deep winter do its work, so that whatever I find in the stillness can light the way for the months ahead. And the guided message was El Camino deck’s Sheets of Rain.
📷 — Fittingly Hermit-esque, I have decided to use July for a photo project, all to cope with the f-ing miserable cold. This month, I am taking daily pictures with a film camera — wandering alone with a camera instead of a lantern. Hopefully, it will be enough of a distraction to keep me exploring outside.
🛬 — I am off to Sydney next weekend for the annual GGP session with Jik. We are staying in the Blue Mountains with plenty of things planned around it. Here’s to wintering somewhere NOT Melbourne.
🛀🏽 — The weekend after, I am off to Rosebud with a couple of friends for hot springs and Thai food, and on the last weekend of the month, I am upskilling myself with a baking workshop.
Follow me on Instagram @KultureKween for more recent updates.
