Saffurawanders

As I mentioned in my previous article, understanding Russian culture takes time. Some things seem unusual at first, and the White Nights are one of them. For people living in St. Petersburg, summer is a season worth celebrating. The city stays bright late into the night, and instead of staying indoors and going to bed early, people make the most of the long daylight hours outside. In Malaysia, where I come from, there are really only two kinds of weather we talk about: rainy and sunny. Our days are fairly predictable too, with daylight from around 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. We are lucky to have beautiful sunrises and sunsets almost every day. But St. Petersburg was something I had never experienced before. During my visit, Fajr began at around 2 a.m., with sunrise only about an hour later. I also learnt that blackout curtains are almost essential in summer. Without them, children can struggle to sleep, because the sky stays bright even when it is technically night. Then came the White Nights,...

The Eyes (눈동자)  ⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Eyes (눈동자) , a 2026 South Korean film directed by Yeom Ji-ho, a remake of the Spanish thriller Julia's Eyes . Shin Min-a plays Seo-jin, a photographer with a hereditary degenerative eye disease who is shattered by the sudden death of her twin sister, Seo-in, who had already lost her own sight and became a ceramic artist before dying. As Seo-jin investigates, an unseen presence closes in, twisting her sense of reality and pulling her into paranoia as her vision fades.  That part really is the unsettling core of it — Hyeon-min isn't your typical black-and-white slasher villain. He's framed as someone who's genuinely unraveling, obsessive and dangerous, but the film keeps circling back to this warped idea that he sees himself as devoted, almost protective toward Seo-jin rather than as a threat. That gap between how he sees himself and what he's actually doing is what makes him scary — he's not hiding evil; he's convinced he's the go...

31st July 2025

Before I Knew It Was Lupus: My Vietnam Story 20th July 2025

A Real Pain (2024) ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I love the cinematography in here. The shot was in Poland.  Mismatched cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The whole film was shot on location in Poland mainly in Warsaw and Lublin, plus the town of Krasnystaw, which has a personal connection to writer-director Jesse Eisenberg's own family history. A lot of it was filmed in Warsaw's Muranów neighborhood, near the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Warsaw Uprising Memorial, which grounds the story in Poland's Jewish heritage.  What stands out most, according to cinematographer Michał Dymek, is that the visual choice was deliberate and they wanted to show Poland as bright, warm, and colorful rather than the grey, somber way it's often depicted on screen. One reviewer specifically praised how Eisenberg captures the beauty of everyday Polish life through quiet, overlooked details such as street...

Welcome to my travel blog! I'll be sharing my travel pictures here a lot mainly as a personal memory, so I can keep all my favorite moments in one place. I'm a little nervous starting this, since English isn't my first language, so please forgive any grammar mistakes along the way! I've been traveling since I was four years old, always with my family (anak emas).  My first trip overseas was to Singapore in 2006 and honestly, I don't remember much from that trip at all.  So far, I've traveled to: Asia: Singapore, China, South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Brunei Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait Europe: United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Norway, Russia Balkans (Eastern Europe): Bosnia, North Macedonia, Türkiye, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro,  Africa: Tunisia Oceania: Australia, New Zealand I also live with SLE (...