MAQUI'S Kobe

MAQUI'S Kobe, a Japanese sweet store originated from Kobe, Japan. From chocolate to pudding, cake to mini pie, all their sweets look so tempting. I walked past  one of their stores in Jakarta a while ago but did n't get a chance to buy anything from their shop but lucky me last week got one box of five mine pies brought by a family. The soft texture and melt-on-your-tongue filling will make you go back to their shop and try the rest of the flavours. I got the almond, chocolate and cream cheese which is my favorite one and definitely will go the their shops on my next trip to Jakarta. 

You can find their stall shop at Grand Indoesia,  Plaza Senayan oir Senayan City. 

The Coffee Legend

I happened to visit Ho Chi Minh City last month and treat myself some of the best coffees in the world. Vietnam known as the world's second-largest producer of coffee behind Brasil, that gives enough reason for its government to protect their domestic coffee producers by banning some famous coffee business from opening their shop in this country, but this policy ends soon as Starbucks will open its first shop in Vietnam soon.

My trip was a short one yet I managed to try the three most famous coffees in Vietnam: Trung Ngu Yen, Highlands coffee and Vinacafe. Trung Ngu Yen coffee is the most internationally famous Vietnamese brand for coffee while Highlands and Vinacafe are more 'local'. You will easily find Highlands cafe at almost every corner of the city but barely find a shop of Vinacafe. I did visit Trung Ngu Yen and Highlands cafe and bought some Vinacafe instant packaging in a supermarket. 

 (The famous Trung Ngu Yen coffee served in Vietnamese style)

(Cappuccino from Trung Ngu Yen) 

(The favorite black coffee and iced coffee with milk at Highlands cafe)

For me, personally, the highlands iced coffee is the best one...

Bokeh

My first post in this new year, been busy and didn't post anything over the past couple months.

This morning I read an interesting article on Peta Pixel about 'How do you pronounce bokeh' by Michael Zhang:

The term “bokeh” is often used in the world of photography to describe the quality of the out-of-focus blur in photographs. Do you know how it’s pronounced?

The term comes from the Japanese word “boke” (暈け/ボケ), which translates to “blur”, “haze”, or “fuzziness”. It made its way into English-speaking world back in 1997 after Photo Techniques editor Mike Johnston (who now writes at The Online Photographer) included three articles on the topic for the March/April 1997 issue of the magazine.

In the articles, Johnston changed the spelling from “boke” to “bokeh” to make the pronunciation of the word more intutive, lest people pronounce it like “poke” with a ‘b’. Johnston writes,

[It was] one of the few issues of that magazine that sold out. My own contribution was…er, a letter. I decided that people too readily mispronounced “boke,” so I added an “h” to the word in our articles, and voilá, “bokeh” was born.

Actually, to be precise, what I had noticed was not just that people mispronounced the word as it was commonly spelled, but that they had a tendency to ridicule it, making lame jokes about it as if it rhymed with “smoke” or “toke” or “joke.” Actually, even spelled boke, it is properly pronounced with bo as in bone and ke as in Kenneth, with equal stress on either syllable.

Here is one of my shots with bokeh effect..