Mum arrived in Melbourne a few days ago. I’m catching the 5pm to the city and meeting up with her right after school today.

Yesterday, the year 12s of my boarding house (Cuthbertson) had a special organized breakfast at the Sheraton Hotel in Geelong town. This being our last few weeks in school, let alone the boarding house, the Head of House organized a breakfast outing for us, where we can enjoy being together as a group for the very last time.

Though I must say, I was impressed at seeing the whole year 12 group getting up at 6:30 in the morning and managed to get organized and caught a 7 o’clock bus to the hotel; with limited difficulties and complaints.

We enjoyed the best breakfast the school has ever provided for us. Turning up at the Four Points restaurant at the Sheraton Hotel, one could only expect the best to be served.

Having so many choices at what I wanted to eat, I chose my all time favourite cheese omelette to start my day. By all means, this was one of the best western-style breakfasts I’ve had in a very long time. Accompanied with toast, baked beans, mushrooms and hash browns, I made the most of what my tummy could and devoured every single bit of it.

Though feeling dreary from the lack of sleep I had the night before, I still found something that amused me early in the wee hours of dawn. Whilst waiting for my cheese omelette, I noticed the name tag on an Indonesian lady chef who was making my omelette.

I could tell she was Indonesian by the way she looked and the way she spoke. With only a slight Australian accent, the distinctive Indonesian intonations can be heard in her voice when she asked me about what school we came from, and what we were doing there so early in the day.

Unlike Thai names, Indonesians tend to follow more conservative names such as Wati or Mita, and anything similar to that. So, I was surprised to see the name on this woman name tag.


With my diminishing ability to understand Bahasa, I actually translated this in my head as ‘Duck’, which is actually Itik in malay.

Titik in Bahasa literally means dot or full-stop. Now, can you tell me, who in their right mind would actually name their daughter after a punctuation mark?