One Girl. . . on a Path Less Travelled By. . ! Tell Your Story Contest - The Tale of foodie.warrior

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As far as I can remember, my life has always been on the path less traveled. Here are some highlights of my life before Steemit:-

Born to a Singaporean Chinese Family of 8 (not very common in my city in my generation)

Around the time I was born, my parents were members of a church that took the words of the Bible “Be fruitful and multiply” at face value.

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Homeschooled under an American Curriculum in Singapore.

It’s not that easy to find someone in Singapore who was homeschooled from kindergarten to high school. After I turned 11, I would walk to the nearby foodcourt with my sisters or alone to buy my family’s lunch around noon everday. This prompted lots of questioning stares and glances by the stall owners.

One particular question I was always bombarded with by the aunties. . .
“Why are you not in school? Playing truant, issit!”

And then the nagging/scolding that happened every two weeks. . .
“Why can’t you speak Mandarin?!! Chinese also cannot speak Chinese?!”

University Broke My Public School Virginity

Entering into the Singapore public education system for the first time in University was not the easiest journey for me. Along with all the normal challenges and transitions that other students face, I had to binge update my social skills and get used to actually listening to a teacher going ’blah blah blah’ in front of the seminar room in order to participate actively in class, when all I really wanted to do was read the textbook myself and chat on Facebook. It had its highs and lows, like the alligator teeth of many crypto charts. But there were three shining moments that stood out:

I took a half a gap year for an internship, so I graduated one semester after my friends. This explains my lack of a graduation gown in the photo :) Photo Credit

(1) Overseas internship in Shanghai, CN: I got the best ticket to getting over a big breakup of an unhealthy relationship with my ex by living 6 months in Shanghai and discovering myself.

(2) Overseas exchange program in Atlanta, GA, USA: I got to learn even more about myself and explore completely different mentalities during the 6 months I spent in a different continent.

(3) Meeting The Mann in my university. I think (1) and (2) and many other factors worked together to bring my husband and me together (my mother-in-law likes to call it ‘fate’ lol). We met in a ‘New Media’ course and hit it off immediately. This jaded girl who had accepted that she would marry for convenience and not for love, actually had a love at first sight experience that has lasted till today!

Breaking Out of the Career-hungry Madness of my Peers

After university, I started work as a branding management trainee-cum-tuition teacher in a modern office downtown in Singapore. My colleagues were all young and my friends. We had such great times there!

Three months in, I decided to throw that away and chase my childhood dream of becoming a Singapore Girl with Singapore Airlines (Okay, I make it sound like a rash decision, but I did a lot of cost-benefit analysis before making the switch). Some people think that becoming a flight stewardess is a complete waste of a university degree, but for me, it was a rewarding job.

I had the pleasure of operating 146 flights safely to cities spread around 5 continents, enjoying luxury hotel stays, swearing at having to repeatedly do my makeup and hair, roaming the foreign streets of cities, supermarket shopping (my favourite activity), touching base with people I love and names living overseas (esp. The Mann), and taking thousands of pictures (many of which I never got around to uploading anywhere, so I likely won’t be accused of stealing photos in the future).

Moving to Germany for Love

It’s very unrepresentative of airlines across the world, but Singapore Airlines pays its cabin crew well. Taking home a higher salary than I would have been able to at my former office job meant that I could set aside a bigger portion to go to my savings. With disciplined saving, I put aside SGD 4K every month, and paid off my combined university and study exchange loan of SGD 58k a couple days before my 25th birthday. Happy birthday to me :))

With nothing else standing in the way, I decided to move to Germany to get married to The Mann and live happily ever after (hopefully) :)) Alright, this decision detailed an even longer cost-benefit analysis.

Relocation Depression Reared its Ugly Head

Moving over to Germany proved to be more difficult than I had ever expected. Even though I had spent many months living away from Singapore, the finality and gravity of uprooting my belongings and self, leaving my parents’ home and the country of my birth for good, and bidding farewell to your closest circle knowing that your physical time spent together would from now on be limited and so precious, had set in. Couple that with settling into a new, foreign culture and country where the sun shines for maybe only three months out of twelve, and the processes and systems are vastly different. Moving over to Germany took a rather unexpected toll on my health, both physical and emotional.

After one year of feeling sorry for my ass and fighting to stay afloat of the ridiculous thoughts running through my head, I found myself on steemit.

I First Heard about Steemit from My Cousin-in-law Willem

Cousin Willem is currently writing his master thesis on cryptocurrencies and block chains. One fine day, he made a passing remark that steemit could potentially replace youtube in the future since earnings are a lot more straightforward and direct here.

Side note: He's a pretty cool dude. I've got a photo of him dancing to the tune of Gangnam Style in front of the entire show audience in the Singapore Zoo.

A week later, my husband, whom I regularly refer to in my posts as The Mann, calls me while he’s at work to say “hey, steemit looks like your kind of thing. I checked it out, and it sounds like something that you really could do..since you always take so many photos and like to record experiences you find cool with long Facebook posts. You should really check it out!”

I did, and then I created my account @foodie.warrior.

Cousin Willem and The Mann are not on steemit

Unfortunately, both Willem and The Mann are not on steemit. So I joined all alone in my little guppy world. Fortunately, I found my fins, swam about a little, and made some other sweet fish friends here.

@foodie.warrior writes about. . .

FOOD. Given my screen name, it would be unseemly for me to not write about this topic, wouldn’t it?

Food is in my brain, blood, bones, veins, everything! I love to grocery shop, enjoy baking, happily experiment in cooking, make many smoothies for my family, and love to eat.

I recently launched a series called SHIOK SHIOK. This series features the food culture of my homeland Singapore and includes recipes of Singaporean local dishes that I make whenever the cravings kick in (which happens more often than not lol).

Here's my first few posts in the series:
Unravelling the Mystery of Singaporean Food: Launch of the SHIOK SHIOK series :)

SHIOK SHIOK #1: Har Cheong Gai - a 'Zhi Char' favourite of Singapore (contains recipe and verdict)

SHIOK SHIOK #2: Avocado Juice - Best Drink to Make with the Fruit of the Mayan Gods

Aside from food, I also blog about my travelling experiences and incidents that happen in my life. I may also post supporting articles to my other posts in order to give some background and create a more rounded experience for my readers.

I don’t have interesting or special hobbies

I enjoy exerting energy and sweating it out, preferably through a range of sports — in-line skating, soccer, captain’s ball, badminton, basketball, swimming, running, etc. — but also just in the gym.

I also like to play board games or chess with my family and friends. I don’t drink much alcohol these days, but I do get excited over the occasional chill house party in which we play darts or make cocktails to enjoy :)

A Steemit experience must have its Alligator Teeth

I’d say my best experiences on steemit have been the sincerity and open welcome from the users here. There is an amazing level of camaraderie and support on Steemit that I find remarkable. I’ve made some friendships with some really awesome people, and I know there will be many more, simply because of the quality of the community members that you can find here.

At the same time, there are a handful of newcomers who are possibly here for the sole reason of making a quick buck, and love to spam F4F, UV4UV, etc. I take it that starting here may not be the easiest thing to do. A small part of my strategy has been to visit the pages of people who up vote and comment on my posts to give them a boost as well (principle of reciprocity without begging).

I’ve received direct messages with a statement along the lines of, ‘Hey man! Nice channel Up & Follow exchange?’. Firstly, I’m a woman (lol jk). Secondly, Hey Mr. Insincere! If you really thought my channel was nice (if you’ve even seen it), you could have just left a sincere comment, and I would most likely check you out and give you the boost that you had wanted. I typically ignore these kind of messages.

Another time was when a user commented on two of my posts with the SAME link to his post twice. The first time he did it, I checked out his post and liked what I saw, so I upvoted and commented on it. He replied to my comment within an hour.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, he went to my latest article and spammed me with the very same link to the same article that he had already replied to my comment the night before. Hello?! Thanks very much for noticing that there are TWO foodie.warriors on Steemit (not)!! He seems to have stopped doing that, and I know he was probably careless and got a wakeup call, but that was not a very nice experience for me.

After Steemit?

Is there going to ever be life after Steemit? I’m pretty much deeply sunk and rooted in Steemit addiction.

I find every day on Steemit to be highly rewarding. I have a fresh chance daily to build new friendships, support people in their journeys and dreams, get them interested in my stories in return, produce content that people don’t mind spending a few precious minutes to peruse, and learn so much about cryptocurrencies and life experiences through engaging in intelligent, respectful, and interesting conversations. All these are motivating factors for me that go beyond the dollar value reward of each post (though seeing a higher value gives a great feeling, of course!) :)

And at the end of the day, my ideating, cooking, writing, and photo-taking skills are continually being warmed up and improved upon each time I do a post.

I’d say the odds are against my ever getting over Steemit. :)

I had much more fun writing this ‘Tell Your Story Contest’ post than I did writing my #introduceyourself post, for two big reasons:-

(1) After being on Steemit for 25 days, I feel way more connected to the community here and am more open about sharing personal details that I may have been too shy to share at the beginning.
(2) The provided list of questions to answer makes this post a lot more structured.

This is a really, really long post, so if you read this far, you’re awesome!!

Thanks for reading my post! If you liked what you read, upvote and comment (I love all your comments, except if it's a F4F one hehe). If you'd like to see more, follow @foodie.warrior. There's lots more where that came from :)

Your support is a great encouragement to me. Here's a big THANK YOU from me! <3