Hello, and welcome to Lil & {destination:…}

My name is Lilian and I hailed from a small town in Malaysia. After living in the beautiful Emerald Isle for over a decade (with a few months stints in Vancouver and in the UAE), I now call Paris my home.

Initially intended as a space to share my travel news and photos with family and friends, this blog has evolved to include not only my adventures – local and abroad – but also the trials and tribulations of living (and trying to fit in) in France.

Facts about me

- I am a polyglot who speaks English, Chinese (4 dialects), French and Malay. My level of fluency varies but it is my aim to work on them regularly so I don’t lose the linguistic knowledge that I’ve acquired. I would also like to commit less faux pas in French.

- Someday, I dream of adding Arabic and Russian to my language repertoire.

- Food and culture fascinate me more than places, but of course, these don’t (and won’t) stop me from appreciating the locale of my visits.

- If a menu containing all courses of a meal is given to me, you bet I know what I’m going to have for the dessert before I get round to deciding the starter and/or the main.

- While I was a postgraduate student, in order to understand European arts and architecture better (purely personal interest), I used to attend undergraduate evening lectures.

- When I travel, I always write a bunch of postcards to lucky recipients among my friends. If I was short of time, only a handful few were sent.

- I once sat in a café and spent two hours to write about 30 postcards. I have not repeated this number since (cramps from writing!).

- Project 365 is my pet photography project. In 2010, I completed a series of webcam self-portrait (not hosted on this blog) in hope I’d stop hiding behind cameras. It didn’t really work. In 2011, I switched to a more general theme of “daily life”. I took a break in 2012 and returned to a new series in 2013.

- I am PACSed to a Frenchman called Frédéric.

- When we get round to owning a place of our own, it will have a kick-ass kitchen for me to cook in, and a reasonably-sized library bookshelves as I am a little tired of giving books away. (Hard to keep books when you move regularly too.)

- For 2013, I’ve decided not to buy more books but to make full use of the public libraries around Paris.

Contact me

Finding the right balance of presence in the social media realm is not easy. I like to keep things relatively simple, so for now, you will find me on:

Email: hello [at] lilianlau [dot] com
Twitter: @lilianlau
Flickr: lilianlau

I do not have a Facebook Page, nor Google+, nor Pinterest, nor Instagram. I did register (a long time ago) a Tumblr blog but I don’t use it. That was back when I pondered if I should register for services in my name just for the sake of having them. As you can see, I didn’t follow through this plan. There are other Lilian Lau’s out there sharing their finds on Pinterest and Instagram.

The blog design

I started dabbling in programming and coding a few years ago. In a spark of creativity, I decided I would try to create something for this blog, with a little help of available resources online, since I am not a web designer, nor web developer, nor an illustrator. This was in 2008.

The theme I use is a modified version of Focus Grid by Derek Punsalan and the Old School icons were created by Sebastien Durel.

The site may feel a bit jaded in comparison to the many beautiful and mobile responsive sites out there. I may look into a redesign at some stage but that also means I have a lot of re-learning to do, given the fast-paced evolution of WordPress and the web standards in the last few years. As a hobbyist, I haven’t been keeping up with all the changes.

Last modified: March 2013