“Living as a rich man is easy to learn (you don’t even have to learn how to spend your money when it’s plenty), but learning to live as a poor is difficult (living in modesty, in a limited budget takes a learning curve).”

~ My mom’s wisdom

We love to eat sushi. ‘We’ here means me and my husband. Unluckily my children don’t enjoy this kind of food yet so it’s always a challenge to bring them to an “all you can eat” Sushi restaurant – how to keep two little monsters still for 2 hours with so many people eating in next to the cramp seats close to you. But thanks to this fact we didn’t have to buy the meal for them, so it’s cheaper for our wallet. But not for too long because starting from a certain age they have to pay too if they sit there in the restaurant… Eating or not eating.

Anyway, it’s been practically one year since we never step our feet inside a restaurant and sit there properly to eat. It took us at least a good 6 or 8 months to gather the courage to order from the restaurant and bring the food home. My surgery and later my daughter’s surgery caused us to be extra careful in this corona situation so we don’t go out so much except to nature. And ordering a take-out sushi is never very appealing for us since it’s so much more expensive than sitting in the restaurant and eating all we can eat.

Recently in one of the Facebook groups I follow, there’s this Sushi-hype caused by one member who sells her self-made sushi. After seeing several posts with excellent comments I thought why don’t I try? It’s cheaper than the one sold in the restaurants and it has many good reviews. This morning the sushi came (yippie) and after one year we finally had sushi!

The sushi itself is not disappointing, but not particularly exciting. It was nowhere bad, but it’s still not very good. It tasted like a home-made sushi – it was a home-made sushi after all! It was more like a Korean kimbab, the one I often see in the Korean dramas, but nevertheless, we enjoy the sushi. I think it worthed the relatively small price that came with it.

I remember another incident when my husband once told me that he did buy the supermarket sushi almost everyday for his lunch when he was still a bachelor. 

“Really?” I said. “How much did you eat?”

“Like 3 portion each time, the sushi was so small, it wasn’t fulfilling.”

“Three? Each day? How much did you spend?”

“Well, perhaps I spent like 15 euro each day for lunch.”

15 euro??? Why didn’t you just save the money and buy a car? So I don’t have to walk so much! (hahha, only in my thoughts, I didn’t say it outloud)

Well, 10 years ago, prior to my relocation from Singapore to The Netherlands, the Euro was still very sacred in my view. Two euro lunches was already expensive. Not to mention 15 Euro! Every single day! It was beyond my wildest imagination, and actually until this day I will resent my husband if he dares to spend so much for a single lunch for himself! I can buy two or three day worth groceries with that amount of money!

Now talking about sushi, one thing I love from my dear husband is that he’s very flexible about food in the terms of taste and price. Actually he’s quite flexible in many things.

When we got married and had to readjust our financial style from being two single-expats living abroad and receiving good salaries to a married couple with a single income and great expenses of a sudden wedding that we never saw coming. From buying nice things and eating out at nice places to buying one Burger King menu for both of us and spending as little as we could, that was something we had to relearn and adjust.

As the true daughter of my mom, I’m quite an expert on this issue. Basically I’ve always been careful about money and don’t spend too much when it’s not necessary (except for sewing machines, fabrics, and sewing stuff🙊), and I always try to save whenever it’s possible.

On the other hand, my husband was another story. He didn’t think too much about saving, he lives to enjoy his day, he’s not particularly reckless about money, but he does have this weakness of spending too much, especially when it comes about food. He loves food too much (I truly think that he loves me because I can cook well too😎).

But bless this man, he’s so supple that he adjusted quite easily. He does ask me from time to time to eat out, to ‘enjoy life’, but he doesn’t demand that we have to go to get a certain standard of food in order to enjoy the outings. Sometimes we have ‘warmed’ discussions about this money saving thing, but in general we’re acting as a team and still enjoy our life adjusting to every financial change that comes in our marriage life.

This kind of mindset I hope to teach to my children too. I want them to be able to enjoy things in their life without being fixated on how expensive the things themselves are. I don’t want them to value themselves by the brand of clothes they wear, the name of restaurants they visit, or the type of car we ride. I want them to value themselves by their true worth, by the work they are able to do, things they are able to create, and most importantly because they are the children of God.

I want them to later be free from the worry that they are not chic enough, or not branded enough. I want them to be flexible, to be bendable, in any situation or changes they’re not breakable just because they can’t get what they want or need in immediate counts. I want them to be able to be happy, to feel enough, to be content, in whatsoever ways they might go through in life.

And that’s my friend, the story about our flexible sushi.