I'm quite a visual person, thus I love books with pictures. But I love not only children's storybooks, but especially dictionaries and encyclopedia.



It started with a German pictorial dictionary, which I bought when I learned German. It was *the* book I read before I came to Germany - I spent hours looking at the illustrations and the descriptions.



I even made indexes for faster access. Oh yes, it was a long time before internet has made everything so simple as nowadays :)

A few years later, when I studied computer science, I bought a dictionary about computer science, which also has some pictures in it. Not really exciting pictures as in the books in this post though (thus, to be frank.. I forgot to take a picture of it this afternoon)...

I found this French dictionary in a second hand shop a few months ago. As a person, who cannot speak a word French, I bought it because of the pictures. It's old - from 1916 -, so I was delighted to find some colorful illustrated pages in it.



My latest discovery was this music encyclopedia, also from the second hand shop. I almost missed out on this, as I seldom browse in the music book part, which is just above the art book part. But the yellow linen cover attracted my attention and as I leafed through the book, I was very excited about the typical kind of illustrations from the 70's (the book is from 1977).



I knew do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti. In this book I learn something new: ja-le-mi-ni-ro-su-wa. I never heard of it before. I'm sure, I'll learn some more new things from this book, which is actually for children.

I hope to find more of such pictorial dictionaries in the future.

You might have enough of our cats for now (esp. if you follow me on Flickr), so for a change I'd post something different today ;)



One thing I dislike about living in this part of Germany is the lack of fresh seafood. In Indonesian I was a great fan of shrimps. Since I often only found some cooked ones here, I seldom eat any. But last time, I got a big bag of deep-frozen, uncooked and unpeeled shrimps.



Normally I simply sauté them in margarine, spice them only with salt and pepper and a bit of lemon juice and eat them with rice - that's how I loved it in Jakarta (margarine is not the thing I normally prefer to cook with, but in this case I do, since it brings my taste buds back to my childhood - the best shrimp dish on the street restaurant!). Today I got some green asparagus and mixed color chillies, so I mixed them in - yumm!

What'd you cook, if you had those ingredients?