Lorraine aka Yoyen

I have been blogging here since april this year, before this I've held a blog at Friendster from 2004. My postings there were a bit personal since I only have people whom I really know on my list. Now, I must conclude that I am quite fanatic in maintaining this blog. I'm happy if the entries are well read and other side effect is the nice contact with the fellow bloggers.

So, it is time to reveal more about me. Firstly, I would like to begin with this blog's title. Why Lorraine aka Yoyen? Lorraine is my firstname (I have three surnames). This is how people here call me. Yoyen is my nickname, invented by me. When I was a toddler I couldn't pronounce the R properly, so I called myself Yoyen.

There's a funny story about this, when I dated my husband, he just called me Lorraine.

A day before our wedding, during midodareni (javanese tradition, a day before the wedding when the bride and the bridegroom to be are not allowed to see each other) my husband to be then, was asked by my friends "Hey, do you know where Yoyen is?" He just gave them the look that he didn't quite get the question, then replied with a question "Who is Yoyen?". My friends just laughed at him and explained him Lorraine aka Yoyen. After that he began to call me Yoyen. So he was the only person in NL which called me this way, untill I met a girl which I knew from the University back in Indonesia. I was passing by down town the city I lived, I heard somebody whispered "Yoyen??". I was very excited, it was no need for me to turn around, cause I knew instantly it was somebody I knew from Jakarta. The last four - five years, my sister in law and three Indonesian best friends here have been calling me Yoyen, which is ok by me.

Why I chose to be called Lorraine here? for two reasons, Lorraine rhymes better with my husband's name which I started to use after I got married. The second reason Yoyen is not easy for Dutch people to pronounce. They will pronounce it as Yoooyen instead which sounds weird in my ears. Last year I found a third reason, Yoyen is a common name for pinoys (Phillipinos).

I am named after a song by Nat King Cole, Sweet Lorraine. I can be a Sweet Lorraine when I want to now :-D. In my youth, when I got this fascination for France, I found out a region named Lorraine (Lotharingen in Deutsch) in North East of France (see map) which is also being famous because of its Quiche Lorraine. I guess this knowledge was an unconsciously start of me being a Francophile.