Of Parcels and Play.

After receiving Jeremy’s present on Sunday, my own birthday parcel came in on Monday. THANKS SAM! There were so many things inside that package that I spent quite some time trying to look at each and every one of them. Oh, and not to forget, Sam managed to meet Miss Tay and got her to write me a birthday message! That was such a surprise! And now I’m feeling guilty as I don’t know when Miss Tay’s birthday is and I haven’t given her any present since… we knew her. HAHA. Oops.

Sinyee’s card arrived too, one whole month after she sent it. Initially she sent it early cos she totally mistook my birthday for CK’s. =.= But after floating and travelling around the world for a month, the card’s finally here — and at the right time as well! Thanks SY! OH. And there’re the cards that my parents sent me. They sent two — one for Christmas and one for the birthday. [Sam: You function like my parents too! HAHA.] The message was formal, but sweet nevertheless.

Thanks everyone, I feel loved even before the actual day. LOL.

Last night we went KTV again. Markov suggested the gathering, and it was really a very crowded night at the KTV, with 8 people squeezing in a small room (for maximum kiasu-ness for money). After singing till around midnight, we went to this jazz bar with Markov and listened to the singer. He was good. I have very little interest for jazz music but he was so good that I couldn’t take my eyes off him and his guitar. Our friends are thinking of going there during Christmas again for the atmosphere. We’ll see how then. =)

Oh, and I’ve gotten some extra cash. I’d been writing voluntarily (or so I thought) for this media and I was pretty satisfied with having somewhere to unleash my writings upon. A few days ago my dad called and said that the company sent a cheque for the articles I’d written. I was quite shocked as I didn’t expect myself to be paid for writing very random things happening around me. Oh well. Then again, now that I’ve known that I’ll be paid, I think I’ll try to improve the quality of my articles to let them feel that the money spent is worth the quality. I hope. (But I have so much work to do before I leave, so I doubt I can come out with anything soon — I’ll TRY.)

Shall end off here and prepare for class. Just in case I don’t get to blog tomorrow… Merry Christmas, people!

When friends visit.

It was Huijun and Liyan, and now it’s Yan Ning and her three sisters. I visited 玉桥 for the second time this week — and STILL bought things from there. I’m really going to ship bags and shoes and belts and all your souvenirs back to Singapore. (And I’m probably visiting that place again for the last time to buy whatever I deem pretty and useful and send them altogether too.) Hahaha.

Anyway, we received Jeremy’s Christmas parcels today! Sherilyn was super excited when she saw it and kept bugging us to let her open the parcel. Hahaha. It’s a pity Yen Chun and Kaiying are now travelling in other parts of China, so they can’t have the thrill of opening the parcels themselves. I’m planning to seal the parcel back to let Yen Chun open it when she returns tomorrow. Heehee. Oh, speaking of which… JEREMY! Have you received our parcel?? *Excited* Oh, and, welcome to my blog! I hope our mundane life accounts don’t bore you out. ^^

OK, just a short post for now. I shall continue doing my work while the girls away for massage. Sighs. I really wonder if I really can finish everything before I leave. Ha.

I should seal up my wallet.

These few days have been pretty exciting for me. Huijun and Liyan have visited over the weekend and they’re going to leave tomorrow. Our time has been largely spent on bringing them around Nanjing for sightseeing and shopping, and… well, I can only say that we’ve been alternating quite well between those two elements. HAHA.

Bought a whole lot of things again for the umpteenth time in China. Belts, earrings, bangles, clothes, shoes and even rings that I don’t usually wear… you name it. Many of them are bought on impulse — When I went shopping with Huijun and Liyan on Sunday, I bought this little dress simply because it was too cheap. And I bought a man’s belt too, simply because it looked so cool and it’s freaking cheap. Now I’m at a dilemma of who I should give the belt too. Maybe I should buy more to give the other male friends instead. HAHAHAHA.

Yan Ning’s coming over this weekend with her sisters. I’m thinking if I should revisit the tourist sites again or let them meet me elsewhere for meals. Anyway I’ll definitely be revisiting those places again should Ying Kit decide to visit Nanjing next month, and I really don’t want to visit the Nanjing Massacre Museum three times within half a year. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t mind going again since I wasn’t really in the mood to view the exhibits last time during summer as it was very warm and stuffy inside the museum. -.-” But visiting it thrice is a bit… too much. Hahaha. Oh wells.

We went for overnight KTV last night! It was fantastic, even though now I’ve sunk deeper into the sleep debt that has been accumulating since days ago. Haha.

Nothing much other than all these every-day happenings. Tomorrow will be another 8-AM-and-negative-one-degree-celsius-day.

Till then~

=)

I didn’t notice this song until recently when CK shared it with me. It has always been in my MP3 along with its Cantonese counterpart. Haha. Still, it’s a very nice song. And, minus the suggestive and weird lines in the lyrics, I just realised that they speak a lot about… me. HAHA.

I hope KTVs have the Chinese version of this song. =)

Adrenaline Rush

Pannie! I’m now a step nearer to the dream we were talking about last time! =)) Tell you guys about it again next time when I see you. =)

Anyway, it’s almost a month away from my return date. I yearn to fly back, but I have a million things waiting to be done before I leave. 2 exams and 5 papers to be exact. I need to finish a paper every week if I want to get my results before I leave this place (God knows how long they’ll take to return us our transcripts after we leave).

Gah whatever.

Oh, today’s Semantics class talked about lies. Although the teacher taught it in an uninteresting manner, the content itself was already enough to grasp my attention throughout the lecture. I feel like typing each and everything that came through my mind onto this post. Okay, maybe not. I think it would bore you people out. Haha.

The lecturer caught me flipping through this psycholinguistics journal article that I was reading, and he got quite surprised that we read these, according to his words, “professional” papers. I was pretty surprised by his words too. We’re in a university! We’re here to contribute to the academic field! Why aren’t the students in the university reading these articles? He said that he usually assigned introductory readings to his students. And from the book that he recommended to his students, it was pretty much a Chinese version of our 1101E textbook. Well, I can only conclude that their field of linguistics research is still at a toddler stage.

A last random rambling before I end off this post: My timetable for next semester is super screwed. Thursdays 9am-6pm and one lesson each day for the other days. =.=” I wanted to tear my timetable up when I first saw it. Then I realised it didn’t help much. I’m still considering if I should spend my weekday nights at my friend’s PGP room since he only applied for it out of record purposes. But as you can see, the person’s a he, so it’ll be very inconvenient if I want to bathe and erh, move around. And if someone complains about me, it wouldn’t be very good a “record” for him too.

Unless there’s another female saint out there, I guess I’ll be having a hard time travelling to and from home next semester. *Wails*.

Okay, time for some serious work.

I’M FINALLY HERE.

OMG. I tried no less than 500 times before I could gain access to my own dashboard. In fact, the login page still doesn’t work for me, and I have to sign in via the forums before I could navigate from there. Irritating.

Anyway, I’ve been “blogging” on MSWord all these while, so now I’m going to update you all with the “posts” that I’ve previously written. =)

—–

24 November, 2009 Tuesday 21:00

Back from Shanghai, tired but happy!

We went around for shopping and had our most sought-after SINGAPOREAN FOOD in Raffles City! At that particular moment when the chicken rice came, we loved Shanghai for its availability of Singaporean food. Anyway, the chicken rice chicken made me miss home. We used to dabao the chicken from The Chicken House at Thompson Road home to eat every Sunday. =) Anyway, after shopping at 华盛街, we went over to Yan Ning’s apartment for dinner. Isaac (yes the one who was in my Beijing class) was there also, and he was feeling so cold that he was wearing tights at home. Oh, on the way to the apartment we met Jia Mein and other people. Jia Mein’s my primary school mate. Singapore’s really small! Adding Yan Ling (Ah He’s friend) to the list, they can map out my life from Primary 5 and onwards.

We had some fun chatting over dinner and watching a wee bit of Click before proceeding on to our next destination at 11.30pm: KTV! We met Jeremy (Mag’s friend who previously came to visit Nanjing and helped carry my bag remember?) there and sang all the way till 6am (just to escape from the troubles of finding accommodation in Shanghai). The only ones left standing were Kaiying, Yen Chun and me. Mag was quite traumatized when she woke up as she saw me singing very animatedly. LOL. I shall not elaborate on that point.

After which, Jeremy took us on a “Grand Fudan Tour” where we took photos before grabbing something along the way for lunch and proceeding to 人民广场 again for more shopping. It wasn’t our fault – our initial plan was to tour 1933, some artistic architecture district in Shanghai, but we were too tired to travel there and we had too little time to visit it either. And then, it was back to Nanjing again! Kaiying and I didn’t sleep on the train ride and chatted about random secondary school memories (and secrets!). Haha. Looking at it now, I really wonder how we survived without sleeping (and constantly on the move) for so long.

The short weekend getaway was really good. I felt so much more relaxed after the essay-crisis before the weekend. I’m left with a tired body and a happy soul. =) And it’s time for me to start paying my sleep debt too. Hahaha. Goodnight guys.

—–

28 November, 2009 Saturday 23:49

Happy 21st Birthday, Chao Kiat!

Was chatting with him over the webcam and giving him comments about his hairstyle when I realized that I missed my friends. There’re a lot of people at his party that I missed dearly. When I called his house just now, Zhen Bin said that half of him hoped that I would give Chao Kiat a surprise by arriving at his doorstep. If I have a sack spouting gold infinitely, I’d definitely do so. Haha. Then again, I guess the homesickness would fade a little when Hui Jun, Liyan, Audris, Yan Ning and Ying Kit visit Nanjing in the near future. =)

That’s all for now! Off to vet through my 《红楼梦》校注 homework before turning in.

—–

Yepp. Just two posts. The blog-hiatus felt like eternity though. Haha. I guess when something’s readily accessible, we’ll take it for granted until we lose the access to it.

Anyway, I’d been really elated these days. Other than the very 晴天霹雳 news that the 文学批评史 module’s gonna have a closed-book exam and I have really no idea how to compete with those swallow-word-then-vomit-all-out students. Well, when you’re in Rome, do what Romans do. I guess I’ll just have to clench my fists and survive it somehow. But really. Other than that, I’m pretty happy. The CBM I’m going to pursue next semester is going to be about music AGAIN. I think I’ve already done 3 papers so far (including my ISM) that touch on the topic of music. Like what I’ve said on Facebook (when I didn’t have WordPress to write on), I might as well have majored in Music. Haha.

Oh, the heater was down for the past week, and the hostel’s staff FINALLY came to repair it after I went down with a severe flu and acted 楚楚可怜 in front of them. Now we have hot air in our room. Muahaha.

Okay, time for dinner. Will try to update again ASAP!

Heylos.

Haven’t been blogging for quite some time. Haha. And I really don’t know what to blog about.

Weather’s getting a little bit more comfortable (around 5 degrees Celsius) after the snow at the start of this week. Relativity’s amazing. A while ago, we’d complain if the temperature drops below 10. Now we’re just satisfied if it doesn’t threaten to be near 0 or go negative. LOL.

The campus was beautiful. We reasoned that maybe it’s because of the suburban-feel at our campus that makes snow so beautiful. The snow at our hostel is amazing too, but because it’s located in the city, they just get swept away very soon after the snow settled. Some pictures of the snow:

A big snowflake that floated to our window sill.

Taken at the walkway between the two hostel blocks.

Our 仙林 campus.

Kaiying and me -- all wrapped up.

The snow was really heavy, and it came a month earlier than usual (you should have heard this from the news). We’re expecting spring to arrive before we leave Nanjing, if the whole weather calendar really gets pushed forward. Heehee.

Oh, we went mountain-climbing again last weekend. Haha. Mag’s friend, Jeremy, visited Nanjing last week and he joined us on our mountain-climbing trip too. We went to 栖霞山, where it’s well-known for its maple leaves and autumn view. Well, we could only see one autumn-reddish maple tree for every 20 trees seen. Still, the view up there was much more spectacular than that of 紫荆山. =) As usual, we had our fruits + peanut butter bread near the top of the hill. Hee. OH. One thing to mention. I really have to thank Jeremy for carrying my backpack throughout the journey. It was loaded with fruits at the start of the trip, and initially we promised to take turns to carry my bag. In the end it was him who carried it throughout despite my frequent offers to carry my bag myself. =.=” Anyway, photos again!

Another nice maple =D.

View from the top (with Mag in the picture)

When we reached the foot of the mountain again (we went the other way instead of tracking our steps back), we realised that we were already OUT OF NANJING!!

Map TO Nanjing. HAHA.

And so we took this little thing to the bus interchange.

I was sitting on Mag’s lap all the while lah. =.=” After quite a long time, we finally got onto the bus and went for our dinner. That sorta marked the end of our little mountain trip. Hahaha.

Anyway, we got back our 批评史 paper yesterday. I thought I didn’t do very well — 84 marks — for a thesis-driven essay. We reasoned that maybe it’s because of the topic chosen. The teacher scrutinises the structure of the essay, the grammar, the title and how it’s phrased… Whatever you can think of. They’re still quite conservative in terms of topic-choosing. Not that it’s a bad thing — they can really go in-depth and from there, open new sights for the field of research. Then again, it limits their creativity and the curiosity to try out new research arenas. Of course, I agree that whatever research done has to be academic-based and not like some pop-pseudo-academia that serve little use for the field. But, with their capability, I’m sure they can widen their field of research a lot more if they break through the psychological (and perhaps social) barriers limiting their choice of topics.

I’m so far OK with my grade, since it’s an S/U anyway and I’m really grateful that I passed. I’m just worried about the next paper that I’m going to work on. From what Sherilyn and the professor of that module discussed, it’s quite evident that he doesn’t really venture into new things that the Singaporean scholars have done about languages in Singapore. It’s back to the “unique” features of Singaporean Chinese (which N scholars have done before) and stuffs like that. I’m quite glad that I’m just an exchange student here, hence it’s less harm done even if I decide to do some bombastically new topic that the teacher disapproves of. I won’t fail lah, I’ll just get a lower grade that doesn’t show on my graduation certificate. =D.

Oh, on a lighter note, we’re spending this weekend in Shanghai! Isn’t it exciting. We’re spending the night at the KTV so as to save up on lodging. Hahahaha.

Okay, that’s all for now! Shall blog again when time permits. =D.

It’s SNOWING!

Okay I know it’s not a big deal. I bet a huge portion of the globe has snow at different times of the year. THEN AGAIN. It’s still so thrilling to be able to see snow!!! Nevermind the chilling winds, nevermind the cold. IT’S SNOW!

This post is just to mark this special moment. Haha. It’s not my first time seeing snow (third time in fact), but it’s really thrilling to be able to scream and jump about with a bunch of friends at the first flake of snow. =)

Okay I should sleep.

Something that kept looping on my media player.

It’s freaking funny how he tries to look suave by turning his cello around. And please listen carefully for his signature “Wooo!” towards the end of the song. I almost died laughing when it came out.

Then again, I like this song. Haha. And the woman is super zai.

It’s like getting a 金钟奖.

This is a long overdue post — Wanted to finish the post and update this blog on Monday, but I was too tired and too worried about my 批评史 essay that my mood for blogging was totally killed. We handed in the essay yesterday… All was fine. And nothing much happened, other than the sudden dip in temperature (can you believe it it’s 3 deg Cel outside now) and strong gusts of the Northern winds. Argh I want the Sun and the heat back. Brr. Okays back to the blog post.

—–

Yepps, we’ve finally finished the whole birthday celebration for Chun and Kaiying. I hereby proclaim our three-day celebration a successful one!

Everything started long before their actual birthdays. Let me just list out our birthday plans one-by-one on a timeline. =)

Saturday — Chun’s birthday

1) We decided to prepare a true blue Singaporean breakfast for Chun. So before that, we checked the opening time for the cafe downstairs such that we could buy toasts from them, and planned how we could sneak Sherilyn’s bottle of kaya from her friend (who’s living right beside our room) before the breakfast. Initially we wanted a Singaporean-breakfast-in-bed thing, but considering the fact that Chun loves her bed so much, we decided to have the breakfast prepared in Sherilyn’s room instead. And so, we had a 3-pieces-of-kaya-toast-plus-two-hard-boiled-eggs-plus-coffee breakfast surprise for her! Everything went on quite smoothly, except for the buying toast part, as the cafe was catering for some event and couldn’t bother to entertain us, so Kaiying they all had to toast the bread manually. ><

2) Spaghetti with canned sardine. This wasn’t a surprise. It’s just hilarious to think that we spent less than an hour cooking but wasted about 2 hours trying to pry the cans open with a lousy can-opener. And I ended up with a bruise because I pried them open using force. LOL.

Sunday — Combined celebration for both girls

Nothing much happened this day actually. Sherilyn went to buy the cheesecake in the morning just in case they get sold out later in the day. It was so difficult to plan birthday surprises with the 主角 living in your room! I had to go “Repeat the choices?”/”Ya the first one sounds good. The first one. NO. The first one you mentioned lah!” throughout the whole conversation. =.= So she bought the cake and lent space in the fridge from Saeka (who’s our immediate neighbour LOL) to preserve the cake for dinner.

Initially we wanted to bring the cake for dinner, but after some considerations, we decided that it wasn’t very appropriate to bring it since we’re going to have buffet afterwards. Luckily we didn’t, as there wasn’t much space on the table to put the cake. Haha.

It was during the evening when things started getting more exciting. We went to this atas Japanese Teppanyaki Buffet restaurant and spent a whopping 150RMB (that’s roughly S$30) on the buffet. BUT. Omg it’s so super worth it. Alcoholic drinks were included in the buffet as well. =D. And I satisfied my cravings for Japanese food such as unagi, sashimi and whatnots! Besides, the meat dishes were so good. The beef was tender, the chicken was full of flavour and the pieces of fish were superb. =)) OH and that ice-cream-on-fried-banana thing. Yum! I think it can be the 招牌菜 for that restaurant. =)

So after the dinner, we were so full that we walked all the way back to our hostel, laughing and chatting on the way. We went to bathe and slacked around while Sherilyn went to get the cake from Saeka. Once the clock struck twelve, we sprung a surprise on Kaiying! And the most exciting thing was the gift-presentation, where we presented them with the videos we’ve been preparing since five weeks in advance. I felt like I was like getting a 金钟奖 award when they watched the videos. Haha.

We ate the cake, chatted and nua-ed around for a bit before we went back to our rooms to sleep. It was already 3.30AM by the time we climbed into our beds. Haha. And apparently we decided to skip the class on Monday. =S

—–

The two fortunate birthday girls had been receiving parcels and letters from their family and friends even till date! Today Kaiying received a package from home too, with her birthday presents all inside. Aww how I envy them! But I know it’s impossible for me to demand any package, since my birthday is really near the date that I’m going to leave Nanjing. Aww. My mom hinted to me today that my birthday present for this year’s going to be really big. I asked her to send it over and she said that it’s too big to be sent over. O.o I really wonder what it is. Hahahaha. So exciting!

Anyway, weather’s been really bad these days. I don’t even dare to step on the floor barefooted. My journey around the room is like, step on bed – step on chair – step on another chair – step on bed – reach for what I want, and back. I’ll buy heat-tec from Uniqlo tomorrow to save me from wearing the same pair of tights for the whole winter. I don’t want to grow moss. Haha.

Okay, time for some supper (I bet it’s the weather’s fault lor — we keep getting hungry around 11+pm) and some research before sleep. =))