Saturday, January 21, 2006
Soooo relieved!
I passed my jap placement test! So now i can join their 2nd module of the elementary jap sequence! whee! it means a lot to me cuz if i still can't pass this time round, the time and money spent on taking jap classes for seven mth before i came amount to
nothing. i mugged pretty hard these few days; it didn't help my oral though (was badly flustered and tongue-tied grr!), but at least my mini-compo and knowledge of kanji were good enough to salvage me. hehe... very excited now, i think i will love this course! :)
Also, i've finally bought my air tickets!! (A big) PHEWW!!! How much i've gone through before i finally got these tickets! To cut the story short: I've suffered the pulling-hair-out-frustration of seeing the price of the tickets that have suitable flight times rise every day and every hour and the irritation of getting the error msg 3 times tt the transaction could not be completed at the final stage and the panic upon knowing from the bank that i had 3 'charges' in my bank account which come from the air tickets which i supposedly bought (??!!) so therefore i reached the limit of the day and i can't purchase any other tickets and the boiling anger when the first Cheaptickets agent i called hung up on me after she forced me to sign up for their GOld membership before she could cancel those 3 charges for me but of course i refused @#%$%^&........... But anyway, the whole saga finally ended today with me getting the tickets at a decent price SMOOTHLY without any glitches. bad experience. grr...
So after the frustration over the whole air ticket issue, my excitement for spring break is BACK! 7-day backpacking trip to the canyons and deserts at Southern Utah, organised by Cornell's outdoor education department! cool right! and since we are told to assemble at Las Vegas airport anyway, we decided to extend our spring break by one day (on our own accord :P) so as to visit Vegas for a night before the backpacking trip itself! whee! looking forward to it alot, i'm sure it will be a damn exciting spring break! :D
The weather is so good today! It's insanely HOT by cornell's winter definition, averages 10 deg celcius!! my god!! I think the global climate has gone or is going berserk, seriously... but anyhow, the campus looks like san francisco without a bright sun, with no snow or ice, so there were sooooo many peole jogging ard in sweat shirts! and some were even playing frisbee on the green arts quad, sth i've never seen in probably 3 weeks! it's such a wonderful day!
The past week has been great on the whole! I volunteered at this orientation program for Jan intake international students. They are mostly graduate students, and it was not an elaborate affair either, but it was nice talking to some of them over lunch and sharing session, because they all have very different backgrounds. I talked to an Iranian lady who's studying horticulture and seems skeptical of being able to assimilate into a US uni, an australian lady who's an undergraduate but she actually has a 13-year-old daughter, australian-chinese law student, a 'resident scholar' who works for the Chineses govt and under training here in cornell.... Pretty interesting!
Then that night, i got a surprise call from a friend i know through chem lab, so we had dinner together at the dining hall. She's a sophomore but she's a Resident advisor (RA) so she's one of the rare upperclassmen who stays in dorm. I even visited her dorm after dinner, cuz i just dun have any other close-enough friends staying in that residence hall so that is one of the rare halls i have never stepped into hahaha...
My dorm has been bustling with quite a few activities! went to a Mocktail party haha.. why
mocktail? legal drinking age here is 21, so we can only make do with beverages like juices and ciders etc but the drinks we concocted are still nice! And the cream puffs and chocalate eclairs are just delicious! (yeah.. i broke my resolute to stop snacking... gah...) sat they are having a gingerbread house-making program which sounds fun too! well, it's only after being under the temporary Winter break RA who was basically hibernating and never bothered to organise any acitivities that i start to appreciate the hard work put in by my RAs now! :)
Went to a few fitness classes within a week! my fitness membership has been severely underused for the past semester lor! tried out aerobics, Step, Pilates, and Jazzercise! Jazzercise is upbeat and fun, Pilates is good stretching excercise but not very interesting i thought, Step just gives u great workout: don't underestimate that lightly-raised platform - it does wonder somehow! wish i could go for these fitness classes on a regular basis, but it will be hard once classes start...
and classes will start on Monday! (
finally, right? ) but i am pretty excited abt starting school really! Looking forward to a new beginning: new courses, new professors, new classmates, and new studying habits and motivation on my part! Hopefully new is better! :)
To justify my increasing rounder face as evident from my photos, i feel the need to do a "food special" :P
Presenting to you, the delicacies i layed my hands on over my winter trip! wonderful food = wonderful trip!
Hainanese chicken rice/ Thai red curry beef/Hong kong Po Luo Bao/ NYC's chinatown Tau Huay/ Lindy's sister's yummy chocolate
fondan (dunno how to spell:P) within it FILLED with melted chocalate/stewed duck rice again cooked by lindy's sis who is truly a great chef!!/New York Cheesecake from the famous Junior's/ famous-in-san fran Ghirardelli chocalate fudge ice cream, tenzura soba (handmade soba) in Japantown and it's my most exp meal in the whole trip (US$19!!!) /Tau Huay again at this Oakland's fabulous dim sum restaurant/ roast duck rice in san fran's chinatown simply DELICIOUS i love it sooooo much i savoured every bit of meat and rice and sauce YUM!
do you realise that a lot of the delicacies i meant are really just chinese food or just homecooked food? i've never desired and loved chinese/homecooked food so much until i come to US. One of the best things about being overseas is that it takes away some ordinary things that one has always taken for granted, and this temporary loss makes one realise how fortunate he/she used to be.
i miss home! i miss singapore! and i miss 6A!
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2:47 PM
I am back
I haven't seen snow for almost 3 weeks already. The cold temperature makes me feel sluggish all over again. i've been telling myself to do laundy before everything else but no, they are still lying in my laundry basket. heez. okay, right after this post, really.
the nicest thing about coming back is i feel that i am coming back home. :) it feels good to be back at a familiar place again, although nothing would be more familiar than home in singapore la.
i took 300 over photos, i wonder how long it will be before i finish uploading and captioning all the fotos onto shutterfly! hmm... For now, i'll just post a few due to popular demand hahaha. Not very easy to pick and choose which few to show, but Picasa's collage function saves the day!
Lindy and I on NYC subway, NYC's chinatown, NY stock exchange at wall street, (pathetic view of) Statue of Liberty
Me at Times Square at night, Christmas tree outside Rockefeller Centre, Ground Zero, just finished watching a broadway musical The Producers at theatre district (with my new bag :) )
Skyline of NYC at the top of Empire State Building, greek exhibits inside Museum of Metropolitan Art, a street outside the museum, Columbia University
New year's countdown at Times Square (look at the crowd!), 2 crazy girls standing in the cold for 5 hours, we were only at 50th street (8 streets away,SADLY), a beach at Long Islands (the first beach i see in 5 mth)
Inside Grand Central Terminal, outside Grand Central Terminal, NY public library, the library and Bryant Park
Partial skyline of San Francisco, Alcatraz Island (used to be a jail), Seals at Pier 39, Singapore's Coffee Bean in California (rare sight!)
City hall, Japantown, nice street with nice houses, San francisco's chinatown
Stanford looks like a chalet, Juline Lindy and I love stanford campus (see, i don't need my jacket!), lake at stanford with mountains in the background, aerial view of UC Berkeley campus
Golden gate bridge, Union Square, biking across golden gate bridge, Sausalito
I've spent thousand over US dollars in all, but i must say it was a good trip. Well i could have saved all this money and stayed in ithaca all alone throughout the entire winter break and rot away and could still view other people's photos of these same places meanwhile, but nothing beats seeing the world for yourself and hanging out with friends. Although i am living in the US and new york city and San francisco are also in US, every city is unique in their own ways, not just the sights but also the people, the 'culture', and how things work. There are many subtle things that are learnt through travelling, i can't even pinpoint exactly what i have learnt and how i have changed but i know deep down i have certainly grown up a fair bit in some way or other, very subtly of course. And i would have missed this process if i had chosen to go home straight during winter break. So yep, 2 weeks of loneliness in ithaca, deprivation of comforts of home in spore, and US$1100 are all worthwhile for this wonderful amazing travel experience!
Of course, not forgetting, my wonderful travel buddy during this trip:
LINDY, who gets things right (like cooking) and also gets things wrong (like mixing up airport terminals). For all the fun and adventure and drama, for welcoming me into your 'family' during those
FANTASTIC (with british accent) few days at Long Islands, thanks for everything! 30 years down the road, i bet we will still remember fleeing the flasher at central park together! :)
And the house of wonderful people who generously housed us and made our stay at california much much more enjoyable:
The Elmo family! I can never thank them enough.
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6:54 AM
At the west coast now!
Using lindy's powerbook now and decided to blog sth tonight haha.. it's (only) 11.20 pm but lindy and juline are fast asleep alr hehe..
have been catching up on all my friends' blogs the past hour! it's barely 2 weeks since i was away from my laptop and all my friends have such happpening affairs to share on the blog! so cool to read them all! especially flo's spectacular amazing race around Europe!!!
san fran is really sunny and nice! i thought it looks abit like singapore add the blue cloudless sky minus the humidity multiplied many times in area and divided by many hills. hehe... oh well i guess i am missing spore a little too much such tt everything reminds me of spore in some way? now even stanford's palm avenue reminds me of east coast park without the crowd! btw, stanford's campus is BEAUTIFUL! i am more sure of getting my masters at stanford now! ahaha...
my only complain abt SF is everything's darn expensive here! i haven't calculated my total expenses yet, but i feel i have spent more in SF than in NYC! especially transportation! i spend at least $7 on their subway every day! (oh btw they remind me of MRT too! haha!) grrr... i am going bankrupt. i should spend less on food, cuz i am getting FAT and ROUND! yes round!! it's showing in my fotos! OMG! YUCKS!
my camera's memory card is running out of space! i never expected i will ever run into such a crisis, cuz it's the first time i've ever taken sooooo many fotos in the same period of time! alr have 280 fotos since i arrived at nyc! dun have my laptop's card reader or cam's usb cable with me, so i only have 2 solutions: 1) delete older fotos, which i usually dun bear to, but dun have a choice now; 2) take less fotos, at least fotos with myself in it, cuz i look disgusting now that my face is round and fat!
Everytime i am reminded that it's the start of the year and that my students are already j2s, i can't help but feel 2005 has been a really "long" year.. i mean, now that i recall my first few days dressing up as a teacher (as best as i can) and walking into those 3 classes and hearing these j1 students call me miss hiong just feels like a lifetime away, cuz so many things have happened since then. gosh.. feel like doing some real reflection on the past year but there's really no time currently since being a tourist essentially means chiog-ing ard as much as possible... oh well...
I guess this trip made me realise that there are people who can't be trusted, but that shouldn't stop us from trusting everyone else other than yourself. i have been meeting such wonderful and nice people throughout my trip - lindy's sister and her boyfriend and his brother, lindy's senior and his housemates at berekeley whom hv kindly let us stay at their house, and juline's friend at stanford who showed us ard stanford the whole afternoon.
got to sleep now! i promise photoS when i return to ithaca! be patient! hehe...
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4:06 PM
A new year!
The new year starts at Times Square, New York City, for me!
Looking back at the past year, i must say 2005 has been the most dramatic and eventful year i've ever had in my life. So many significant things have happened, so many new experiences.
Hopefully 2006 will be an equally exciting year too :)
Anyway, my short trip at New york city can be summed up with one word - INSANE! i mean, everything here is insane! and lindy agrees with me totally!! haha.. elaborate more when i get back to ithaca. heez. but in short, i don't like NYC; i don't like city life. arghz.
Happy new year, everyone!
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5:59 PM
