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!

* 2:47 PM