Fantasies

Right now I'm thinking...

Get one of my friends to find a bloody pigs head.

Bring it to the Chem Engin Office in NUS.

Leave it on a certain someone's table.

Tattoo across the head in fluorescent marker (or better yet write it in blood on the wall)

"READ AND REPLY YOUR EMAIL"

People are the same everywhere.

It was hilarious.

I was just in one of my chemical engineering classes (polymer science and engineering, to be exact.) The lecturer was saying that for this module, it will be a self-study guided lecture style, so he expects us to go and read up on the subject matter ourselves, and gather back the week after to discuss the answers to some preset questions he had for us. So he gave us the list of books that we were likely to use, and the call numbers in the library, and ended the lecture early.

And JUST LIKE WHAT I WOULD EXPECT IN SINGAPORE, every single scheming struggling chemical engineer in the bunch made a beeline STRAIGHT to the library, barely after he finished his last sentence. I was lucky to be ahead of the pack, and secured myself a copy of one of the books. Some others weren't as lucky. I think the librarian was shocked at the sudden impulse input of chemical engineers popping in.

Score one for kiasu-ism! When it comes to being kiasu, SINGAPOREANS ROCK.

SNOWFIGHT

I know its another entry about snow, but i can't help it. :)

I received a call from Kit, my HKU friend, telling me everyone's having a huge snowfight at the other end of Pollock Halls. So I gave the 2 girls a quick call, and quickly ran out. Keyword being quick, as it turns out i was desperate for some snowy fun.

Having being cloistered in my room the past 2 hours with the windows drawn, i was pleasantly suprised to see the ground outside coated with a thick (to me. its about 3cm or  4cm) layer of snow. Sensing imminent joy, i quickly ran (as fast as i could on snow, that is) over to Chancellors court. To my suprise, it wasn't just Kit, but the entire group of year 1 Singaporeans and HK people were there!

Heh. I was running like a sissy and screaming like a girl for over an hour. Halfway through I took off my jacket and was throwing snowballs with glee, in my t-shirt and track pants. NO GUTS NO GLORY. I don't think I could feel my fingers after the first 5 minutes, that was lucky. I might have sprained one of them dodging a snowball in bullet-time matrix style motion. As I type now, the feeling is returning to my fingers...... Ouch. really good thing that I couldn't feel my fingers earlier.

Alright, next objective - Cavorting around in the snow in sexy army shorts, and taking pictures to prove my EXTREEEEME nature to the guys. TAKE THAT YOU PUSSIES.

Oh and so sorry I haven't been updating the blog recently. A lot of time goes to updating facebook with my pictures. And blogger is inherently ill equipped to handle mass photo uploading, and facilitating a photostory style layout. Nasty stuff. Will try again when I have more time.

People try to put us d-d-down...

Isn't it a wonder.

It's snowing outside.

It's beautiful.

It's magical.

A soft white down, covering the land like a silky negligee, hiding the colours, the sound, the light.

Falling ephemerally, like dust in the wind.

The trees bare their upturned branches, stretching out like hands to receive the bounty of frost.

And all is quiet.

I hope i never lose my sense of wonder.

For if I do, I will never be as awestruck by such simple feats of nature.

Life is beautiful.

Highlights - A week in Edinburgh

Where do I begin?

Let's start with an amazingly beautiful campus, sprawling over the southern end of the old town, providing education for the masses for the last 200 years.

New friends, new acquaintances, new bonds.

An amazing city with well preserved Georgian architecture. (Pictures is Calton Hill at 6pm in the evening. Walking there tomorrow!)

Beautiful monuments to the figures that have shaped the city's history. (The prickly thing on the right is the Scott Monument, taken against sunset, with the outline of Edinburgh Castle on the bottom left. (Visiting on sunday!)

A night at Bannerman's with some lovely friends.

A historical tour, spanning the odds and ends of Edinburgh's history, and a visit to a very famous dog's gravesite. (For the unintiated, that's Greyfriar's Bobby, the dog that sat at his masters gravestone and wailed until he died.)

A walk up Exorcist stairs... (not the real one, just reminds me of it.)

Which is nicely rewarded by presenting us with the entrance to the castle (Revisiting on sunday!)

Edinburgh is a beautiful city, I cannot stress that enough. The beauty of the place alone was worth all that trouble coming over here.

Classes? What classes? :) Well, class ranges from interesting to boring... but as usual, being engineering, its more of the latter than the former, and being engineering, the girls are..... well, nuff said. Taking Polymer Science and Engineering, Environmental Issues in Chemical Engineering, Nanotechnology, Fouling in Process Industries, and hopefully Human Resource Management. See how it goes. :)

It's a pleasant 25min walk to class everyday. I feel the pain and stiffness in my calves when I reach my destination. At this rate, I might actually be healthy by the time i leave here!

And i found the most value for money thing here... Rittersport Block - 95 pence. TAN DIO. When crap cafe coffee costs 1.10 pounds, and a sandwich at lunch is 3 pounds...... Rittersport for 95 pence? TAN DIO. TAN DIO, TAN DIO, TAN DIO. heh.

Well, that's it for now. Update if and when i have time yeah?

Ridiculous

I just made a list of all the places i want to visit while i'm here.

If I spent a day in each city, it will take me 2 months to cover everything. (not including travelling)

Time to start prioritizing......

And on the 5th day, God Gave me a Rainbow.

The biggest, fattest, most well defined rainbow I have ever seen in my life. If there was a Ms Rainbow Universe 2009, this clinches the top prize.

I love studying in a foreign country. If there's one thing I can say now, is that everyday brings a new and unique experience.  The morning was dark and gloomy as I made my way down to the King's Buildings, where the science and engineering students work. But as I left my first class of the semester, I was pleasantly suprised to see a shiny day, chasing the clouds away.

Now isn't it a lovely day to be out?

Taking a Backyard Stroll: Arthur's Seat

Brilliant, I was, to take a nice morning stroll. I headed out this morning while the sky was purple (at about 8am), and went to get me some hearty breakfast. (Enough for 2 people or a cow.) 

The sky is beautiful at that time of the day. The purple highlight transforms the most mundane scenes into panoramas of beauty, sweeping across the breaking dawn like a wave of a royal hand.

When the light got brighter, I walked back past Pollock Halls, making my way down to Holyrood Park. 

This area has been a park for over 400 years, and is well tended by paid and volunteer woodsmen. I took the long way about, skirting the Salisbury Crags, which gives walkers a beautiful vista of the city falling below it's heights.

 Going round the back, I approached the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where people were bustling about getting ready for some mass run in the park. Luckily i went early enough to avoid the crowd. 

Cutting across the centre of the park grounds, i made a beeline for the peak of the park, Arthur's Seat. Legend has it that this is where King Arthur was buried. I wish. Apparently it might have just been a bastardisation of "Archer's Seat", which makes more sense as an band of archers holding the location as high ground would prove nearly impenetrable.

Well, whats a climb to the top without a view from the top?

I'm gonna get back up there again. Going solo wasn't really such a good idea - The wind nearly blew me off the top of the hill. (yes all *** kg of me). Will get and post more pictures soon.

Till then, I'll just have to walk more and buildup my stamina!

The Eagle has Landed

I was toying with the idea of sending a mass email to all the interested participants, but the idea of collecting the email addresses is... well, daunting.

Meanwhile, first impressions:

This... is not my hostel room. :(

Wish it was though! It's a graduate hostel room I think.

Here's to more good first impressions. :)

And where it stop nobody knows.

Stimulation is a terrible thing.

With the date of my departure fast approaching, I find that time is fleeting...... Minutes flit by like so many buzzing insects, whirring past the stream of consciousness. It takes a great deal of effort to contemplate each moment as a seperate entity, denying the endless agglomoration of time, sectioning the hours into coherent units.

It's aided less still by new sources of endless entertainment - 10 seasons of F.R.I.E.N.D.S, a few thousand readily available episodes of Naruto and Bleach, as well as the siren call of a bed that I won't see for 6 months. Attempts at regaining traction in my usual social life has encountered, well, lets just say a few oil slicks. Still, it's a futile attempt, for in less than a week I will again be wrenched from the familar comforts of mundanity and whisked to - let's face it, a really really cold place.

Which is not necessarily bad. It's cool. (snort snort.) It's making sure that everything falls in order so that the transition is smooth that bothers me. It would seriously annoy me if I missed something and have the transition interrupted. Bah. Only time will tell.

Musing - If Schadenfraude is a word that means pleasure at the misfortune of others, what's the word that means pleasure at the happiness of others?

She looks so happy. :)

And it was really nice to see the entire gang (well almost the entire gang) together last night. It's been a while since I saw most of them, and its the first time we got together all the couples. Very sweet. Very nice. Let's hope this team sticks together for the long run.

You guys rock my world. :) (I'm gonna miss you all.)

This Shit is so totally Weasel

For those who didn't realise... I'm back!

None the worse for wear, at about the same weight (you bastards), and with over 1000 photos and memories of good times (and bad times) gone by in the land of loving long time.

I wouldn't do justice to my trip if i haemorraghed the entire trip in a single post, and even if i did, my photos aren't quite done yet. So this will just have to do as a marker post, while the main body comes along later.

And for those who saw me last night, i was probably having much more fun than i was letting on, if you know what i mean. :)

It's a game of give and take.

Decadence.

Blissful, sweet, release.

I had never felt so relieved that my papers are over. For some reason, this semester seemed to hold a lot more intensity for me than usual. Perhaps I felt that I had put in much more effort this semester? Hopefully the results show it.

Following the anticlimatic ending of my last paper, the past few days have been a total rush. It's as if all the pent up energy from studying too hard had suddenly found a release. Wednesday I went zapping to Golden Mile with LeeLi, helping the two of them find backpacks. Didn't get anything in the end, but had a good idea of what they were looking for. That was followed by a bout of palatory orgasmic debauchery, butchering a platter of Sup Tulang, licking the flesh off it's bones and sucking every single dribble of the salacious marrow, filling me with its spongy osteoform goodness. Washing it down with a glass of refreshing sugar cane, we then proceeded to embark on a mission to conquer new bowls of Ah Balling....... which we devoured with relish. And then came the classic grass jelly in the classic bowl (which turned out to be plastic since they were going to close for the day.) But still, tasty herbal goodness. Aaaaah. Satiated, I returned to another bout of tossing people around in SWTFU, but ended up getting sidetracked on my brother's bed, watching him and Jerry go EXTREEEEEME in Gears of War 2. I need to learn to ass-kick like that. Khai and Ivan was asking me out, but lethargy got the better of my, and I succumbed to sweet slumber soon after.

Thursday went by a little more frenetically. Woke up at just past the crack of dawn (adjusting back to normal life), and decided that lying in bed was too sinful for a day such as this, so i went on to Operation Nuclear Disarmanent - Or How i Learned that A Clean Table is Actually Possible. It's still in progress, hopefully it'll be done before North Korea is. (ka-ching) Leaving the job halfway, I headed down to town, armed with some vouchers to pick up certain apparel for next year. Saw Cheryl on a lift, but couldn't drop by to say hi (and she looked rather occupied), and had to rush off for the Chemgineers Meeting. It ended up being not too bad, it seemed like most of us were having fun (including Pam, suprisingly.) Ivan was rather stoned from the night before, though. And I found myself with a vicious hunger for a new game, Zombies!!! (yes, three exclamation marks.) Leaving the cafe, we headed down for a few drinks, where Herman and Joshua provided ample topics for conversation. (They are seriously noisy bastards.) Had a Leffe Blonde, which didn't disappoint. Too bad none of my SMUgger friends were around (GLARE.) Left when we realised that suddenly it was dark and about 7.30. It was rather suprising to find out I still enjoyed talking to a certain someone. Got home and.... went for supper with my bro, Keong and Jerry. Dropped them off at Keong's place for more EXTREEEEME action, and me and my bro headed back. Crashed and burned.

Friday was zomfgwtfbbq. Woke up, continued with Operation Nuclear Disarmanent - Then got distracted and bullied brudder to come with me to Paradigm Infinitum - aka Geekhaven. There, i was...... disturbed. The call of the Geek side was strong... but the horror... the horror... I confess, I gave in. I came in with intention to get Zombies!!!, which i did. But i also... got a membership. :( crap. Now I'm one of THEM. And a nice Battle for Black Reach set which I'm gonna share with Jon the Orky Bastard (who better pay me half... you ass.) Headed back to YCK to pickup Leeli and Rich, and left on an EPIC SHOPPING SPREE...... which spanned the breadth of Singapore and 3 different warehouse sales. Needless to say, I ended the day damn broke. But i guess i got what i needed. Picked up the other half of RichanMeiyan and headed for AMK Astons... which was satisfying too. Left them all to go home and went home to rest a while, before picking up brudder and KH. Came back for Zombie Night - Drinking Graveyards, Playing Zombies!!!, and watching Evil Dead II. Insane. I ended the night at 4am buzzed and high and convinced that Zombies!!! was the game to take the edge of a 30 hour train ride.

Woke the next morning to send my mom to dialysis, then returned to crash and burn on my bed... before kicking the other two buggers awake and going for EXTREEEEME breakfast.

Yeah man. Like 8 pratas a head extreme. More to be found on TSFT.

And thats enough decadence for a lifetime of debauchery for me. My god.