keep believing

wednesdays are my free days! and i’m in a struggle not to be so free in my free time. what’s freedom anyway?

i should be doing my tutorials soon, i purposely balloted for tutorials slots which are later in the week, so i can (and have to) do tutorials! i thought my timetable sucked, but i’m fine with it now. having to wake up early four days a week (five if you include saturdays) is not the best, but i can always go back to my room to take a short nap during the empty slots. and i can actually concentrate better in the afternoon lessons.

i had two labs this week.. pretty white crystals on monday and light green liquid in a tube on tuesday. erwin is my biochem lab partner, evelyn, my neighbour, devid and cindy, just at the next bench. bio labs are more luxurious than chem labs, and they are aircon-ed!
i like megabites cafe, had lunch there for two consecutive days.

i should get myself used to blogging again. for the benefit of people who don’t get to see me often ;)
and they should do the same, too!

A big mountain of sugar is too much for one man. I can see now why God portions it out in those little packets. Homer Simpson

not everyone’s as wise as homer. if you can’t seem to understand, just trust, and obey.

evelyn brought me and brenda to this daily scoop ice cream cafe at clementi arcade this afternoon, where altogether we had two waffles, two brownies and an ice cream cone, and i found this verse on the wall:
Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. James 1:17
:)

but i thought the ice creams were just okay. i like their butterscotch pecan best.

the first week of school is over. i only skipped one lecture, and attended the rest. in one of the lectures, i felt a chemical engineer’s blues, when i wished i was anywhere but sitting in a lecture theatre with my fellow chemical engineers-to-be. maybe i really shouldn’t be there. anyway.
school has really started..

it’s indonesian independence day today. let us all pray for indonesia, for the leaders to have justice and wisdom, for all people to have conscientiousness, integrity, and compassion, for the country to be under His guidance always.
God bless Indonesia.

i was almost left with no proof that i really went to china last month. i still can’t speak much chinese, and one does not need to go all the way to china to get china made products. but i have pictures now! (i still have some more pictures with the singapore girls, but i may not have the time to blog when i get the pictures from them)
yes, i really went to china!

i left beijing airport with the singaporeans, the koreans, the japs, and a german girl, guided by two chinese students. i was told that the first step to overcome a tourist’s fear and discomfort of being in a new place, is actually to get to the hotel from the airport by yourself. well, i didn’t.

eating was cheap. food was plenty, some tasted ‘unique’, some were really good.
we had a lot of dumplings, a lot of brinjals, a lot of nooddles and bread, we had peking duck, macs and kfc, porridge, and many many kinds of chinese food. i tried satay-looking starfish, cockroaches, small serpents, and other insects! only had steamboat once which made me very happy after eating.

in the lectures, we learnt stuff like archeological discoveries and qilu civilization, chinese fairy tales, and paper cutting. some were interesting, some were boring. i skipped two lectures on the last week, for shopping and for drinking tea.

we had a lot of dialogues in the chinese class, we even had it for the final exams. my group almost screwed up our final dialogue when two out of four members of the group chose to drink all night the night before our exams. but the other girl and i went on, and we did good!

the great wall is indeed great, but only if you know the story behind it, or else, honestly, i’d think that it’s just something that i also have in my house, a wall. but the scenery, especially on top, was how-great-Thou-art beautiful!
some of the stairs were really steep, i thought it was tough.
oh yeah, i climbed the great wall!
You’re not a real man if you haven’t climbed the Great Wall, mao zedong.

summer palace, it has very pretty sceneries and architectures, but it was too bad that we had no one to guide and tell us the history behind it. i only know that it was a place for the royal family to spend their summer, and that there is a long corridor with paintings to entertain a prince when it rained.

in the forbidden city, we had a very good tour guide who told us the history of the buildings and the symbols there. it’s really interesting (go google!), but the weather was bad, and i was having stomach cramp..

jinan, the city where my university is located, is known as a spring city. we visited baotu spring and daming lake, took many many pictures, took a ferris wheel and got a good view of the city from top.

after our archaeological discoveries lecture, we visited shandong university museum. saw artifacts and old chinese calligraphies. i was kinda reminded of ross geller.

i didn’t go for activities with the chinese students, and went to eat at pizza hut instead. guilty.
i found these pictures where they played forming letters with their body very cute!

we visited the university’s engineering school, saw their robotics room and their preparation for the upcoming competition, and.. we did pottery!
it was not easy, you need to have patience and perseverance and a strong heart.
i did mine a lot of times until it was finished smooth and nice, i asked the lady to help me move it while i went to wash my hands, and when i came back, i saw no more, it was too soft and it got destroyed. heart pain.

i love qingdao, a city so clean and nice, neat and pretty. and they have beaches. we played with the waves, took the water bicycle, and we did taichi!

there was an industrial visit to hai’er, a leading electronic company in china. all air-cons in the hotel and dormitory rooms we stayed in were hai’er. the industrial park was huge, and their technology and innovation was impressive. they even had their very own university that looks and feels like a garden. nice.

we visited yangjiabu, a folk village in weifang, the city of kites. we were supposed to learn how to make a kite, but they didn’t have enough people, and so we had to be happy shopping and flying kites instead. the kites are very very pretty!

the university had a beijing opera to perform for us at the lobby. they had a guy singing with a girl’s voice, and they said it was so in the older time because girls were not allowed to perform. i love the monkey king! so naughty and adorable.
the music they played was very very loud!
the whole thing was in chinese, but i could roughly understand the storyline.

we watched a modern chinese opera at a theatre the next day, and it was kinda painful for me. it was very stuffy and noisy, and i didn’t understand what they were saying and there were a lot of dialogues! but i noticed modern chinese opera is very drama-ish.

chinese calligraphy!
the lecture was in chinese with english translations from the singapore girls. i didn’t really get everything the lecturer said, but i think chinese calligraphy is pretty. i copied the writings the lecturer lent us, and they said it’s not bad for a beginner. i had no idea what i was writing and how i was supposed to write.
but it’s not bad..

i thought the stairs at the great wall was bad until i went to mount tai! i might have climbed more stairs there than i’ve ever climbed all my life before i came to china!
an american guy said that it was like a journey to find yourself, yes it was that hard, and i told him, i didn’t need to find myself. i am already found.
again, there were nice sceneries and great architectures, but i don’t have the pictures with me. we went down by cable car, which wasn’t as exciting as it looked from below.

right after climbing the mountain, we went off to confucius’ hometown, qufu. we watched a perfomance about confucius that night, i was dying then, but the perfomance was really good. i got to sit at the first row, and had a good view of the whole thing.
To have friends from afar is happiness, is it not? confucius.

the next day was a wrong time to do anything, i was tired, my brain was switched off, and it was extremely hot! i couldn’t even be excited about taking pictures. after a few gates and trees and statues, i totally lost it.

i’ve been back in singapore for exactly a week now. was once again reminded about the importance of time yesterday in our youth fellowship, which made me ask myself, what have you done the past one week?

i’ve moved to my room in pgp with the help from pat, johni, and ian. i like it here in pgp! after being a nomad for the past three months, now i can have a room again, i can sleep with my own pillow and bolster, i can use my own desktop, i can use the stuff i am familiar with again, at least for the next one semester. it feels good to finally settle down.
my room is still in a mess though, and it’s really dusty i have been coughing. haven’t really got the time (and the will) to clean and clear again. laundry is piling up too. i’m just so lazyy..

i bought a portable air con. it’s kinda like a trend here in pgp, buying portable aircons. my room has a nice view overlooking pgp, the foyer, the fountains, and the other blocks, and.. the sun. it’s too hot it’s hard for me to sleep. the buying was done without much thinking, but i’m glad i did it. i can’t wait for the air con to be delivered to my doorstep!
oh and i’ve got rid of my fridge and tv. thanks to shinfei. i feel so much lighter now.

we had our indonesian orientation last thursday, it’s called kulinus&kulinite. whats with the name? at first i thought ‘kul’ meant cool, and thus, cool in nus and cool at night, which doesn’t sound cool at all. but thankfully, the ‘kul’ actually stands for ‘kumpul-kumpul’ which means gathering.
in kulinus, ivan the jersey guy and i were the station master for a game called hide and sick. i was hide and ivan was sick, and nobody else thought it was funny. it was fun, but it got a little bit boring after repeating the game for the third time. i want to play too!
kulinite was interesting, but i feel that it was diluted with the rather draggy programs.
i enjoyed working in the committee, but i wish i had more time to interact with the freshies.

and i’ve done the things that i really missed when i was in china! having a fellowship and going to church. i only went to church once in the four weeks i was in china. you really should not take good things for granted.

how’s china? i think china is really rich.. in culture, history, people, language, food. i was overwhelmed!
the past one month, i was immersed in the chinese life, experiencing its richness, seeing chinese architectures, learning chinese history, hearing chinese, eating chinese, drinking chinese (tea). those things are not exactly new to me, but i can say that i appreciate them much better now. oh yeah i’m a chinese turning chinese.

quoting a guy in my class, china has a great past and an excellent future laying ahead. one month is way way too little time to learn everything about china, but it’s not an excuse not to learn anything. i did learn, a lot a lot, except for the last week when we spent too much time shopping. i had around 30 hours of chinese beginner lessons (how can you live in singapore and not knowing chinese at all?.. how can you live in singapore for SIX YEARS and not knowing chinese at all?…..), around 20 hours of lectures about china from religions (the lecturer is my favorite!) to chinese cuisine, field trips on weekends, and a bunch of new friends who helped and taught me a lot. i learnt how to bargain: zhen me mai? tai gui le! pian yi dianr ba..
i learnt from many little things that happened there and is really grateful for the trip.

i learnt to appreciate friends and the fellowship that i have here better, too.

one thing though, i was really dependent on other people in china. i didn’t even order my own food because i couldn’t read the menu! i only took a cab by myself once, told the cab driver: wo er ma (walmart) once and he understood, and i got very proud of myself.

my room is messy, my mind is, too.
i need to clear them both, and put things in the right place and order.
i need aristotle.