fml

In 35 hours' time, I'll be on my flight to Hong Kong, my home for the next 6 months and I haven't even started packing.

My throat's feeling a little 'bo ho say' right now. Really worried that it'll be inflamed when I wake up later, and I'll be heading to HK with a sore throat.

Switzerland - Zurich and Lucerne (most expensive city of this trip)

From Rome, we boarded an overnight train to Zurich (after a one-hour transit at Milan). A cool breeze greeted us when we got off the train at the station and it was definitely a nice change from the crazily warm hot weather in Italy; sort of like the weather we had in UK just before we left.

Zurich was the 'neatest' and most organized (in terms of layout) city that we visited thus far in Europe; badly vandalized train carriages were few and far, streets looked clean and litter-free and the place just seemed to be giving off a healthy glow despite the occasional chilly breeze and mist. Oh, but it was definitely the most expensive city too.

We met the friendliest old man at the tram-stop when we were buying tram passes; there are different types - per-day passes, per-trip passes, half-day passes etc but all of them were in German and we were at a loss deciding which will be a better option for us. The old man came over with his walking stick, asked if we spoke English, and went on to describe the different passes that were represented in German words even before we asked for any help. What a nice uncle!

Of all the places that we've been to in Europe and UK, we had the easiest time finding our hotel in Zurich; and that's probably why I said Zurich is an organized place earlier.

Most expensive Big Mac meal I've ever eaten in my ; that's about S$17, we didn't even ask for up-size and this was shared between F and me.

I've been reading some food blogs and French pastry brand Ladurée's always been greatly raved for its sweet treats, macarons especially. While wandering, I spotted Ladurée in the corner of a street soooo, we headed in excitedly and got ourselves a few pieces of these world-famous babies.

Sweet (but only subtly so) tastes bursting in your mouth when you take a bite into any one of them. Loved them!

Continued to take a walk down the streets with F and here are a few pictures of our wandering:

This reminds me a little of the Grand Canal in Venice hur; only it's much emptier - void of boats and signs of activity.

 

On our second day, we visited Lucerne, and paid for the golden round trip that included a cruise along Lake Lucerne, a ride on the world's steepest cogwheel railway to the top of Mount Pilatus and a cable car ride down from the top. My very first visit to a Swiss mountain (okay any mountain for that matter)!

F & I on the ferry.

b&w.

in colour.

it was quite a long ride and there were quite a few stops along the way.

My impression of the type of houses and places Swiss live in; this picture looks like it's come out straight from my social studies textbook in secondary school.

I wonder what the people living here do for entertainment - definitely not shopping, probably trekking/mountaineering... and making rosti?

the spectacular view that greeted us when we finally reached the top.

I am swa-gu max, this is my first time at the top of a mountain and I wasn't expecting the temperature to be very different from ground level, but oh dear, that was a big mistake. It was freezing! I wish we had our Primark coats with us.

Beautiful view. There were people trekking along the trails you see above; thumbs up for their effort! I hope I'll be one of those trekkers some day.

Descent, cable-car ride; the trees remind me of enchanted forests that I used to read about in Enid Blyton's fairy tales.

And we spotted another shop selling macarons; Luxemburgerli's a Swiss brand though.

These were much lighter and 'fluffier' compared to Laduree's; I'm talking about both the filling and the shells. They look really cute here, but looks aside, Laduree wins hands down in terms of taste - I'd very much prefer the firmer texture.

Nonetheless, I'll never say no if you were to offer me one of these cuties.

Zurich was over for us in a mere 2 days but I hope I'll be back in Switzerland someday to see the Matterhorn and the Bernese Alps!

Up next: Paris!

Life after exams

Exactly a week now since the last paper, it's not exactly the most interesting period of my life but that's okay, because... I say so lah hur. 

Rob got into Female magazine's 50 Gorgeous People of 2010 and we headed down to National Museum (where the grand finale was held) to show some love on Tuesday night, but nah, he didn't win (bet it was one great experience for him nonetheless). Anyhow, if there was an award for the most under-dressed supporters of the night, I'm sure we would have won hands down.

Floating giant dick balloon spotted!

and there's our handsome luobin.

Neh, no more pictures from the event because it was awfully crowded.

In other news, my lens from Amazon.jp arrived today! I am very happy because I can finally has a matching red lens for my camera that is not a kit-lens! 

Corn soup.

Met up with some of my secondary school friends today at Plaza Sing and we ended up back at my place for.... *drum*roll*.... Mahjong! And I won a cup of Gong Cha from ZL :p

I'm at the 4th day of my nearly-all-liquid diet since Monday, and I feel horrible. Here's a boring blow-by-blow account of everything that I've been consuming after my wisdom teeth extraction: Monday - minced pork porridge and two servings of instant mash from 7-Eleven. Tuesday - Plain porridge with 5 pieces of pickled chye sim (that I spent forever chewing), Szechuan spicy and sour soup from Crystal Jade and Frolick froyo, Wednesday - Super instant oats with banana milk and chopped up banana cubes, Campbell's garlic roasted mushroom soup, Thursday - Marigold yoghurt, Instant oats with banana milk (again), corn soup from MOS, Gong Cha (I attempted to chew the pearls, but ended mostly swallowing) and finally, Campbell's Szechuan spicy and sour soup. I'm perpetually feeling hungry but I'm too chicken to eat anything that's more solid than what's been mentioned above for fear of breaking the stitches that are holding my gums together and bleeding gums.

I'm craving for everything that my mind can think of at the moment, everything! :(

Wisdom Teeth Extraction

The most exciting scary thing that's happened to me since the start of holidays so far, has got to be my wisdom teeth extraction. I had it this noon at Lucky Plaza and it lasted close to an hour? Can't be too sure since I was drowsy from the effects of anesthesia.

The only pain I felt from the entire process was from the injections; the 3 injections on my right hand (to make me drowsy) and the four on my gums (these were really bad and I teared). There was drilling, lots of it because my two bottom wisdom teeth were growing in a horizontal manner (bottom left in picture below) and the dentist had to break them into smaller pieces before he could remove them. So other than drilling, I also heard cracking sounds inside my mouth; I had no idea how he cracked them, but I'm guessing he used pliers of some sort?

Something stupid happened to me. After exiting the clinic, I headed straight for the nearest toilet to pop a painkiller before the effect of the anesthetic wore off, and since my entire mouth was in numbness, I didn't realize I hadn't swallowed the pill and it got stuck on my teeth instead. Tasted a horrible, bitter taste in my mouth when I woke up in between bouts during my sleep and after I woke up for good. It was blearghhhhhhhhhh.

Fortunately for me, the bleeding's stopped after my nap, and I even managed to have some pork porridge that Dad bought for me when I got home. Maybe it's because of the bitter taste that the painkiller left in my mouth that for the first time ever, I thought cold (put out to cool for 4 hours) porridge actually tasted good. Oh wait, maybe it's because I haven't had any food all day hurhur.

My jaws are still feeling a little sore, but I can finally feel my lips and chin again! I still dare not use my tongue to probe around the back of my mouth, kinda worried that my tongue's going to get caught under of those stitches and rip them out :x

Hehe, okay lah. Enough scaring you guys (who haven't gone for your wisdom teeth extraction). Like what everyone else say, it's really not that painful (cept for the jabs!); okay actually not painful at all apart from the jabs. I guess it gets scary only when you try to visualize what the dentists are doing with their equipment in your mouths... so, stop doing it!

I had Siao to accompany me home after and thank goodness for her, if not I'd have fallen down on the escalator or slipped or something if I were all by my own. Thank you Siaooooooo I love you!

My mum was super annoying earlier on, she said she's "going to buy all the nice food because I can't eat them for now". And that's why I think my mumsy's the best :p

Bad end.

Tomorrow morning, I'll be sitting for the final exam for the module that I've been whining about so much all semester. I never really felt like I understood what my tutor was telling us about in the tutorials, and I don't know how I managed to get a B for my individual assignment. I have absolutely no idea if I'm going to pass this module, and I'm so scared that I might fail an exam for the first time in university that I'm shitting bricks right now.

'Wildest' encounter in school so far

looks like someone's just had lunch

Audrey spotted this cute, little fellow on her way to the toilet and when she first shouted "snake!", I didn't believe her at all because she's been pranking the girls and me a fair bit for the past few days/weeks. Let's hope we'll have more of such encounters in future!

Ten

That's the number of days to the last day of exams. I have two final tests, and two final papers; three of which I'd be done with in 7 days.

Hang in there little tomato.

Friday!

Met up with the poly girls for a sumptuous dinner at Simpang and it was awesome! <3

Jaded.

The last assignment of the semester's finally submitted. I procrastinated (like how I'd predicted), and I paid for it with a night's worth of sweet slumber, a great deal of last-minute rushing and some heart-stopping moments when my darned thumbdrive refused to work. It was horrible; having to down two bottles of chicken essence and a cup of coffee (my tummy felt weird after) just to keep myself awake, and repeatedly go through the incoherent paragraphs that I'd written, keeping my mind in a perpetual boggle. It was so very horrible but I totally deserved it. At times like that, I don't know if I should be marveling at my ability to conjure a superfluous 2,000-word essay in a night or be ashamed that I was only trying to briefly touch on a module that I've raved so much on by merely lumping lexical sets together to make up the word-count. I'd bet your gut's telling you to go with the latter. Mine too.

Guilt was the only thing that filled my mind when my tutor spotted me in the staff corridor during submission this afternoon and said Hi. I've really enjoyed his lessons and I even thought I'd been well-prepared by completing the readings weekly; seems like that's not going to be nearly enough, I'll never be one of the ones to come up with the model answers and I'm truly apologetic if I've been a disappointment.

Despite the horrible post-submission feelings that I'm experiencing right now, I must say that I'm glad to be finally able to focus on exams' revision!

Oh. Lack of a night's worth of sleep results in what you see above; I can sleep just about anywhere as long as there is a resting place for my head. Xinrong snapped this some few weeks back and I think moments later, I was lying on the study bench on my back taking a quick snoozeeeee.

tired and bruised

I can't seem to make up my mind on which bruise is more painful; the bruise on my left shin, the one on my right shin, the one on my left thigh or the one on my right index finger (yeah I know, how did it even get there?). There are another 34734389302 abrasion marks and tiny nicks all over my legs (even the sole), and together with the few mozzie bites that have been scratched to become bloodied scabs by me... I am annoyed. By all these little nicks that have been causing me mild irritation to severe discomfort. But I should really be annoyed with myself actually, for even allowing them to get onto me and complaining about them now.

I really don't want to end up with dented shins. Wish I'd be a little less clumsy. Blah.

People like to ask for 'honest feedback' so often that I can't help but wonder if they are prepared to handle the cruel and disheartening truth (most of the time), me included. Some people just enjoy receiving positive affirmation from the rest on their work/themselves (don't deny), while others want 'truthful opinions' so that they can make adjustments/enhancements to their work/themselves. In most polite 'face-saving societies' or used by some as a strategy to avoid bruising a friend's self-confidence, the cold, hard 'truth' is sometimes sugar-coated with a layer of social niceties and something truly unpleasant can end up sounding acceptable or even great.

I think that's the way Singapore functions, or among my friends and acquaintances at least. We have become so used to and dependent on the sugar-coated feedback that we are no longer able to accept constructive criticisms that don't sound half as lovely as all that fructose-candy goodness; instead, we see critics as rude, fault-finding individuals who just love directly challenging us (yeah right, why are they even bothered in the first place) and then we start getting all defensive and worked up. Sometimes, things gets so bad that people don't even look at things in a clear-headed and objective manner anymore, not realizing that they sound like complete idiots who have no clue about what they are defending anymore. I do this pretty often admittedly; even though I like to constantly remind myself that 忠言逆耳. It doesn't matter if your friends are trying to protect you, or be nice or encouraging by avoiding negative truths, because we learn to settle for something lesser in the end by leaving them as they are even though you know it can turn out much better.

If things happen according to the way I want them to, then I'd be probably be producing the most awesome of assignments/proposals/lesson plans, and I will be the perfect person that I've always dreamt of being naturally effortlessly. There will be no need for feedback, because things are just going to unfold in the ways they are supposed to be, and nothing will go wrong because Murphy's Law doesn't exist. But no matter how hard we desire, we all know things are never like this in real life, that's why there's always stories of successes and failures.

When I think aloud to myself and my friends hear my thoughts (that sometimes do not necessitate replies), they will be super nice about it.

Example:
Me: Why am I so fat? :(
Friend A: You are not fat dearie! I am fatter than you lah, look... (totally not true okay)

I'm never ever going to lose weight if they keep telling me that because the truth is, I am fat because I am so depressingly unmotivated in exercising (and you should really look at all the crap *don't take it literally tyvm* I eat) and nobody tells me that instead, but I cannot help and be thankful that my friends usually keep the nasty comments to themselves, because I might just die from embarrassment if they replied like that:

"Are you sure you really want to know why you are so fat? I'm going to say it even though you don't want to know. Look at all that crap you eat without even exercising. You so deserve to be fat lah."

I will confirm burst into tears. 

It doesn't just apply to my physical appearance, but the most funny thing about all this? It's okay if I am the one saying it instead; I probably won't feel half as depressed if I were the one to saying it to myself, not that it'll actually work (tested but not yet proven, I REALLY WANT TO LOSE WEIGHT).

I'm lazy to raise more examples or elaborate any further. My point of writing these blocks of text? I definitely want to do better at the things I do and not be constantly stuck in a rut just because people are trying to be polite. And people who have been awfully nice to me, I really appreciate your positive words of encouragement so don't stop being awfully nice to me! Don't know bout you but I can see myself saying a whole lot more of nasty (but truthful) stuff to myself in the near future, good to hear the awful truths from myself first before hearing it from somebody else. Or even better, work on the awful things you tell yourself about you before people have anything bad to say.

So, nasty-sounding but honest thing that I want to tell myself today: Stop procrastinating and saying you don't have time to do your essays when you have all the time in the world to Facebook-stalk people, visit www.cuteoverload.com, www.tastefullyoffensive.com and www.lamebook.com. You will totally deserve your shitty grade for Multicultural Research Paper if you don't pull your damned act together. Like now. 

By the way, it's totally alright if I'm the one saying it to myself but it's not if you are the one telling me that.

Okay kidding. You can continue telling me what a lazy ass I am, but be gentle k.

#13 - Someone you wish could forgive you

Here are some class photos taken during my CCHS days that I've just dug out from a dusty stash. I like to see how much we've all grown over the past 9-10 years; both on Facebook and in real life. Like how the super tomboyish Ah Long's transformed into such a lady now, or how ZL's lost so much weight after secondary school, or how much Boss' not called Xiao Pang any longer... hehe good times. I hope everyone's doing well these days...

sec one - all so cute and innocent *ahem*

No secondary two picture, didn't buy it because I wasn't in the photo; even though we had a really good-looking relief teacher in it instead of everyone's favourite Mr D.

sec three - fiercest teacher I've ever had; kept me on my toes during chemistry lab sessions. i hate to say this, but she might've been the reason why i was so scared of chemistry!

sec four - someone heard my pleas, and gave our class a much friendlier chemistry teacher this time round!

I'm not sure if anyone else's noticed, but the skirts (at the front row) got noticeably shorter as we progressed from secondary one to four. Hur hur hur. Vanity and girls... Oh and the shoes too; they 'legalized' track shoes after secondary one, I think.

If you were from one of my classes back then, I hope you had as much joy looking and groaning at these photos as I did.

Anyhow, #13 - Someone I wish could forgive me, can be seen in all 3 pictures that I've posted up there. To the people who were in my classes, I'm not going to point out exactly who it is though, I'm damned sure you can infer from what I'm going to say next. To everyone else, you probably don't need to know who it is.

#13 is a girl in my classes, who was ostracized and picked on by nearly everybody else merely because of some bodily issues that she faced. We didn't say it in her face that we had problems with her, but talked about them behind her back, even at the expense of making her look really bad. Everyone was just nasty, and whenever we were assigned to work in a same group with this poor girl, people condemned her right from the start even before she was able to do anything.

Sad to say, but such is the effect of peer pressure and conformance in schools back then, and most probably these days too. There wasn't a need to question whether what I did was right or wrong, I went ahead blindly with what everyone else usually did - because it was accepted as a norm, and since everybody does that, there's no harm in me doing it either, right? Nobody tried to put themselves in her shoes to think about what it felt like, being ostracized and mocked at constantly, day in and day out. And even when she does something that you feel is awfully nice, you keep it to yourself and not say a thing about it to your friends because everyone else feels that nothing she does will be enough to redeem herself, even when she was never at fault to begin with.

It was plain unjustness (such an irony that I was in the classes 1/2 Justice) and we really ought to have known better back then, but we didn't, and we never thought about the consequences of our actions - basically, ruining her secondary school years that were supposed to have some of the greatest moments in her life. I feel like a moron/awful and terribly ashamed of myself as I'm typing this, but I am truly apologetic and sorry for being such a shitty person back then. I understand that no amount of Sorrys will ever right this wrong, and even though we really don't deserve her forgiveness, I hope she's got a much bigger heart than us (I know I'll never forgive someone if they did this to me) and is not too mad at us anymore.

It might be too early to say/conclude, but I hope to do my best to prevent such things from happening to my students in future.

Mozzie-magnet

The title doesn't sound all that sexy, but people sure love me for that! Audrey and Rongster can attest to that. In the short 15 minutes that we spent at the wooden benches outside one of the art-rooms on the basement level, I got 5 (and counting) stings all over my arms and legs. Just by me sitting around and not doing anything (oh right, maybe that's the problem), the girls managed to effectively deflect all the damned mosquitoes - because they all came for me instead. The girls were really sweet to me after; Audrey helped me draw circles around the bites; took pictures of my *ahem* trotters and posted them onto Facebook, and Rongster offered me her medicated oil to stop the itching. Everybody say 'awww...' 

On an ending note, I really hate how much of a mosquito-magnet I am.

guilt

It's not my fault, but I feel bad for having a horrible dream about a new friend. Dear scary, don't get into a car accident anytime soon.

new favourite site: lamebook

Because they're all so much more fun to read these than your actual facebook friends' updates. 

自恋

so boyish to so girly, in a year.