we are not laowai

last hour of having internet in beijing!

we are all chinese, yet easily spotted as non-beijing-ers, non-locals. wonder how people spot a singaporean?
we are not laowai, but we have been gleeful visitors and observers of beijing for the past semester! Yet at the same time, beijing already feels a little like home. As i brought zz around beijing on the bus/train/cab, realised that so many little things have become so familiar, so much a part of our everyday!

but it's back to home truly in 3 weeks! =) mixed feelings?

byebye beijing!

heehaw

如果考试代表学期的结束, 那今天就是我们交换学期到了一个尾声吧…
考试时才发现自己的中文其实好差啊! 小学、中学、甚至高中和法学院里, 都自以为中文不错。可是! 可是! 也许那只是相对而言的! 在我成长的环境里, 总觉得必须让自己的英文进步, 甚至努力学法文-- 结果中文就走下坡到谷底了! 和本地人说话, 他们有时会听不懂, 昨天连留学生都听不懂! -_- (注: “几时”是错误的… 是 “什么时候”) 几个月来, 生活用语都学会了… “牛”啦、土豆啦、服务员啦、没事..等等^.^ 说话可能能较完整地说了, 抄笔记也不必再把手机当字典。可是真正要表达观点、写作… 还差好远好远! 真有点失望? 而且和一些外国朋友交谈, 都不禁感觉到他们知识的广阔。我的? 太有限了! ignorance is not always bliss!

another pea-brained post

felt a tad uncomfortable when people referred to "my blog" a few times this wk heh. i don't really know why i blog. or even who reads it. I don't blog particularly personal or deep thoughts, i try not to blog things like i ate X then went to this place and bought Y then went to Z everyday. i just type random things that come to mind at that particular point in time.

random thought of the day:

watch this video! When Love Takes You In. it's a beautiful song. Steven Curtis Chapman has 3 teenage children (aged 16, 17, 21), but he has gone back to changing diapers and running after small children by adopting 3 beautiful Chinese girls, aged 7, 4.5, 4. Thanks bing for jio-ing us to his concert. He writes good music and lyrics, together with a good voice =) When Love takes you in.... everything changes

the random picture of the day - such an educated tree! cheers to papers tomorrow and wednesday. Don't quite know what to expect! (wait... where and what time is our paper?) it's terrible how pea-brained i've been for the past 4 months. promise to start the brain working harder next semester! but 读万卷书不如行万里路 hor?
this week promises to be exciting! -papers, zz's arrival, post-exams lala-ness, goodbyes? there are seasons in life.

when the music fades
all is stripped away
and i simply come
longing just to bring
something that's of worth
that will bless your heart

i bring you more than a song
for a song in itself
is not what you have required
you search much deeper within
through the way things appear
you're looking into my heart

bored thoughts

this is ma la guo from a roadside -well almost - stall. it consists of sticks of random little things soaked+cooked/cooked+soaked in ma la soup 麻辣汤. it's really yummy! we kept going back for more rounds of the sticks of cuttlefish, noodles, mushrooms, meatballs, sausages and what not.
and there's the local version of icekachang ie. ice shavings with lotsa of more random yummy things like red bean and strawberries.
But eat them together and it's the ultimate combination to guarantee a tummyache!



it's been really funny looking at the cat-and-mouse game between the vendors and the gongan. first, they drove up and down the street. then, they decided to park their vans along the street and read their newspapers there. but the vendors decided to set up stall right 50m away or across the road or round the corner. so now wudaokou has an average of 3 gongan vans parked along a stretch of 100m or so.

jing said that my exchange experience seems pretty different from those in US or UK. yea, maybe. maybe because i think stuff like these are pretty fun! not to mention that we gleefully went shopping in the middle of a studying trip to qinghua yestd :P it may just be our last outing... everyone's heading... south south and south! we're so north up that the sun rises at 4am and sets at 8pm.
i'm so bored of studying!! great respect for the local students and koreans now, they have to crunch, memorise and apply so many modules.. no wonder alot of them are always sleeping in class, from the sheer workload perhaps. or maybe our law school is just too good to us =) not that i wont complain next sem... lala.

ode to open book exams

i have a big head small brain.
that is threatening to spill out swirls of chinese words.
at a rate exceeding the rate of input.

i would write an ode to open-book exams,
but i need a bigger brain capacity.
for now, preferably a chinese one!!

不好意思 ... just needed to write something in english.... sigh

we had a singapore food gathering yesterday - laksa, bah kut teh, rendang, borborchacha, etc - reminded me of chinese new year feasting! the tastebuds were awakened!!!
omg, i miss my prawn noodle, satay, nasi lemak, mum's curry, popiah, bar chor mee, hor fun, prata, teh ping, duck/chicken rice, western food!!!! and just sitting down to dinner tgth with family, even if we don't always say much or eat in front of the tv. i miss walking/buss-ing down the road from hougang to kovan, looking forward to catching that first sight of you.

i miss making pretty notes for open-book exams, focussing not on whether i can memorise a definition but on the how-to-analyze hypo's and issues. almost miss the "determination" to do well. i miss walking down the shiny NUS corridors and saying hi to people, not a sense of "i'm transient here"... i miss good friends that you don't have to think about what to say next...

everyone's getting pretty excited about their flights home to singapore... i have a month or so more, my return date makes it exactly 5 months in beijing!

i'll miss the travelling and sights/sounds/experiences... the carefree-ness of being on exchange. the people here, singaporeans and international. the openness and diversity in BICF. the laughter & learning in our small bible study group... the small snippets of life living on campus... my own little room here. of starting another slack day with the Bible and prayer... and laughing at mantou the rabbit's antics... yes, and the shopping!! as though things are free haha. and learning to bargain. the chinese-ness of the whole place, esp the lyrical chinese accent.

but for the first time in 4 months, i think i'm ready to return to our small city with nothing very much yet quite alot to do!

old-world charm

We've just been reminded to do up our SEP report and submit pictures. well, in return for a $3000 award, it's very much worth it. But that still makes it a tough assignment - with 3000-4000 of my own pictures AND another 2000 of SH/ST/JD's photos! I wonder which ones the SEP team would want? And where do you start reporting on 4 months?

The focus is certainly not on the studies! Can't believe I've my first paper tomorrow - I had another tour of beijing with mum and jie who came over last week, and just so distracted by playing with photos... tell me more horror stories of losing your 2nd upper honors and repeating a semester if you fail on exchange!!


Hutong (alleyways) and siheyuan (courtyard houses) have been a signature feature of Beijing since the Ming dynasty. Some interesting stories of phrases like 少东 and 门当户对 arose from these neighbourhoods - eg. how there are different no of beams above the household entrance, a sign of social and political status.

The hutongs have such a old-world charm - it's a pity that many of are making way for modern development and wider roads! We took a pretty touristy tricycle tour around the hutongs, but it's so quaint that they are still inhabitated, with people heading home on the bicycles, etc.

With a temperature of 36 degrees(!!!) in the past week, it's no wonder that jie didn't like beijing that much. But I love the way Beijing is a mix of new and old... walking along the old hutongs out to the traffic-jammed roads (no, i still don't love the traffic), going from crowded shopping places to mountaineous Great Wall in the rural areas....
3 times great wall + 4 times peking duck. good thing the law of diminishing returns hasn't set in yet! at least this peking duck experience was unique - to complete the old-world-charm- week, we went in search of Liqun Peking duck, situated in a siheyuan, a 15 minute walk into the hutongs. catch it before it becomes another quanjude tourist chain!!

tick tock tick

时辰不多了!

answers.com is more informative about Singapore than i am

We should all get a crash course on some basic facts about Singapore before we embark on exchange!

have been quite stumped by simple questions like - so how big is singapore? (err... the size of Haidian district in beijing?) so what's the annual GDP? (err i know what my starting pay is gonna be?) so what's the story behind the merlion? (err... that it's ugly?)

a typical conversation:
-- oh! i've always wanted to visit Singapore! (or: i've been to singapore!)
-- but there's nothing much to see there.. (the tourism board needs to 'educate' us)
-- it's a hao di fang! so clean! and lee kwan yew! such a clean president!

it's amazing how big other countries are, and the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Americans etc can tell you all about their hometown and many other places in their country even without having been there before!
Singaporeans? we probably only know that Geylang has good tauhuay (beancurd), Bedok has good chweekuah (rice cakes), Bt Timah has good heh mee (big prawn noodles)... yummy! and i still can't get the different geography between hunan, hubei, henan, hebei, guilin, guizhou, yangzhou....!!

we haven't exactly made that many international friends here, hanging out with many singaporeans in beida and qinghua :P but it's been fun in the past week or so getting to know some new friends better!- Ruishan from NUS law school all the way here in beijing, Shin from japan - who's a collector of masters in law (LLM) from london, new york and beijing-, Incheon from korea who probably speaks better mandarin than i do. =)
Beijing international Christian fellowship (for foreign passport holders only) is also super international - lots of westerners, asians and africans. There was a Hillsong concert this week - and it's super cool to have everyone worshipping together with great music under a great worship leader =) with many super high koreans right in front of us who started jumping right from the first song. haha.

Answers.com guide to Singapore

Land Area:
total: 692.7 sq km
land: 682.7 sq km
water: 10 sq km

The per capita GDP in 2005 was US$26,833.

About 9.7 million tourists visited Singapore in 2006. (how come we didn't sink! considering we've 4.5million people already stacked up on each other)

The local colloquial dialect of English is Singlish, which has many creole-like characteristics, having incorporated vocabulary and grammar from various Chinese dialects, Malay and Indian languages. Singlish is spoken commonly on the streets, but the government frowns upon its use in official contexts. (speak good english campaign ahem) English became widespread in Singapore after it was implemented as a first language medium in the education system. ---
[ most of them are most intrigued with this aspect. but it's a little hard to demonstrate, not like i can give you a english/chinese-singlish dictionary for every word! it's more in the sentence construction - or lack thereof?]
this is so funny

The Sociolect Continuum of Singaporean English

Basilect ("Singlish") "Dis guy Singrish si beh powderful wan. Hoh seh liao lah!"

Mesolect "Dis guy Singlish damn powerful one leh."

Acrolect ("Standard") "This person's Singlish is very good."

the anwers.com explanation of singlish is damn powerful lor! your guide to leh lah lor siah meh har so you won't kena mah hor

anyway, no matter how much i love beijing, i don't exactly want to migrate here! somebody give me National Day tickets!!!