one sem in beijing 我留下许多情

水土不服 at home?!

2007-07-25T10:15:00.000+08:00

After 8 or 9 consecutive meals of chuan cai in Tibet, i gleefully made a list of all the dishes i wanted ma to cook when we got home! (sichuan province cruisine, which to us seems like each & every dish is drowned in chilli oil. but i'm sure the sichuanese love their chuan cai!) But 3 days after coming home, I haven't tasted any!!
maybe my dad is right, i am 水土不服 at home?! 3 days of diarrhea, rumblings in my tummy and slight nausea = bleh :/ apparently there has been some food scandals in China, which probably explain the 2 doctors' weird expressions when I say I just returned from beijing. never mind that I was fine for 5 months and the bug hit only after a day of plane food! did i mention that the first BJ-HK flight served us haggen das. And barely 3 hours later, the HK-S'pore flight served us a magnum icecream? ;P

Tibet is so pretty that every picture is like a postcard. Yet the pictures don't capture the WAH! when you see that lake 3 times the size of Singapore, that snow-capped mountain range with its green slopes, that vast field dotted by white sheep and black yaks. postcards are boring, so here's one of the many sketches that entertained us for the long bus rides!
you almost mistake thunder in lhasa as your upstairs neighbours having a bad fight...
btw, the rain in tibet doesn't go sideways, i'm just trying to draw the different angle of elevation in lhasa and in singapore haha!

2007-07-01T16:17:00.001+08:00

大连
第一次出北京好兴奋

下江南
印象最深刻就是一连串的火车!

五一内蒙古
骑马骑骆驼滑沙冲浪车蒙古包玩"手抓羊肉"

北京景点走透透
北大-清华朋友 =)

北京生活
北大朋友 =)

dear siokhoon, siting, jasmine, yinjie, junda, huaijie, weixin, enli, yanru, meihui, jiahui, yuanhong, zhexiong, yinbing, ammily, jiasong, xiaojin and many others: THANK YOU!

we are not laowai

2007-06-30T15:38:00.001+08:00

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

2007-06-27T15:55:00.000+08:00

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

2007-06-25T20:22:00.001+08:00

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.

2007-06-23T22:51:00.001+08:00

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

2007-06-20T22:02:00.001+08:00

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

2007-06-18T19:11:00.000+08:00

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

2007-06-16T11:29:00.000+08:00

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

2007-06-12T09:27:00.001+08:00

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

2007-06-07T10:02:00.000+08:00

时辰不多了!

answers.com is more informative about Singapore than i am

2007-06-03T22:26:00.000+08:00

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!!!

新加坡风俗

2007-05-29T18:20:00.000+08:00

now i know how my french teacher felt.

新加坡风俗是政府机构在财政部之下。被重新组成在2003 年4月1 日, 新加坡风俗主角代办处在商业帮助和收支执行事态上。它负责还对执行措施风俗和商业执行包括那些与自由贸易协议和战略物品有关。

sure makes a lot of sense! i needed to translate the singapore customs website into chinese, for lack of a english-chinese dictionary, decided to try babelfish. just like how we did for french assignments =P aww poor mademoiselle!

2007-05-28T13:47:00.000+08:00

so the story goes:
during the mayday holidays, a group of americans decided to go near mount everest and protest, campaigning for the independence of tibet. yes, so the chinese govt decides that they need to station people everywhere to check foreigners really strictly from then on, and require a guarantor agent and daoyou tourguide to follow these naughty foreigners (well, the visa is called an Alien Pass) everywhere they go. thus making free and easy tours of tibet near impossible. yay!

lazybones

2007-05-22T18:15:00.000+08:00

Take a lesson from the ants, you lazybones. Learn from their ways and be wise! Even though they have no prince, governor, or ruler to make them work,
they labor hard all summer, gathering food for the winter.
But you, lazybones, how long will you sleep? When will you wake up? I want you to learn this lesson:　A little extra sleep, a little more slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest –　and poverty will pounce on you like a bandit; scarcity will attack you like an armed robber.

Last Sunday’s message on Proverbs 6:6-11 reminded me that our past 3 months could be so aptly summarized as an extended holiday! need to take a lesson from the ants and start catching up on lessons :P paiseh to keep saying -err don’t have- whenever my mum asks if i’ve classes the next day.
spotted at xiushui shopping market - no wonder the sales people sound the same. looks as though it was only made for you! (and you and you and you and you) and when they say 下次再来喔, it gives u a nagging suspicion that you most prob got fleeced...

caught a tragedy 话剧 <<骆驼祥子>> at the 首都剧场

yummy! all you can eat jap food -not confined to sushi- buffet for 68yuan.

one of the few times we laboured for our food - making jiaozi under jasmine's instruction =)

haha looks like a 变态 foto :P

but if i’ve learnt nothing else here, i’ve learn more about God’s nature, God’s righteousness, God's gospel. funny thing, given that i missed several Sunday services cos of traveling :P maybe the northern sun that rises at 5plus am is a good thing after all!

Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight, declares the Lord (Jeremiah 9:23-24).

fall in love with china at simatai =)

2007-05-21T00:03:00.000+08:00

sometimes a 6hour bus ride for 3 hours of fun is worth it...
when it's just awesome to be surrounded by mountains! 崇山峻岭, 蓝天白云 (ermm about as far as my chinese goes) at simatai 司马台 Great Wall.
although that always puts me out of photo-whoring mode cos photos would always be too disappointing!

had a lot of fun with our good company =)
one of the biggest lessons here is to thank God for community.

he's 77 years old! and this was already pretty far up Simatai. uncle & auntie, you rock!

Simatai is some 130 kilometers to the north-east of Beijing. About 500 years old and one of the less restored sections, one website claimed that we'd have to go on all fours to climb up this rugged Great Wall! But it was quite a relaxing climb UP (downwards kills yr knees&toes), prob because we could only go up to 12 out of 16 watchtowers - and then peer at the rest through little holes...

heading for the roof of the world!

2007-05-17T22:28:00.000+08:00

what is china without the bicycles rite? been having fun hitching rides on jasmin's bicycle n borrowing it for a qinghua tour. we were sooo tempted to buy a bike to complete our china experience. BUT time is running out! we have 4 weekends before the exam weeks :( and then it's home to 7% GST :(:(

but before that - we're heading for the rooftop of the world!!!
plans for semester-end travelling keeps changing and very much uncertain, because
1. people -including me- keep changing their mind or just have no plans
2. china uni's have no idea when their exams will be, it's useless asking the prof/classmates, so that makes it pretty hard for us to plan and coordinate across the different beijing/shanghai uni's and to singapore frens joining in (thank you Best Friend for being so patient about the uncertainty).

tibet was the -only- "plan" before 12 of us law pple started out in february. but the emails, even a macdonald's meetup wasn't all that productive. so we went ahead with our mini-trips first. after jiangnan's 5 eventful train trips, i got train phobia! after inner mongolia, spending half the time sitting on the bus to get to ulu breathtaking places, i got bus phobia! and maybe after watching 2 seasons of Lost, i'm getting plane phobia! but u can't exactly sail to tibet.

wanted to go to chengdu-sichuan to see jiuzhaigou - apparently where they filmed Hero and all the artsy out-of-a-painting scenes. but seems that that's flooded with tourists (esp erm domestic ones) all the time which can be pretty sha feng jing 杀风景, and prob have too many expectations after looking at pretty pictures of the blue/green/red/yellow dreamlike colors, which is mostly in autumm.

and yes! happened to talk to Xuanrong who actually went there before the railway was even built - he took a 4 day bus all the way to Lhasa. that kinda makes the 48 hour train (board on the first night, reach on 3rd day morn) ride sound somewhat better. 48 hour train ride to the rooftop of the world!
maybe it only sounds exotic. maybe it's a pilgrim's tour with so many lama temples, etc (Lhasa means "holy land of Buddha"). maybe the high altitude sickness will be so bad i just can't wait to get out of the place. but i'll keep wondering if we don't go!!

他们没吃过水密桃

2007-05-12T13:19:00.000+08:00

他们没吃过水密桃, 切一粒给他们尝尝 =)
the nice auntie at the 早市. she sells the more 'exotic' fruits like fresh peaches and cherries, whereas most stalls just have pears, apples, etc. yummy~ but i got a tummyache from eating too many fruits yestd! in a bit to cut down on the cookies/chocs/munchies... :P
she asked whether we were korean!!! hopefully cos we were sua-gu-ly whispering in english what's the difference between a 水密桃 and a 油桃. not cos of bad chinese!

the IP Office of China. notwithstanding that i'm gleefully buying dvds and whatnot, i think the IP office really has a tough job! they seem a bit defensive about their work (chinese pride), but they've had 20 years to build up their IP law to what other -western- ctys have had 100 years to do.
and their officers who determine whether u get yr patent are of masters or PHD educational level. and still stuck at a small desk doing paperwork. the chinese really have it tough!
note the grey skies. bleh~

2007-05-08T10:34:00.000+08:00

mantou at his fave activities 1. eating up the doorframe 2. suffocating himself in the rubbish; 3. making frens and then peeing right next to his new fren - on my bed!!

A and B are broke and lay in wait by this dark path to rob any passerby. C takes a shortcut along this dark path, A and B grab her and rape her in turn, only to find that C is A's wife.

and I thought our prof was very original to come up with a funny hypo for our assignment... SH just grabbed a random casebook in the library and there it was - even the names were not changed! but this is the hardest that my brain has worked for a couple of months now - delighted to find that it is still working!!! after completing 50 episodes of 康熙王朝 and a reading list comprising books on travelling china.

someone commented that there's a lack of variety in singapore's food.

well, i can't decide whether to get the rice or the noodle or the rice for dinner leh. but the fruits are really good and cheap - had apples, pears, mangoes, berries, bananas for the wk =)

2007-05-06T15:53:00.000+08:00

Call me slow, but this verse seems to have just sunk into me :P

that God made this world and us to partake in His glory, in fellowship with Him, but we chose not to... (our sin). God is Love, but He also is Just and Righteous.
He abhors our sin but He has promised Noah not to wipe the world clean again. The only way He can keep balance between love and righteousness, is for Jesus His Son to die on our behalf, for Jesus' blood to wash away our sins. Jesus has conquered the cross and death (the empty cross) so that we may have faith, hope and joy and abundant life even beyond our time here. God is both a loving and just God.

But who is Jesus? I remember CS Lewis wrote about the difference between begotten and created... to beget is of the same 'equal' kind, like a mother begetting her child, while to create is like human creating a sailboat model. [Mere Christianity puts it better] Jesus is God's only begotten son. (John 3:16) sacrificed on the cross. God is 三体为一的神 (trinity) Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Hope i finally got it right. but hmm i think my understanding will not ever be complete... yet.

God assures us that faith is still a process, and even for reluctant converts like C.S. Lewis, God is patient for us to continue to seek and to grow. and it's okay to struggle in that growth

pictures 1. early spring in beida 2. sunshine in nei meng

postcards from inner mongolia

2007-05-04T17:21:00.000+08:00

northern skies~ funny how we can look left to a breathtaking sunset and right to a full moon.

aiya! should have taken up this 大叔's offer to stay back at his 牧民家!

baaa! oops i think i'm wearing his friend's skin~ the little one i'm carrying is 2 weeks old, didn't realise she looks so strangled! but she was so sweet! gave a little bleat and just lay in my arms. i miss u!!

my wordiest post?

2007-05-03T00:45:00.000+08:00

sometimes i think i've had more than enough of the salty food, the starchy mian/mi fan, the grey skies & dry air and feeling friendless at times, but at other times, i know i will miss china terribly!

we just got back from yet another tiring trip on mayday... this time to inner mongolia - this northen land further north of beijing was one of the reasons why i chose to come to beijing! but then again, "near" is always relative... cos we were on the minibus for about half of the 4 day trip! exhausted from that, plus a freezing night in the monogolian hut (蒙古包), and bouncing up & down, clinging on for dear life on our galloping horses. But it was all worth it i think. the vast grassland -even without its fully-grown beauty-, the boundless desert... marvel at Creation! it makes you wonder how anyone can stand living in the boring city :P

then today we spent half a day stocking up on fruits and snacks -ie.instant food/chocs/sweets/cookies- at the market+supermarket, making Junda faint at how much crap we girls intake...(btw, why don't guys snack? they dont know what they're missing out on!) there's just so much variety here for everything to feed their 13million population. from the dirt cheap range to the gasp! 35rmb toilet paper we bought :(

at nearby wudaokou, i wanted to buy some hard-to-find english books from the di tan 地摊 again but the vendor ran away from the police before i could figure out how much to bargain down! the vendors along that narrow stretch do leave the place really cramped and littered, but it's another characteristic of china that i love! fun to wonder along and see pple browsing and bargaining =P it's actually a pretty smart move to quote a high price and bargain down if the customer can - something that's probably very appropriate for a country with a large poor-rich divide and increasing numbers of foreigners.

hmm there are still some initial awkward moments when i dont warm up to pple quickly - a characteristic i dont like that doesnt go away just because you run away to china. was almost beginning to enjoy jogging by myself, checking out the korean hairdresser by myself- haha sounds so pathetic~ 这就是孤僻的慧娴~ but i know we are made to be "people people"! enjoyed this trip prob also because we travelled in a big group - 9 exchange students and 8 others. playing silly games like we did on judo japan trip =) laughter and 互相挖苦. Thank God also for bible study... and looking forward to CS Lewis seminar this sunday and 话剧 next week! i'm not not here to watch dvds in my room :P not that we can any more, with 2 cheem-chinese assignments due next wk!

huay huay huay!

2007-04-24T11:01:00.000+08:00

finally went jogging for the first time in 2 months! 2 months left.

how do i take in enough of the beauty of this place?

which is the prettiest? what a tough choice~

pretty flowers always remind me of joanna!
i dunno what we do everyday that whiles time away,
but a fave activity is admiring flowers on the way after class =)
haha actually i cheated. some of these are from suzhou and hangzhou!

江南

2007-04-19T22:33:00.000+08:00

back from jiangnan!
we are all so exhausted from our 5-day, 6-night, 5-trains whirlwind tour of hangzhou, suzhou, shanghai and nanjing. hmm honestly, it didn't feel rushed, and didn't feel like we needed to see anymore of each place (except maybe nanjing where it was just freaking wintery cold after the rain). Jiangnan is so pretty! no wonder the poets are always writing about some shan shui that we can't visualize...
but we were just so exhausted everyday. so many stupid suay but memorable things happened - the kind that u wonder: did that just happen to me/us?!
like being stowaways on the train when we ended up holding on to yesterday's train tickets!!! getting pickpocketed within 10min of reaching Shanghai! rapid downgrade from sleeper cabin to soft seater (like a plane cabin) to hard seater (environment feels 杂乱 ) to STANDING tickets. i can't believe it... and jiangnan -in the south- was colder than beijing!!!!!!!! but we -and my MP3 player- are still safe and sound - thank God! =)
this is what happens when you start wondering: shouldn't your life on exchange consist of more than writing a paper on the importance of family upbringing and juvenile crime~ God knows our thoughts and prayers!!!

being loving/tolerant in all circumstances isn't that easy when yr legs are aching, lack sleep and getting banged against for the upteenth time, horrendous music blasted in your face at 6am by a fellow train passenger...

but thanks to dongyan my shanghaiese fren who came to NUS for exchange just last year. good to see her again! =) in her hometown. and thanks to yingchan the only singaporean in zhejiang uni who brought us around hangzhou too.and thanks to yi and her boys - who we put out of their beds when we camped over at their palace-y shanghai apartment. and one of whom recommended us a suzhou hotel tt charges by the hour - guess why?

and so a good break from travelling is to laze around and watch drama serials!!! my lovely samsoon is soooo addictive - just like Goong~

she gained 7kg to play the role! hmmm just come to china on exchange!! the food in shanghai was yummy =)

watching k-drama feels different with lots of korean students and korean fashion/food right here in bejing...hmmm maybe can try the korean hairdresser soon!

Family in town!

2007-04-11T11:43:00.000+08:00

couldn't finish uploading photos last week...
finally blogger is less "blocked" this week (already 19apr!)

Family in town! =)
Dad, mum & Ying came up to Beijing over the Singapore Easter weekend. =)

an update on spring~ a different view of 未名湖

yuan lai it's so difficult to play tourguide! heh~ but i think they liked the 早市 morning market best =) although mum already horrendously bought so many things tt she could only look longingly at the many goodies in the morning market she couldnt bring back. she bought a carton of books back! and that was only cos she ran out of money and luggage space le... ha!

this is the roof of tongrentang 同仁堂. even the roof of the palace 故宫is not entirely gold!
it's this medical hall that were the imperial physicians during the qing dynasties. and because they are proud that they 治未病, 不治已病, of course everyone has something to buy at tongrentang!! horrendous prices~

back to the touristy places...

good weather =)
from my last trip to china in 1999, i remem china= mountains. but this time we've been in beijing city for far too long, finally caught a good sight of mountains!

get your "certificate for climbing up the great wall" here! this is at about 1/4 of the way though. chairman mao wrote: 不到长城非好汉, not 不爬长城非好汉~

climb far look far! 爬得高看得远!

exchange students don't blog this part abt their sem~

or mayb beida's the only uni that has mid-terms...

we guai guai stayed in our rooms trying to finish up our paper in prep for jiangnan trip~ not everyday on exchange is travel/photo-happy day :P

bleh! i can't express my opinion in chinese!!!

i thought could come here to improve chinese.. but from a 25-75 chinese-english expression in singapore, i'm prob gg up to a 50-50 chinglish ba...

suka makan

2007-04-03T07:47:00.000+08:00

after cold winters-early spring, there's cold spring winds and sandstorms! sand in your mouth, sand in your eyes, sand in your face! so that's a jollly good excuse not to exercise!

and after the initial complaints about the food here, we've been eating, eating and eating. singaporean student assoc gathering = makan. meet up with qinghua pple = makan. go out with roommate = makan. after dinner, we headed for the minimart - when your food is very salty, you crave for something sweet after dinner! conversation = talk about where has good food (in beijing, china AND singapore). yesterday while trying to decide to get a big purchase for our mums, siok hoon and i headed for... carrefour for more munchies :P fascinated by everything in the supermarket. upon our wondering aloud, a kind auntie explained how beijingers eat the strange-looking vege. friendly beijingers~

and of course, can't miss out on the Peking Duck in beijing
as expected, the first time we ate it with siok hoon's uncle -on my bday!- seemed more yummy! wanted to try the duck heart, duck XX part and duck YY part, but they look more exciting on the dish than when it's actually on your chopstick.

一点点赘肉别紧张,杨贵妃照样迷死唐明皇

eating twice or more of my usual portions :P

upcoming Easter in beijing! quite fascinated by the queue in the middle of a construction site to get into the local church 5min away from beida. but apparently the "approved" churches here have some content "banned". but for what we think as 'conservative' china, our IP professor actually took up a lawsuit against Philips 飞利浦 in her own capacity, trying to make a point about IP protection and exploitation in China. she's one dynamic lady - got Philips to withdraw their patent and donate money to IP R&D in China! it's interesting studying IP law from the Chinese perspective - how they're disadvantaged having started developing their IP system years after the western powers have (which is true!). yes, while downloading my MP3s and watching DVDs from the nearby 地摊...

春天到了!

2007-03-27T17:36:00.000+08:00

china/beijing/beida has blocked blogspot...

but blogger is accessible - strange. as well as another useful transfer site =)

no more excuse of eating more in winter...

we spend more at carrefour than on proper meals

Siok Hoon, my stack wins!!

breakfast thanks to our multi-purpose cooker.

i need to learn how to cook :(

feels at least 1kg lighter shedding the longjohns, wool socks & sweaters!

but like there's a price to pay for snow (freezing cold + walking in slush), there's a price to pay for spring apparently - 花粉症 where the pollen irritates your respiratory system.

now now, don't mistake the 山桃 for the 樱花!

-- some zuai student commented as he walked past us flower-admirers.

梅栏竹菊 i want to play mahjong! the fake tree

chinese mathematics
笨笨男人 + 笨笨女人 = 结婚

笨笨男人 + 聪明女人 = 离婚

聪明男人 + 笨笨女人 = 婚外情

聪明男人 + 聪明女人= 浪漫爱情

to zz the everyone-says-looks-bullyable mooter!

dalian is not a big ah lian

2007-03-20T23:01:00.000+08:00

headed for Dalian over the weekend !

thurs overnight train til sunday morn returned in time to run to church! =)

selected photos of 大连之旅.

chey! only after spending so long sorting out photos did JD send us some pretty pro pics!

first train ride on 硬卧 (hard sleeper) carriage.
it's certainly not the dark dirty dingy trains we imagined!
旧上海的味道...
they even play you lullabies and give morning calls...

who needs to fly to Russia?

Russian quarters~

welcome to japan... i mean, dalian!

日本风情街

the long-lost cousin

老虎滩

海底世界

remind us not to be touristy

good company makes all the difference!

Siok Hoon, Siting, Yinjie, and our new friend Junda who didn't mind the "ying sheng yang shuai"!

we actually went in the wrong season - who wants to 吹海风 at 1 or 2 degrees?

but it was a not bad first trip out of beijing!

lion city

2007-03-19T09:49:00.000+08:00

siting and i always joke that if u finance us, we could prob extend our stay here another sem :P heh heh so 没良心! almost 1 month since we've been here... funny that our first trip out of beijing made me seriously miss home for the first time! dalian is supposed to be modelled after singapore... my lion city!

funny that this is what i miss the most... a good cuppa teh-ping!! (Dalian HK cafe)

and my mama's cooking! this is her CNY spread...(zoom in on the curry yummy)

we were so gian over the seafood steamboat we had in dalian - the rare time we got vege that wasn't soaked in salt/oil! a bit sick of cai fan already...

figured out the story of our room

2007-03-15T16:49:00.000+08:00

...李老师在北大法学院的资历和地位... 李省长、吴校长、苏力老师、兴良老师、陶大律师等等都是她的学生，芮沐先生和她是忘年交，她在美国时曾“逼”过罗豪才先生替自己做饭！
[-results of voyeuring the blogs of students u were exchanged with.] i don't exactly know who these pple our prof previously taught are, but she sure sounds influential!

that explains how our prof LMQ (she taught us our compulsory chinese prep module last semester) got us a room in the 'atas' hard-to-get block that everyone "waaa!"s at in contrast to the normal 北大 "贫民窟" or "squatter settlement" just a few steps away. and considering she has taught each batch that is headed for beijing, to fig out why we got 'special treatment' needs to be traced back to -- the frustrating delay in getting our visa documents from Beida 1-1.5 weeks before the everything-shuts-down CNY period!
otherwise, prof wouldnt have called up beida on behalf of the admin, blah blah blah. nasty thing #1 delay turned good thing. God is good!

and then i got quite a crappy roommate right on the first 凄凉 night we arrived... but turns out that she made me more resolute to change rooms (from super-atas 2-per-unit to less-atas 3-per-unit) when both SH and I were indecisive about the options (again, open to us only because of influential prof). we love our cosy room/unit and our nice taiwanese housemate now! so that is nasty thing #2 crappy roommate turned good thing. by God's grace =)

mini efforts to personalise my room.
still havent figured out what 'blu-tac' is called in chinese!

we get one small cosy room each and share a living room + mini bathroom.

pretty atas price by beijing/beida standards, but i like! [oops]

i like staying on campus... it's like a little cosy town on its own =)

for eg. walking back from night class, there are lots of 地摊 selling weird things from dvds (they give out namecards) to stationery to books. anyway, it's more expensive to photocopy a book than to buy a book here. the prof actually offers you his copy to go zap it if you don't wanna buy it.

天坛 temple of heaven

in ancient times, no women within 500m of 天坛

(where the emperor came as the 天子 son of heaven to pray for good harvest)

7 girls at 天坛~

clear blue skies can be a rare sight in beijing.

PSI is prob an average of 100(-150?) here!

i shouldn't have bought a white jacket!

beijing: window to china & more!

2007-03-09T22:02:00.000+08:00

here we are in "tibet" (雍和宫 yonghe gong - a tibetan temple)

here we are in "hangzhou xihu" (颐和园 summer palace)

and today's visit - this feels like some "ancient greek civilization"..

(圆明园遗址园 ruins of the summer palace)

the ruins of the palace are preserved as a "monument" to 毋忘国耻...

once magnificent grounds reduced to incoherent random pillars and rubble. it's described by the (obviously western) guidebook as a "tiresome monument to comtemporary Chinese xenophobia". the place is pretty 凄凉... for a moment, you realise why the chinese use(d?) phrases like "洋鬼子". but huh, the emperor take so much taxes to build his miles and miles of summer pleasure grounds - doesn't seem very right too!

look! these are the evil evil foreign troops looting yuanmingyuan,

the old summer palace, while the qing officials are hapless during the second opium war!

but the catch phrase " 中国崛起 " now - the rise of china again is indeed amazing,

prob cos the chinese have a thirst for knowledge 他们好好学

- chinese rabbits included!

this is 馒头, my housemate's rabbit =)

she slides around the place cos the tiles are too slippery for her little paws

she hopped right onto my bed!

PKU-NUS swap

I sat in for admin law classes in NUS in jan before leaving for china, and coincidentally, the 2 PKU students "swopped" with us were taking that class! but selfishly got wrapped up in pupillage & SEP stuff, didn't properly host them... but they're been so nice since we reached beijing... their friends in PKU too have been so warm! 北方人很好客... so true!

and then i abashedly found out that they have no "buddy" in NUS (what is LSRIC doing?) - who can help host them? =P

cultured beijing

2007-03-08T00:32:00.000+08:00

i paid 33yuan (S$6.60) for my "western craving" pizza, and got scolded for being 奢侈 extravegant!! because for the same price i could have got 10 TEN plates of jiaozi 饺子:

today we went book shopping - there's a huge bookshop (book building 图书大厦 to be more exact) spanning 4-5 storeys. books in china are SO cheap and there was still a 80% discount. i would load cartons of books back if i read more chinese books. for now the target is to find nice picture books ;P
Beijing gives me a very 'cultured' feeling... the way their signs to say simple things like "under construction" or "don't step on the grass", even their campaign slogans for more 文明 behaviour are phrased... and especially 浓浓的读书风气 !

this is what we saw one morning walking to class - students standing in the numbing cold reading. are they trying to keep themselves from falling asleep in their rooms?

there are many elderly folks in 颐和园 (summer palace) who are doing their morn exercise by writing calligraphy with water on the ground. elderly graffiti!

right beside them are ladies dancing so professionally and joyfully, with many people gathering round to enjoy the performance. and as we walked a little further, another old gentleman was practising a traditional art of top spinning (don't remem what it's called...sth luo?)

ambidextrous culture

i mean people do spit on the ground freely, and i've seen pple cutting nails on the bus & even in class beside me, but that's about it. everyone, even the cab drivers, here speak such lyrical mandarin... and all the random pple we asked directions from, the classmates here have all been super nice. somehow i just think beijing (china?) is not what some people imagine it to be!

我带你去shang di

2007-03-05T09:13:00.000+08:00

"十块钱我带你去shang di ?"

???

my destination was 上帝 in the BICF international church. but strangely enough, the cab driver was actually offering to bring me to the further shangdi 上地 mrt instead of wudaokou mrt for a flat fee instead of running the meter. wah, quite bewildering for a while...

going to church in the snow and wind - i won't be inertia to go to church in s'goon anymore!

snowy 北大 beida.

snow in march 元宵节快乐!

we went to visit 清华 qinghua university nearby - it's slightly more modern, newer and lots bigger. but we agreed that we prefer beida's rustic 古色古乡! heh, actually our lessons are in grayer, less traditional buildings la.

the main chef at the singaporean students association's gathering was a 清华guy. chek cooked us 汤圆 tangyuan for 元宵yuanxiao last night. girls, we must learn how to cook soon!!

hua yu cool BEIJING FREAKING COLD!!! weather forcast for coming days: -4 to -7 degrees. heeeelp!

下雪了!!!

2007-03-04T00:44:00.000+08:00

今天北京下雨了, 出去走走的计划也泡汤... 也冷了一天...

但两位本地学生sms 我... 下雪了!!!

bear bear, 我们第一次看到雪了 (snow city 不算!) !

有一碗妈妈的汤, 那就好好好幸福!

world heritage site under construction

2007-03-03T14:23:00.000+08:00

we went to 故宫! the world heritage site that is...

boo! under construction!

we saw so many sites where 黄金甲 and running around to find the 金姿玉孽宫殿 where 如妃, 玉莹 lived... thank god the rest of the smaller 宫殿 are still open!

glad i am not a 妃嫔!

why do their elderly all look similar ?- this cap is still very much in vogue...

咸福 in beijing - no wonder i am always thirsty!

Greetings from Bei da 北大!!

2007-03-02T00:58:00.001+08:00

华语cool, 北京colddddd! brrrr... but not so for him??

well, they call this a warm winter

so many photos, so many small stories, so many thoughts - where do i start?

God is good, all the time! most thankful for our nice less-ex hostel after our 大搬家 - amazing how the luggage already grew after just 4 days here! the first night we came here, the place was empty & pretty 冷清, and we got some hostile receptionists and i got a mega hostile room mate and a misunderstanding with her... but everything only got better from ther =)

man can survive without internet

but it has never felt so good to see a "successful connection" webpage! After one week of running to and fro, up and down to get the internet up. But generally it has been much better than expected... of course some things we went one big round circle to get it going... others are good and straightforward. patience!! 要沉得住气 - that is what one prof here told the class when he talked OT!

we are 冒牌北大生! so many "horror stories" about how each chinese student here is the scholar from their province etc... they really have it tough. even after coming here, they take 25 credits, each module about 2-4 modules, which comes up to 8-10 courses a semester! and here we are, not fantastic students, here to take 8 credits (about 3 subjects) - oops.... our main modules are Living in China and Travelling China. so happy to have made friends with some chinese students, and contacts passed on to us we have yet to meet...
北大的 一塔湖途 (understand why?) ; this is 未名湖...

so many wrapped up toddlers bumbling around!!

lots of photos for the ilovechildren.org website :P

诗情画意的北京

too many photos to load!! the typical exchange student's blog... :P