水土不服 at home?!

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!

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

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.