FREE AT LAST~~

omg, it feels so unreal. on monday i went to work expecting i’d have to last out the week. then my supervisor took me for farewell lunch and casually said that i can just wrap up tomorrow and end with the end of the month. whee!!!

so yesterday was rather awkward, saying goodbye to people you’re not that close to. i packed up all my stuff, returned my laptop and access card, and left the office. hard to believe that i’ll never walk its corridors again. haha, when i woke up, i kept telling myself this is the last time i’ll ever wake up for work here…the last time i’ll ever take this crowded bus…the last time i’ll take the horrid stuffy lift up with people stopping at almost every floor before we finally reach the 18th…etc etc!!

now, at home on at 2pm wednesday afternoon waiting for my lunch delivery after a 10-hour sleep, it’s starting to sink in. omg feels so shiok, to not worry about a THING in the world!! i can’t believe that i no longer have to count down…have been doing so pretty much constantly for 5 months and now i’ve finally reached the end.

goodbye to the grey buildings of my office complex, goodbye to horrid processed food from lawson, goodbye to slacking with a guilty eye turned towards my supervisor’s office. she’s so capable and efficient and nice and professional that i feel like a worm next to her, haha. she even gave me nice anna sui perfume for my going-away present!! omg.

now what? thanks to h1n1, my friends from singapore can’t come find me for fear of being quarantined by the chinese authories…the irony, i can’t believe it’s so rampant in singapore when there’s hardly any in china. then again, not that many chinese travel out of the country, if you’re looking at percentage of the population. once it starts spreading in china, it’s going to be ridiculous, with people spitting all over the place goodness knows how many germs will be floating around on the street.

belated xi’an trip

at the side….only 13 days left to the end of MY GIP! haha…in a stunning turn of events, i am now finishing on 3rd july instead of 10th july…because my sup’s gonna be away for my last week and she says i might as well not go cos i won’t have anything to do. wahahha. now the question remains: what am i going to spend that week doing? it’s too hot to travel!

speaking of travelling….it’s been like 3 weeks since i went to xi’an and i’m in beijing now. but i shall try to post whatever i remember since i got a few more photos~

xi’an cityscape from the top of the big goose tower.

the musical fountain of xian from the same tower, and a human wall around each segment, haha.

looks like ntu’s yunnan gardens hahaha.

just had to post this again cos it’s pretty…haha.

many pretty loooong strings of kites flying in the city central. i bought some too! damn cheap, 3 long strings for 20rmb.

us climbing on this path made of gold bars.

new word alert! this word is “biang1” and is used to refer to a type of noodle called “biang1 biang1 mian4”. it is also a nightmarish word to learn to write, haha.

xi’an is gaga over terracotta warriors. the terracotta warriors kept qin shi-huang safe thousands of years ago, and keeps many many establishments alive today through the tourist trade. i was rather freaked out though by the parts of the excavation site where they found the warriors that had fallen to pieces over the years…with a head here, a torso there, it looked like they had just been at the site of a terrorist bombing.

yes, xi’an is obsessed with terracotta warriors. even dairy queen also have.

i couldn’t help squealing over these outside their concert hall though…haha. they also have terracotta warriors playing flute, clarinet, trumpet, french horn, double bass….

this, at qianling’s tomb, is really rather creepy. i wonder what the headlessness is supposed to symbolise.

after climbing up the hill…lots of rocks for us to sit and nua around on, haha. perfect place for emo shots too!

the view from the hill representing qianling’s head. and guess what those 2 hills with the fortresses on top represent…wahahaha.

we rode a horse up part of the trail up the hill and man, i think walking would have been less scary. i was convinced i was going to fall off the horse.

obliging butterfly posed quite long for me.

horrible trail we climbed down.

timed shot at the tang dynasty theme park.

this would look quite cool if it weren’t for the spoiler people. then again, china is always about the spoiler people…

inside the theme park.

i love my camera’s night shot.

that speck there isn’t the moon, haha…i dunno how it appeared. but it’s cool cos it looks like the moon!

i love my camera’s night shot part 2.

the main gate of my hostel.

view of our room from my bed. we had 5 people sharing a 6-bed dorm. it was extremely clean and the beds definitely beat my shanghai sofa bed, only pity was that we had to use a communal toilet.

oh well, that’s about it! there’s lots more photos i haven’t posted of course but these were the highlights, haha. we also went pubbing every night and severely lack of sleep, but the photos in the pub look horrendous so i shall not post them.

ennui

thursday night was a happy night as always because it’s the end of another work week! week 17 passes away…4 more to go!

anyway, i went with a bunch of people to dinner and then a club. i don’t know why i still go when i’ve almost never liked it. the premise of clubbing seems rather pointless–play drinking games until we finish the alcohol, dance a little, and rush to the toilet to “merlion”. and then spend the rest of the night on the sofa feeling totally seh…haha. anyway i dislike alcohol so after being forced to drink one cup of whisky i decided not to play anymore, which turned out to be agood thing because at least 1/3 of the group puked and double that number were totally seh-ed. dinner was good, but seems like most people wasted their money on it, haha.

sigh. what a boring life we have to look forward too. after year 4 we’re just going to spend the rest of our lives working…and working really sucks man. either that or we’ve just been spoilt by uni life. after all, didn’t we spend 12 years of formal school waking up at the crack of dawn to spend the whole day sitting on a chair?

i wish i could find something meaningful to do with my life.

life on hold….

today, the class schedule for the next semester came out. haha i had been anticipating it eagerly for the novelty of something new to do at work—plan timetable!! anyway it was quite disappointing in the end because i only managed to occupy about 3 hours. and no sense of satisfaction because despite having only 4 subjects, i ended up STILL having a 5-day week.

what’s this??? i’ve worked hard and cleared all my UEs…i should be having a 3 day week!freaking sway…have to come to school for one class one monday, wednesday, and friday. and on the semester when i don’t have hall. sigh, looks like i’ll be wasting a lot of time in school, especially when figuring in waiting for night practices. but still, it’s the last year i’ll get to spend just nua-ing around in school….

it’s depressing becoming a year 4 student. one more year will pass like the wind and the carefree-ness ends and we will be spending the rest of our lives slogging away….sigh. but university is so life-changing, somehow much more life-changing then the other stages of school…it feels like i spent primary and secondary school growing up, jc stagnating and getting cynical, and university life growing outwards, growing into the person i want to become. at least, i hope. (unfortunately i have grown outwards physically too wahaha)

my life is currently on a 5 month hiatus, with myself cast into the role of an observer. i watch as the human dramas of 60odd university students play out…watch as people go about their daily work at the office…watch the days go by. finally, we’ve made it to june, and have 5 more weeks to go till the end. so near yet so far, so real yet so unreal. it seems like such a waste of one’s life, constantly waiting for time to pass. when we start working, back we go to watching the clock. life is depressing and constantly on hold. what’s the point of it all?

anyway. i was at xi’an last week with some people. it’s kind of sad that halfway through the trip it kind of struck me that all my life i’ve wanted to go travelling with friends…it’s the craziest, most fun experience ever. and it still is, but somehow i’ve forgotten to appreciate that. oh well…i’ll blog about it soon as i get a few more photos taken by the others who don’t stay in my house. here’s a couple of pretty ones i took which are quite un-xi’an, haha. the historical splendour of the city is lost on me…all i see is dust and pollution and crowds.

oh well, tis the only pic i managed to get up this time. but nice gradient right?:D

migrant teaching….

Phew…migrant teaching must make up like 50% of my stressfulness here in Shanghai. At least the company one has now been concluded without any painful ordeals.

 

The migrant school my company volunteers teach at is in a village. Not too remote as it’s still somewhat within the city limits, even though there are no bus links. I was quite stunned the first time I went though. We turned off the main road at a zebra crossing into a PATH. I was like omg what if another car happens to be coming out? The path, as seen, is wide enough for maybe one car. The last time one of the volunteers drove us out, she somehow managed to squeeze past a rickshaw parked at the side. all i can say is, thank god i don’t drive in shanghai.

Came out for a walk once while the volunteers were teaching and managed to observe a tiny bit of village life, haha.

ducks just ambling around on the road!

There’s a guy fishing on the bank. When I was there, a girl was running towards him yelling “Pa!”Aww…

Oh well, that’s one programme concluded. Now another one to get through with the GIP mates which has its own sets of trials and tribulations. We’re all enjoying ourselves and more NTU volunteers show up every week, such that the teacher student ratio is almost 1:1 haha. It’s just such a pity though, the only time we can come is sunday and that’s the worst time for the kids cos their parents want them to be at home/go to market with them, etc. And finally, next Sunday we’ll have good student attendance cos Sunday’s a school day in lieu of Fri cos of public hol this thurs…and all the NTU ppl are zhao-ing to go on holiday or need to work. Bah! And of course, I’m one of the few who are going to be there, so I really hope we survive this Sunday.

I just realised that I’ve been typing in proper caps every sentence. Must be a by-product of blogging at work.

Anyway, I’ve finally visited a doctor about my 3-week old cough. he sent me for an x-ray and diagnosed bronchitis. i know it sounds quite serious but actually it’s not, even though my bronchitis is somewhat above what would be considered moderate. haha… well, it’s a change to have something apart from throat infection. anyway i’ve discovered that expat places here are out to con people’s money, based on my one experience going to an expat hospital and what i’ve subsequently read on forums that led me to decide to save my money and go local. clue 1) expat hospitals offer to charge direct to your insurance company. clue 2) they can charge above SGD$100 for 2 packs of antibiotic drips. it’s kind of sad how these people work…they assume that the insurance covers everything so they just qiao1 to their heart’s content and continue to provide lousy service because the poor expat doesn’t know chinese and don’t have other choices. china is a sad sad place.

i quite like the hospital i visited in the end though. went there cos it’s near my workplace and it’s quite ulu so it was empty and i hardly had to queue. doc was nice, and consultation was only RMB10.50 (which is like SGD2.50) and x-ray RMB60(SGD13). on the downside, medicine cost RMB160 (SGD 35) which was quite a shock, but guess it can’t be avoided. oh well, at least i didn’t end up spending RMB1000 in some lousy expat place.

anyway…it’s almost june!! the weather is still quite nice, occasionally hot in the day time when there’s sunny weather but still always so cooling at night that i can open the window and not need the fan. and….i can countdown to the end of gip in terms of weeks and not months! 6 weeks left (not counting last week cos i plan to skip part of it) yeahh!!

counting down the weeks…

finally may…and it’s been a month since i last blogged! 9 weeks left to go…not counting the last week which i hope to take off. finally into single digits. more than halfway through!

i was rereading old blog entries yesterday night and gosh, my life used to be so full and so fulfilling, i was like praying time would slow…whirlwind of practices, friends, dates, fun…when i go back it will be year 4 and bound to pass like the wind. but these 22 weeks here are just crawling…almost devoid of what makes life enjoyable, and filled with 4 days a week of shitty work. how am i going to live when work begins for real for me??

there are good points too of course. it’s fun to share an apartment with friends, sometimes fun to be in a foreign place, even though the weekly partying has gotten old. i find myself quite lacking in energy these days, preferring to stay at home than go out…

a couple weekends ago i went to nanjing with the jiaotong people which was quite enjoyable. the best part of it though was coming back and discovering, on my way to xujiahui, a vendor selling pirated books…omg i have been so book-deprived, it’s so hard to find a good selection of books here. not to say the vendor’s selection is good, but at least i managed to find stuff i’m interested in reading, that’s not jeffrey archer. the most accessible bookstore with english books here only has very old books and lots of jeffrey archer and meg cabot.

the couple of friends i was with at the time and i went crazy, haha…we bought 11 books in total for 120rmb after some hard bargaining. later the vendor was running after us yelling that he should have charged us 180rmb for the lot. hahah it seemed too good to be true, but obviously we’re not going to double back and pay him another 60 rmb. so he gave up and just yelled after us to come and patronise his stall again…haha i doubt he has many experiences of people coming and relieving him of 11 english books at one shot. the chinese people really hardly even touch english.

last weekend my mom came for may day which was really fun. her main purpose was to visit me so we hardly did the touristy thing while she was around…it’s her 5th visit here already. we spent the days shopping and eating good food. i’ve found a place that can possibly rival kuishin-bo! jap buffet for 170rmb and very good quality too. i managed to stuff myself with sashimi:D and it has damn good teppanyaki rice and codfish, though the tempura loses out…prawns in shanghai just aren’t that good. unfortunately, nobody here wants to eat 170rmb jap buffet when we can get meals for 20rmb, so i’ doubt i’ll get the chance to go back. our concepts of cheap and expensive are pretty much altered after 3 months here.

living with my mom means lots of coffee breaks. we went to a hotel for high tea and it made me feel like i was back in singapore.

pretty cappuccino! i’ve discovered a lovely coffee place in town which also has amazing cheesecakes. after 3 months here i finally taste a proper cheesecake.

sunset over the bund. the sunsets these days are extremely clear…all you see is a glowing great orb sinking into the distance, without a single cloud in the sky….and many buildings below. i feel like taking a photo from my office everyday. compared to singapore sunsets, it’s looks really majestic, but somehow rather barren.

it’s just starting to get warm here. actually no…it’s still lovely and cooling during nighttime and in the shade. in the sunlight, it’s like being back in singapore, only with a more pronounced baking effect because shelters here aren’t so aplenty. not to mention that aircon refuges are hardly refuges. cabs and buses don’t turn on their aircons so it’s a veritable sauna. and the locals begin to sweat and it stinks really bad. i don’t believe i smell that bad even after playing sports…ugh. they’re not exactly big on personal hygiene here. once i actually got off the bus early cos i couldn’t take it anymore.

and it’s just going to get worse as it gets hotter, ugh. oh well, the hotter is gets, the closer i am to home!

qingming jie trip with photos galore

i just got back from a lovely qingming jie holiday! met ssy in jinan, shandong (sounds ulu, but china has too many cities, and it’s actually shandong’s provincial capital). it was a convenient place to meet cos jinan is somewhere in between shanghai and beijing and our goal was to climb taishan…supposedly the most famous mountain in china, the first of china’s “5 sacred mountains” which the emperors used to climb themselves in olden days. there are around 6600 steps to the top and we covered all of them (though not all upwards and not all at one shot, haha). nevertheless, my calves are now so tight i can barely descend steps.

anyway, right after work on thursday i rushed home, packed, and took the bus to hongqiao airport.

 

first time i noticed that the bus stops encourages people not to say dirty words.

had dinner at this chain of restaurants. the guys on gip find the name of this restaurant amusing.

the next day, we took a bus to tai’an and then to the foot of taishan. this was our first glimpse of taishan.

spring is here with many flowers!!

mountain valley.

  i love this shot! this is from midway up the mountain, where we stayed our first night.  looks like i might be able to adapt it for blogskin, haha. anw, we took a minibus up the mountain cos we didn’t fancy climbing up with full backpacks.

DAMN CUTE!!!! advertising jian bing haha.

random steps we climbed on our first afternoon cos we had nothing better to do.

the next morning we woke up at 3.15am to start our long climb to the summit, in time to catch the sunrise. ate cup noodles for breakfast and then stepped out into the sub-zero temp darkness, armed with flashlights…it was quite scary cos i kept thinking i would topple backwards while climbing, haha. the steps were crazy and never-ending…it felt like the more we climbed the further away the end became, haha. it was disgusting to finish a long long flight only to shine my torchlight up and discover more steps ahead! we walked past many many temples with stalls selling cup noodles, drinks, etc.

glimpsing the end at last as the sky began to lighten….after about 2 hours of climbing. haha it looks brighter than it actually was cos of my camera’s night mode.

behind us!

the street of heaven!

the number one mountain under the sky! i cut off quite a bit of the rock because damn overexcited ah tiongs take ten years to pose for photos.

the summit was crazily packed with people who had spent the night on the mountain…can’t imagine how cold that must have been.

the sun only made an appearance later…was obscured by clouds as it was coming up. oh well~

rolling mountains~

anyway, we decided to take a cable car from the top of the mountain back to the middle. i have no photos from the cable car because it was so steep that i mostly had my eyes closed, wahaha. even ssy couldn’t resist giving a yell when we left the station and began the steep descent…he described it as being like the point on a roller coaster ride when the car stops at the top before going into a dive.

i really like this shot too. which is better, this one or the other one?

crazy crowds on the way down from the middle of the mountain. i laughed inwardly hearing the complaining of those still climbing up, haha….they’ve got a long long way to go!

back to jinan! the highlight in jinan was…..FOOD. we discovered the real mei shi jie (as opposed to the lousy one we went on the first night) and greatly lamented having wasted stomach space on mcdonald’s and other less exciting food.

random: ssy ate like 2 ice creams a day.

this is just a representative photo because i didn’t have my camera on me when we stumbled upon our dumpling fest. on our first morning in jinan we went for breakfast and i ordered one jin of dumplings for 16yuan. imagine our shock when one jin of dumplings turned out to be 50 dumplings…one plate of 25 for each of us. ssy amazingly managed to finish almost all on this plate despite having eaten a bowl of noodles…i left about 1/3 behind. and the dumplings were really good too!

the craziest mei shi jie i have ever been in, though ssy says that the taiwan one is crazier. this street stretches out for quite a distance.

bbq food everywhere. we avoided the ones which cooked normal meat together with bugs.

i’m drooling just looking at this. it’s roast chicken drumstick meat all squished together roasting on a spit…they then chop off chunks for you and put it into a bun. anyway i couldn’t take a better photo cos i didn’t think the hawker would like that.

rubbish everywhere with no dustbins in sight.

on-the-spot steamboat…you fish out whatever you like and pay for the lot when you’re done. it costs something like 0.50yuan, or 0.15 sgd for one stick.

haha….this post is damn long. thanks to wonderful msn live writer, i can put photos directly into my blog without puking blood. that’s about it for the trip, i should end here and go find my own dinner since my housemates aren’t back yet from their trip. sigh…it’s almost 7pm, and the worst of gip is about to begin…i have 3 days, starting tomorrow at work, to coordinate the volunteering shit before it begins on sunday and hope that nothing goes wrong~

drip drip drip

i’ve just discovered this lovely thing called windows live writer which allows me to put photos in blogger without puking blood!

View Full Album

nice ain’t it? it even auto-flips the photos for me. and i can insert random things like tables and maps, haha….and it displays my blog background as i’m writing! okay, i love this thing*free advertisement*. pity i didn’t discover it earlier, i think it’s a pain to have to go to another site to view photos. and i don’t really have many photos to put up now…a couple are from my workplace and there’s a shot of my room and another of people over for dinner. one of my housemates enjoys cooking, so we’ve been holding dinner parties of sorts with another couple of households over.

anyway, i’m off on MC for these 2 days…haha so shiok…down with throat infection as per normal, only i felt rather feverish too so i went to the hospital to get the MC. this then became the most expensive throat infection i ever had. they just took a sample of my blood to test, concluded that my white blood cell count is high = infection. well, duh. then they put me on a drip—my first time on a drip, all for a throat infection! it was quite horrendous cos i’m quite afraid of needles, and they poked around on the back of my hand to find my vein before concluding that the vein there was too thin…and then using the veins at my elbow instead. the whole process was very painful. and i gotta go back again tomorrow…ugh. anyway, the bill came up to a whopping CNY 810…roughly equivalent to SGD 186!! horrifying ain’t it? fortunately, my insurance will cover anything beyond SGD 80. they put you on the drip for everything here cos they don’t give antibiotics.

everyone’s been going down like dominoes here, so i was able to find a guy staying near me who recommended me this hospital, already much better than the public ones. i’ve known of at least 5 people from my jiaotong class who’ve come down with food poisoning…one of them even fainted during break because of a sandwich eaten from the canteen, cut his chin and had to have stitches. and get this—the excuse the stall vendors are giving is that it’s springtime and the food spoils faster. like wth! in that case, we should have been dead from food poisoning in sunny singapore. seriously, the word negligence should be under the definition of ‘china people’.

oh well, nice slack 2-day work week then it’ll be a long weekend!

suddenly spring

it’s strange…one moment it’s cold and the next the cold has vanished like a dream. last weekend it was still cold enough for one to shiver when outdoors…yesterday it was so warm that i took off my heaviest jacket and ate ice cream. wahahah. went to try cold stone which everyone has been recommending, and yes…it’s good stuff.

you know what this means? time to go shopping! spring clothes!

i’m kind of stunned that it reached 24 today though. seems a bit too early. later got heat wave this summer….-_-

of course, the ultimate irony was that it stopped being cold as soon as we finally got the heater installed. on sunday we got it up and going at last…and yesterday night we didn’t even use it, haha. soon we’ll be sleeping with the windows open. i will prefer that. it’s damn weird for me to sleep in complete silence…i prefer to have either the hum of the air-con/heater in the background, or the window open like when i stayed in hall.

i’m at work now waiting to knock off…have had less to do these couple of days so i’ve been reading damn a lot of fanfic to pass the time. gotten bored of that, and am now updating here.

hmm…how was the weekend? well, saturday was the crazy day…after school ended at 4.30pm, i went out with the jiaotong-ers who were planning to meet up with the fudan ppl…went to huaihai rd to eat dinner and ktv till like 1am. the ktv lounge is just a place to nua…only about 5 people were singing while the other 20 or so were screaming at each other over their singing. mostly spent the time playing drinking games. so this is gip, haha…every weekend is a party! hope i don’t get sick of it too soon. a bit sian alr but not good to nua too much at home too.

friday and sunday were mostly spent waiting around for the heater people to do what they needed to do, and then cleaning up after them.

time is flying here, but still not fast enough for me. i wanna go home! almost exactly 4 more months to the end of my attachment…

photos!

yay, we got the wireless password for jiaotong uni, and the internet is like MUCH faster than home! about half the class has resolved to bring their laptops next week so we will all be squeezing in the corner with the power plugs and taking up the bandwidth to download stuff haha. maybe less peopel will pontang so that they can use the wonderful wonderful internet here. finally, facebook doesn’t take 10 years to load!

anyway, i took the opportunity to finally got some photos up. because i’m lazy and the blogger photo uploading is crappy, i’ve used picasa. if you’re interested, the links are here. there aren’t that many of them cos i only picked the highlights out of my own and other people’s photos, haha. have captioned them as some are quite amusing.

1) http://picasaweb.google.com/xh3887/Zhujiajiao
Zhujiajiao. this is a famous water town, like a chinese venice, from the ming/qing eras that’s been very well preserved. a bit of a tourist trap but extremely pretty all the same. a big group from ntu of 20plus people went for a day trip since it’s 45min away from shanghai by bus.

2) http://picasaweb.google.com/xh3887/EverydayShanghaiStuff
Everyday Shanghai stuff. i will continue to add to this…the wonderful thing about usuing picasa is that it can automatically sync with web albums, haha (sounds like i’m doing an advertisement). has a few photos now of my area, walking around shanghai, food, etc.

3) http://picasaweb.google.com/xh3887/Hangzhou
photos from Hangzhou, just for consolidation…including funny ones taken by my housemates too.