sturm

What are the odds of getting stood up two days in a row, while waiting at the same place. I must be jinxed.

Well at least now it doesn't rain on me so much that I feel like I am the dark cloud.

I think it's cooler to be lightning than rain.

HK pics

Lan Kwai Fong, 19 May (Saturday), 19 30 hrs
This place feels like Holland Village on a slope, with the whole expat crowd thing going too. It was eerily quiet because of the rain, but that was nice.


I took this at one of the back alleys of the residential estates at Mid-Levels. All the houses are on this steep slope, and there are one way escalators up the slope that switch direction depending on the time of the day. So Hong Kong doesn't just have dengue, they have Japanese Encephalitis too.


This was taken at the indoor carpark of the place I was staying at. The cloth cover makes them look a bit like Ku Klux bikes, except in black. And I love the electric pink bike.



The original but now-abandoned ferry pier at City Hall. The banner says "This place belongs to the PEOPLE" - one of many signs put up in protest regarding the building of a new pier at the Central. I was wondering what would have happened if Singaporeans bothered to do something like that for the Old National Library.



The night view from the ferry. I think I got a better view here than from the Peak. I saw nothing from the Peak, incidentally, as you'll see from the other pictures.



Apart from esprit factory outlets, the only other place worth going to in HongKong if you want to get seriously cheap stuff. True Religion jeans go for $30 bucks. Ralph Lauren polo tees are $22, albeit with the label (reluctantly) snipped. But still, who cares. They snip off like 1 or 2 alphabets of the label. Check out the Salvation Army here too. Anyway because everything here is insanely cheap and not-fake, this place I hear is normally flooded with people. But again, because of the rain, There was totally no crowd - a total of 30 people in that place, tops. Tell me again why I love the rain.


The beach at Stanley was very quiet, except for these two boys in surf shorts.


This boy was doing Cantonese 听写 (ting1 xie3), and looked absolutely dismal. I decided to take a picture to make him feel like something good was coming out of his misery.


This is why I saw nothing at The Peak. The place was shrouded in fog, the kind where you can't even see the outline of a building 50 metres in front of you. How cool is that.


This grandfather and his grandson were hurrying to the toilet. They sat next to me on the bus ride up to the Peak. The grandfather was teaching the boy English. Specifically, the word 'scoop', used in the context of 'ice-cream'. I must have heard each word close to 10 times. Halfway through, the boy fell asleep. Oh I forget to mention that they are Japanese.


I attempted to try the Peak circle walk - apparently the thing takes 3 hours - but decided against it because I was alone and the place was too dark and foggy.


In Singapore, we register bridges, in HongKong, they register slopes.

amber red (black)

Rotting at the comp now waiting to go down to KoolPurpleSkool, which I immensely do not feel like going to today because I'm exhausted from too much walking in the rain in HongKong.

It isn't supposed to be raining at this time of the year, but unfortunately and fortunately, it was. And it wasn't just rain. It was Amber Rain, and Red Rain, just short of Black Rain, the codes they give for different degrees of rain storms. But the rain cleared the crowds, which is good because I can't stand crowds. And thanks to Hongkong I can avoid the whole Great Singapore Sale crowd because it's not like I'm going to buy anymore clothes in the near future. I have shopping phobia now.

Travelling alone was liberating, because you get to do whatever you want, whenever, You have the liberty to get lost, to scrap plans whenever, to not shop, to walk through the residential areas, the small roads with the wet markets, and see how people live.

But of course, having someone there makes a difference because of the energy boost in times of flagging enthusiasm. And knowledge of bus routes helps immensely. I think buses, in all forms, are better for getting around than trains that let you see nothing except black tunnels.

Photos following soon.

winding down

I didn't realise how much this research thing was stressing me out until I finally sort of finished it in the wee hours of the morning and lost sleep over whether Prints will get pissed with the 400-plus suggested edits I gave for her paper.

Fortunately when I went down to her office this afternoon she seemed quite alright with it and when I left I discovered I was feeling much much better. Relief is an awesome physical sensation.

I think I was stressed over the whole interrogation thing because she asked me to explain all the suggested edits, but some things feel like they can't really be explained - it's all about the flow! And because apparently in Korean the verbs are left to the end of the sentence, she wrote almost everything in passive voice which is rather tiring to read, much less edit, and then explain.

And today I discovered that she's paying me out of her own pocket, and not the university, because she didn't apply for a research grant, and for some strange reason I'm feeling guilty. I mean, this is the kind of thing I normally do for group projects. To be paid to do it feels wrong.

Anyway I'll be off in HongKong from 19th to 22nd May, hopefully by physically removing myself out of the country I'll finally manage to get some peace and quiet and alone time. Woo hoo.

strange and beautiful

I was devastated when I found out I hadn't factored in expenditure in HongKong. But anyway, the GST credits thing came in the mail today, my uncle who just came from HongKong gave me his 'spare change', and I got a random job tomorrow giving sectionals to the KoolPurpleSkool kids, and amazingly, that quite about covers my costs.

The best and strangest thing is I didn't even pray for all these. He really lives up to His Ephesians 3:20 - ness.

the reason why

I'm broke.

$362 - plane tickets to Hong Kong

$240 - cello strings plus mute plus rosin. Massive heartache because my Spirocore C string cost $104 and the G string cost $90.

$60 - Beethoven cello sonatas and Saint Saens Cello Concerto Barenheiter scores.

But I got a brand new copy of "The Sandman Papers" from Kinokuniya at $8 so that's enough to keep me happy for a while.

collision course

After 9 hours of trawling electronic databases for the proverbial-needle-in-a-haystack statistics, I have reached the scary self-knowledge that I do more harm to myself than anyone could possibly do to me. And having slack group members is actually a safety mechanism that prevents me from overworking myself.

In one of my groups this past semester, there was another slavedriver-sort, and it got scary there for a while, so I was consciously running away and not checking my smses and emails. That was ok because I had a choice. This time my choice has forced me into The Corner of my Undoing. I actually forgot to eat, until my dad called and reminded me. And this has never happened before. Probably because I might have been slacking through life.

I begin to see that I smother myself with nobody's expectations and demands but my own. And I don't know when to stop.

mindsucker

I finally found someone who slavedrives herself more than me, and readily concede defeat.

I am currently serving time in Research Hell, drowning in databases that churn out tons of irrelevant stuff despite the numerous keyword permutations.

This is the extent of my sadomasochism, which apparently has a cooler name - self-defeating personality disorder.

First day back in KoolPurpleSkool since exams and it's my first time teaching 5 students back-to-back. It was slightly disconcerting, having to switch modes every 30 minutes, because all of them have such different personality types.

The new Korean student is un-readable. It's exciting in a way, because it makes me try harder. I think I have an obsession with trying to read people. Sometimes I really identify with Sylar, the "Heroes" villain, and the way he goes around cutting people's brains open to see how they work. He does it to absorb their powers; I don't do any of that gruesome stuff, but in a way I suppose knowledge is power, like the power to manipulate.

That is terrifying knowledge.

post exams day 2

Shucks I wrote a post but it deleted itself.

Random conversation that happened when I went to collect my research/gender paper from the korean lecturer. It began with the innocuous question,

"So what are you doing this hols?

"The same, teaching part-time"

"Where?"

"Sometimes at KoolPurpleSkool"

"Oh! My daughter is going there!"

"When?"

"...My daughter is going there"

"Oh! (when I realised she was saying her daughter is currently going there) I have a Korean student now.."

"What's her name? I might know her..."

My brain blanks out at the most inopportune times, especially since exam aftermath equals brain death.

"Errrrrmmmmm....Soo something. Soo Ree? I know her surname is P***"

She gives me the "I-can-remember-all-my-students'-names-you-can't-even-remember-one?!" look.

Hey it's not my fault. I've only met her once and haven't even started teaching her yet.

"... *lame laugh*"

"Would you like to do some research?"

"Huh?"

"Oh because some of the students are doing their placement this holidays so (they can't do)..."

"..."