ticket to ride
it's my last sunday in beijing, and this will probably be my last post in beijing. i'm looking forward to coming home more than ever. still, i woke up this morning and felt the slightest twinge of sadness at my impending departure.

or maybe i was just hungry.

i decided a few weeks ago that my farewell post would consist of me telling you about two important things:

first, we've discovered that lee kum kee soya sauce tastes awfully good with just about anything. we've hence taken to calling it magic sauce. and it really is! can't speak for the bottles sold in singapore, but those sold here are filled with. . . magic sauce.

second, and most important of all, is probably my greatest achievement in beijing to date.

i can now poop in a squatting toilet (poop being the most neutral word i could think of). i used to have a mental block against it, but desperate times call for desperate measures. it is amazing what one can achieve when driven to it.

on that note, much as i'm not for globalisation and the erosion of culture, one of the best memories i'll have of travelling around china is coming out of the train station at 长春 (chang2 chun1) on the way back from changbaishan and seeing a kfc right in front of my eyes, open at 0630 in the morning, because the sun rises really early in summer - breakfast was from 0530-0930.

kfc meant just one thing, especially since i needed to poop Really Badly.

clean toilets. squatting, of course.

if They dare

(yes, THEY, whoever THEY are) to delay my flight home for no apparent reason except that terminal 3 of the beijing capital airport is Too Big and therefore Highly Inefficient, i swear i will run past airport security and out onto the runway, then wave my arms and jump about hurling obscenities (i won't be heard, but it's the thought that counts) until Someone cares enough to take notice of the crazy singaporean girl dying to see her boyfriend after 9 Very Long months, and demands an immediate all clear for take-off from the control tower for my flight.

after i get onto the plane, of course.

i'm not making sense, am i? and do pardon the use of so many italics.

but today was the first time i left the house in about five or so days, and i even did some cross-stitching in the dark when we went to sing ktv.

i must be going crazy.

baa baa white sheep

meeeeehh meeeehhhhhh - for alliterative purposes i realise i cannot call this a lamb, i have to call it/him/her a sheep - Suzy the Sheep! Sam the Sheep! Super Sheep! the only name i can think of to go with 'lamb' is lana.

Lana Lamb.

which effectively makes it/her (i suppose she'll have to be a her?) a Lame Lamb. Lana the Lame Lamb.

for the rest of this post i'm just going to refer to it as 'it.'

it does look like its butt is overstuffed, doesn't it? and like it had an operation where all its innards were removed and put back in. see the line down the middle of its back?

its face is also kinda weird - crooked smile - as are the ears. it looks like a little like a rabbit somehow.

what eternity really is

i stand corrected: it is almost the end of the second day of what i know is going to be the Longest Week in my entire life, and i am Sorely Tempted to change my flight home again, because now i think i know the true meaning of eternity. it's not what i said it was before - there's a post on this sometime in may - it is this. this having Absolutely Nothing To Do and Missing Your Boyfriend So Much That You Think You Might Die From Loneliness and Insanity and Worrying About Stupid Things Despite Having Friends Around You. Soon.

and missing your mother and father and brother and grandmother and your boyfriend's mother and father and brothers and your lovely best friend who is coming back at midnight on 2 july and your other lovely friends who are going to have fellowship tomorrow, and doing other things like working as shopgirls and procrastinating about applying for pupillage (you know who you are, don't try to deny it).

well, it's not quite having Absolutely Nothing To Do. xiaoyun and i were so bored yesterday that we took ourselves to the nearby shopping centre, not to shop, but to purchase craft projects.

i successfully completed one of those D-I-Y lambs today, although it looks rather weird. i shall post a picture of it tomorrow, perhaps.

yes, i am That Got Nothing To Do. it took me all of half a day, maybe less, to cut up pieces of cloth, stitch them up, stuff the resultant lamb-shaped cavity and sew the entire thing together.

i am now cross-stitching something. it takes up more time, probably because you have to keep counting the stitches.

JONATHAN LAU MUN YEW WHY THE @#$$%^$%#^%*(^*! MINISTRY OF DEFENCE MUST MAKE YOU KENA RESERVIST NOW?! since he won't be reading this, being safely IMPRISONED in jurong camp, i'm tempted to come home earlier to surprise him, except i know it won't work. and it just seems so strange to come home before 1 july now. somehow.

but there's an upside: i'm kinda looking forward to the sermon on sunday, there's a sermon series on galatians.

and sunday means i'll be just one and a half days from home.

maybe i should stop counting. i'm going nuts.

durians

i went for the king's singers concert last night, and had a really great time. i was a bit worried that audience response wouldn't be good because it seemed to be mainly made up of chinese, and some audience members were exhibiting boorish behaviour before the concert started - but happily enough, i was wrong about that. the audience was responsive, enthusiastic and warm (even if they didn't understand english), and i was just so happy to have heard the king's singers version of danny boy live that nothing else really mattered. i felt goose-bumpy the entire time. they also did two classic chinese songs, self-arranged, as an encore, and i really liked jasmine flower. kinda reminded me of something mrs. wilson might have done to the song.

although their set tonight had a jazz selection, AND they were also going to do all i ask of you - but no matter.

when i finally set eyes on the 国家大剧院 (guo2 jia1 da4 ju4 yuan4, national centre for the performing arts) yesterday evening, my first thought was, it's got to be easier to clean than the esplanade. because while it's all steel and glass panelling, at least it doesn't have spikes protruding from all over it.

until i realised that it was totally surrounded by a moat of sorts.

whoever designed the esplanade probably really had a thing for durians - or maybe he or she had to do it durian-like, as part of the Uniquely Singapore theme. i have no idea what whoever designed the ncpa beijing had in mind. a floating orb, perhaps. or a*mei's ufo song. that was the second thing which came to my mind. but that can't be right, because they (The Chinese Government) don't like her now, right?

also, Somebody, Somewhere, has decided that it's cooler at night, so they turn down the airconditioning in the subway and subway stations.

and that, my friend, is totally not true. sure, mr sun sets by around 2030, but there's something about the insane amount of dust in the air, and the even more insane amount of people trying to get onto the trains on a saturday night which makes it terribly hot and stuffy.

and then while i'm away, i'll write home every day

i've got just about 10 days till i'm back in singapore, and i couldn't fall asleep last night for thinking about it. i gave up after about a half hour of staring at the ceiling in the dark, and reached over to my desk for my mp3 player, because i decided that i wanted to listen to all my loving by the beatles. not the best song to fall asleep to, i'll admit - it's up-tempo and a little noisy - but two weeks ago, we chanced across a man on the street selling cds, the Many CDs Burned Onto One Disc, Very Blatantly Pirated kind, and after i purchased a beatles 78-CDs-In-One disc, i deleted all the chinese songs on my mp3 player to make room for a bunch of the beatles' songs from aforementioned disc.

i think it was then that i knew my time in beijing was coming to an end. if it hasn't already. not in terms of days, you understand, but in the other way. whatever way that is.

ploughing through assignments in chinese, one of which was not much more than a desperate attempt to paraphrase a chinese article by the same professor i was handing up the assignment to, was an extremely painful process which i'm glad i probably won't have to repeat ever again in this life (or the next, for that matter). the worst thing was having the niggling knowledge at the back of my mind that based on what my classmates had told me about elective modules, and the fact that my professor had about four classes of around 80 to 100 students each, he might not have even bothered reading through what i wrote. as it was, jinni and jolie had an investment law module exam just last week, where their answers were copiously copied from the textbook(which they were told to do). when it was time to hand up their papers, they walked over to the desk where their professor was sitting, whereupon he took one glance through all they'd written, rifling quickly through their scripts, and then graded them. well.

at least jinni, and jolie, to a lesser extent, had a good laugh editing my juvenile delinquency essay. i don't think i've ever seen jinni so amused, or maybe we were just bored after being cooped up at home for more than half the week.

i'm glad i came to beijing, although something jinni overheard an ang moh man saying in starbucks probably sums up my entire experience: you can't take the people in this country seriously. or you'll go crazy, trust me. you've just got to try and laugh it all off, but some days that's harder to do than others.

after all, i suppose coming to beijing has been about making friends, loving people - and more importantly, the stuff you talk about at wedding dinners. like paul very earnestly demonstrating to us, on a cold night walking along the streets to find a cab after leaving the Very Boring singapore students' association dinner, what a salsa shimmy was. shangren silently leaping off the bed and crouching by the door of our hotel room in chengde, when we played do-an-action heart attack. everyone was supposed to follow suit, but i was a bit slow on the uptake and ended up sitting on the bed laughing at everyone crouching in one mass by the door.

jinni coming into the house with a bag of potatoes and declaring matter-of-factly that she didn't buy the big ones because she suspected that they were genetically modified. just like what my mother said, and some of them can be the size of your palm. xiaoyun's naps on the sofa before she goes to bed, or the time she came home and excitedly exclaimed that some touts for a nearby hair salon practically lifted her off the pavement and into the salon.

and more recently, me poking around with a pair of chopsticks in my letterbox for a letter jolie wrote to me - i managed to retrieve it, but there is now one chopstick in the letterbox; yesterday, when i met a prc friend who's studying in singapore and is back in china for a holiday/usp summer program, and we wandered around the central shopping area chatting idly, me finally slurping up, through a fat straw, 抹茶玄米沙冰 (mo3 cha2 xuan2 mi3 sha1 bing1, ice blended matcha with crushed almonds) from 街客. due to a shortage of ingredients it had been out of production beijing-wide for a couple of days.

close your eyes and i'll kiss you,
tomorrow i'll miss you,
remember i'll always be true;
and then while i'm away,
i'll write home every day,
and i'll send all my loving to you

bye bye beijing, in ten days. i'm saying goodbye now because although i know i'll feel Rather Sad (i'm not entirely heartless, you know), i'll probably be too excited to fall asleep again.

i really, really really hate to say this but on the episode of the office which i'm currently watching, there's a scene where dwight walks into michael's office to speak to him, and i thought he kinda looked like jon.

and that, my friends, is not a compliment.

it was the high forehead and the fact that there are still 12 interminable more days till i see him again. really.

yay rachel is going to do dipsing after all :)
not that i'd really be able to hang out with her a lot and she's got to do horrible compulsory modules like evidence and company but still. she'll be around.

after the rain has fallen

we had a rainy weekend, much to our astonishment, and this morning i was sorely tempted to have a last run to the park, along the streets of beijing. well, of my district, anyway. because the dust has dissipated somewhat, the air's cooler and smells a little fresher, and best of all, the piles of dirt and sand and loose concrete are damp and the wind's therefore unable to blow any of it into your face.

i don't think last runs are really last runs unless you set out from home thinking it's going to be your last run.

but i lay in bed for a while listening to the sounds of traffic and thought about how a wave of exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke hit me when i stepped out of the apartment building, on my way to church yesterday morning, and decided against it.

i skipped in the lift lobby again. you've got to go at a particular time: too early and the neighbours are leaving for work; a while after that and the cleaning lady comes. once i hear the sounds of her huge mop i know i'm good to go in about five to ten minutes.

our university has an Extremely Strange and Useless Policy. we've got take-home exams which function pretty much the same way as they do in singapore, except that after you've finished typing your essay, you're expected to collect these sheets of paper from the teacher and copy out your entire essay by hand before handing it up. thankfully, two of my three professors with take-home exam modules have decided to do away with this requirement.

still, i had to sit at the dining room table last night copying out 3500 chinese characters, not all of which were arranged in correct grammatical order. jinni had a good laugh editing my essay for me - every cloud has a silver lining.

i've decided that i can only put one article per day into my luggage for the remaining days that i am in beijing. however, i realise that i'll probably run out of things to put in, unless i want to end up not brushing my teeth or washing my hair.

last night
some nights i lie in bed unable to sleep, listening to the steady sound of traffic in the early morning, wondering whether i'll miss it when i'm home. cats mewling, the neighbour's dogs barking, and the shriek of sports cars going much too fast in a residential area at random intervals isn't quite the same thing.

that's around 17 days away, give or take a few hours, but i've been compulsively feeding things to my suitcase for the past week, and stacking up my notes as soon as i'm done with an assignment, ready to hand them to the scrap collectors downstairs.

defining stupidity

as usual, we were comfortably seated on the sofa again, chatting at random intervals and doing our assignments, when the doorbell rang.

jinni went to peer through the peephole, and announced that it was some weird guy.

nevertheless, i wrenched myself free from the hold of my piece of sofa and went to join her, and we opened the door a sliver anyway - whereupon i looked at the man standing there and exclaimed hey that's the guy who sold us long distance talk-time for more than double of what it was really worth!

he took one look at us, realised he must have visited us before, and scuttled away quickly.

aiyoh, want to con people also cannot remember who you've conned before.

it is Extremely Hot and Dusty in beijing now. i don't mind the heat as much as the dust, and the worst thing is that the people in charge of beijing seem to have the same ideas about the singaporean government re roads and pavements in Perfectly Good Condition. in fact, i vaguely remember a phrase from my short-lived gossip girl phase, something about if it ain't broke, make it broke, and fix it. and in this case, make taxpayers wonder where their money goes to at the same time, i might add.

so, not only do you have to cope with the dust already in the air; when the wind blows, all the piles of sand and dirt from the Absolutely Unnecessary re-paving and re-tarring of pavements and roads, ostensibly in honour of the olympics (olympics, schmolympics) rises up and if you're unlucky you get caught in a mini-sandstorm.

boo ya!!
i had a title for this post last night. i even thought about what i was going to say, but now all that's running through my head are the lyrics to ben folds' still fighting it. in particular, the bit which goes and everybody knows, it sucks to grow up.

the title of this post, therefore, is taken from words i saw printed on the shirt of the tiny boy i met in the lift on my way back home from buying fruits at the mini-mart downstairs. they were encased in a speech bubble, the words seemingly issuing from the mouth of multi-coloured giraffes and zebras.

okay, i'm not very sure what animals they were, but that's what they looked like.

it's been very pleasant the past few days in beijing, especially with jon being back in singapore and able to buy calling cards which give him 340 minutes to talk to me, for $10. two of our girlfriends from the university are also staying over for the weekend - and with that, i suddenly remember what i wanted to call this post!

happy dumpling festival! 粽子节快乐 （zong4 zi3 jie2 kuai4 le4)!

that's what our china friends have been referring to 端午节 (duan1 wu3 jie2) as, and that's also why our friends are staying over, because for one it's too far for her to travel home and everyone else in her hostel has gone home, for another, her parents have gone travelling so although she stays in beijing she's been locked out of her house.

it's been pleasant with them here, with jolie coming over too, and we've been sitting with our laptops on our laps, typing away at assignments and the like, sprawled over the sofas in the living room. chatting idly from time to time, napping, ordering take-away at mealtimes. the sun has been gracing us with his presence, and shines in a nice way through the wall-length living room windows.

i'll miss being an exchange student. i won't miss the whole being away from singapore thing, but just being a student elsewhere. is there a difference?

i decided to go for the international christian fellowship's serivce today, even though i'd dismissed it as being Annoying and Too Americanised sometime during the beginning of my stay in beijing. i'm really glad i did, actually, and although i'm slightly ashamed to admit it i think i'm going to be going back there for my last 3 sundays here. it was almost like being back home, somehow, and i felt terribly lonely as i walked out back into dusty beijing and a wall of spoken chinese.

delays

my parents and brother are stuck at the hong kong international airport because their flight from beijing got delayed; i came online to check out why but didn't get any answers. seems the flights coming in and out of beijing recently have been delayed, anyhow. they've been using the weather as an excuse, so i've heard - maybe it's foggy and cloudy way up there, although the actual rainfall in beijing has been apologetic, a token amount to make up for the lack of sun and the resulting chill.

and although my mother is still Rather Naggy, my father still Rather Dogmatic and my brother Rather Lame, i miss them already, and couldn't help but tear as their taxi pulled away from their hotel.

i can only imagine the earful she must be giving the airport staff in hong kong now. haha! oh mummy, what will i do with or without you.

i chanced across this picture though:


for a moment i couldn't for the life of me remember which year this was. and actually, i still can't. i think it was quentin's 19th birthday, or it might have been his 20th.

on that note, we met the man who made my brother's 中软 (zhong1 ruan3) so he could purchase another one. this man smoked like a chimney, as do so many of the mainland chinese men, and when my mother asked him why he would, he held out the hand where two fingers grasped his cigarette. making his hand go all wobbly and trembly, he said very matter of factly that people who smoked weren't as prone to alzheimer's, and did we ever see people who smoked with trembling hands (and by that extension, being forgetful?)?

she came up with the perfect retort later that night.

you never see smokers with alzheimer's because a great many of them don't live that long!

alright, not funny, and not necessarily true. but i'm 22 this year and i can't remember when it was that we celebrated quents' birthday at the food court in the botanic gardens. i do remember that amanda made a white chocolate cheesecake and there were strawberries on it. and in it. see, that's not so bad, right?

interesting fact of the day
if you brush your teeth - i use the tri-coloured colgate - and drink milo right after, you'll get a taste in your mouth that's exactly like warm mint-chocolate chip ice-cream or one of those fancy starbucks drinks with a name beginning with the words peppermint and chocolate. it works best with milo made from pure milo powder, not milo 3-in-1.

today i am going to attempt to overcome my fear of travelling in china by taking a bus with my parents to the nearby city of tianjin.

of tv

my parents and brother are in beijing until friday morning, which explains the dearth of posts. well, i stayed in today but that just means that i have Very Sadly finished watching seasons one and two of 30 rock. i started on gossip girl, and after 3 episodes and some wikipedia-ing of plot synopses, have decided that it is Not Worth My Time.

and dudes, chace crawford is awful. nevermind that he looks vaguely like zac efron and is therefore "good-looking," he can't act to save his life. though i must say he looks exactly like his character. weak-minded with no opinion of his own, poor-little-rich-boy trapped in a bubble and fighting to get out.

give me a break. also, the clothes aren't as nice as i thought they'd be.

i'm going to start the office tomorrow, as planned. i shouldn't have listened to those xoxo's floating around at the back of my mind, along with various exhortations that i watch it. it reminds me a little of popular, too. does anyone remember popular? whoever produces these shows/writes books of that ilk seems to like giving the poor-little-rich-miss-perfects one syllable names starting with b: there was brooke, now, blair.

anyhow, the office should keep me occupied in the breaks between my assignments - which i really must continue - until i get back to singapore. i can smell the extra vinegar in my bak chor mee already.

yay for steve carrell and shows which don't have Absolutely Preposterous Premises.