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