Nanjing, Nanjing

A short trip to Nanjing turned out to be a fruitful educational trip, even with the unforgiving sun and searing heat. Nanjing was the place where the infamous Rape of Nanking occured, and I had thought that the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall was the only thing worth going for, but boy, was I wrong.

The highlight of the trip was the Memorial Hall, where they created an atmosphere of bleakness and death. That was deliberate, to remind all of us that 300 000 people died when Nanjing was captured by the Japanese in 1937 during WWII. Floating candles, check. Countless name lists and photos of victims, check. Grotesque pictures and videos of intestines spilling, women being raped, heads being chopped off, check. One huge ass incense flame smack in the middle of a prayer compound for people to offer incense, check.

It was there that I suddenly had an inkling of why Chairman Mao's radical ideas were so widely received by the people of China. He emerged to power around the 1940s, a period after China has just been freed from constant Japanese bombardment (and torture). His ideas were all about fighting, war, and having enemies. That was exactly the sentiments of the Chinese people, who had suffered much humiliation and were licking their WWII wounds. That was exactly what they wanted (not neccessarily what they needed), and so, that was one factor why China went into communism.

Another educational highlight was the spotlight on Dr Sun Yat-Sen, whose body is in Sun Yat-Sen Mausolem. I learnt about the Father of Modern China, and a little bit about Chiang Kai- Shek, and how Taiwan came to be the rebel of China. There was also mention of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which was formed by rebels and which managed to hold its own against the Qing empire for 11 years. This same Kingdom was the inspiration for Sun Yat-Sen to overthrow the feudal system of china.

Sounds confusing right?

To really know the history of China, one really must be in China. I'd never have known about all of these facts, and the way they link up to each other, and truly understand why China is the way it is now if I had never came for this.

Plus, I bought the above stamp for 60RMB. It's of Chairman Mao shaking hands with Joseph Stalin. Mao and Stalin leh! It's the epitome of Communism!

At this very moment, I think I made a wrong choice studying A Level Chemistry. Very wrong.

I don't feel like blogging, blogging, even though I find nothing better to do

Today, for the first time in the longest time, I found/convinced myself there was nothing much to do at work. And so I went around, surfing the web, trying to download good free applications to enhance the Apple Of My Eye. (Tee hee) Midway through, I found some really good online websites.

1) www.bluetin.com/catalog

A website that sells headphones/ earphones/ audio stuff from Japan, and there's a store in Singapore too!

2) http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/60-most-beautiful-apple-mac-os-x-leopard-wallpapers/

A very useful website chock-full of tips and tricks. This particular webpage lists down the 60 most beautiful Apple wallpapers. And I downloaded a really neat one.

3) http://forums.macrumors.com

An all for Mac users forum, with a lot of FAQs answers in there. Very helpful when I started using my Mac for the first time.

4) www.sxc.hu

A site for royalty free & free high resolution photographs. I surf this site almost everyday for work.

5) www.fffffound.com

A site with random pretty pictures of every kind and sort (like the picture on top) that just light up my creative neurons everytime I go there.

While surfing these places, Felicia was dilligently making a Facebook quiz. "How well do you know Felicia". After having done (and FAILED) a similar quiz, I was quite apprehensive. However, Felicia quipped online that "Deanna, you might just get full marks".

I fell for it, hook, line and sinker.

By the time it was over, I knew only 40% about Felicia. 40%!!! When we breathe in the same air, day in day out, and some of HER carbon dioxide is still probably stuck in my lungs. When we sleep on the same bed at least once a week, eat the same food and see each other 24 hours a day! (Minus the working hours)

When Soon and Joyce, our only other housemates received their "How well do you know Felicia" results, they passed. Not with flying colours, but they passed. By today's O level standards it's a low C and they'll have to go to poly for that, but hey, they passed.

So I decided to give Felicia my own quiz as well. The "How well do you know Deanna" quiz. Only contains 1 question, which is "Do you think Deanna thinks you know her well?" with only 2 options to the question- yes and no.

Felicia answered, "No."

HAR. She failed my quiz too, with a measly 0% to show for it. Immediately, Nelson Muntz "har har" comes to mind.

Ultimately, a quiz is a quiz, and I told Felicia that I'm sure I know her well enough. At least I know about the things that she doesn't dare to put on the quiz as questions, which just goes to show, that quiz isn't accurate. Ask me about a favourite song, colour, or even food, and I think I'll just fail terribly. Tell me a secret, a life story or share an experience, and I'll listen. That's the kind of friend I want to be.

And Felicia, Joyce, the answer to the "How well do you know Deanna" quiz is a resounding Yes for you two. If you two have seen the naggy side of me, you do know me well enough. :)

Shanghai Shenanigans Part 12- The Great Firewall of China Versus My Life Story

So the nice Chinese people in Beijing gathered together, spoke Mandarin that sounded as if they had marbles in their mouths, drank some cloudy precipitation that looked like milk, ate some rubber salmon. Some guy, probably a jolly old man who sport the exact same hairstyle as their dear leader, then raised his hand, decided that the sheer amount of people blogging about their lives, for example the sushi they had for dinner, may just somehow lead to a revolution against the government, and pushed the big red panic button.

Then boom! “The connection to the server was reset as the page is loading”.

And Blogger.com is now off limits to us poor sobs that desperately want to share our lives with the rest of the world. The things we do now are meaningless because we no longer have a platform to talk about our latest conquest, buy, gossip, feeling and most importantly, we cannot show off.

“See, see what I did today! I licked Great Wall leh. You never lick right? Neh neh ni bu bu.”

Damn!

Other than this little irritating piece of profanity I have to contend with, my life here is pretty much turning into routine. Work is getting heavier and becoming something like a blessing and a curse (but of course, more of a blessing than a curse), while my social life can be considered basically almost zero, since I choose to be a hermit and stay at home all day on Sundays while my housemates go for their community work. As a matter of fact, I think I function like a lone ranger these days. Which has been the way I have functioned in Singapore, like always planning my timetable on my own. Today I stayed home to catch up on some work, while the housemates went on a shopping spree (Ah Soon went to school), and went to meet them for dinner after I was done. They were late, so I walked around People’s Square by myself, enjoying the cool evening. I also suspect that I’m becoming more and more irritating to boot.



(A few days later)

My fellow intern so graciously taught me how to beat the system. Check it out, I'm BLOGGING. Neh neh ni bu bu. Okay, problem solved. No more ranting-- for the time being.

Shanghai Shenanigans Part 10- Why didn't you turn around, why did you knock thrice

This is Felicia, after being hit by a tree. Joyce took the picture, and I was right behind, laughing my ass off.*


*The above picture may seem irrelevant to this post, but trust me, it's a good photo to cheer anyone up at the expense of one of my beloved housemate.


I lost my expensive earphones yesterday. Saw it when I locked my house door on the way out to work, and the next time I opened up my bag, it was gone. I was on my way out the condominium's gates, and was on my way to a meeting, so I figured there was no time to turn back to get it. I had drawn out a few suspicious places that it might have dropped, and there was a 1/3 chance it had fallen while I was still at home. The other 2 places possible was the lift landing and the lift itself.

When I reached home, the truth beckoned. No earphones were found in my abode, therefore confirming the odds were right. My lovely, expensive, pretty white earphones with superior noise-canceling ability were gone. I felt my world of crystal clear sound collapse before my very eyes.

So, like a kid crying over spoilt milk, I became quite pissed off. But then again, there was no one to blame but my past self, who'd refused to spend 5 minutes just to go back and search for it. I started to piss off my housemates by doing inane things such as knocking on Felicia's toilet door when she was bathing. Enraged because her "Yes?What?" went unanswered, she opened the toilet door with nothing but a ....... and said, "Deanna Tan!"

In the end I managed to calm myself down by doing sit-ups until I remembered how it felt like after a good workout. And mourn a little for my earphones which may have been incinerated by some rubbish company by now.

Probably cheer myself up by investing in a good piece of headphones this time. One so huge I will notice it if I ever lose it. Or look that the above picture and think back, "Why Felily cannot see the tree branch even though it was damn huge and right in front of her?"

stirring

Cultural Street, Shanghai.



It's nice to be able to meet up with a good friend in Shanghai, even if it means a quickie trip to the bund and a RMB50 Maglev train ride.

It's also nice to talk on the phone with the bestie for 1 hour plus, even though I did hang up on her the first time around in a dream-like state. (funny story!)

Most of all, it's the nicest to wake up and see your housemates smiling at you like a retard, and proceeding to crush you like toufu for no apparent reason, or knowing you're pissed at the weather and trying to make you feel better about it, or scaring you just for fun by turning off the lights and jumping out of nowhere.

:)

Shanghai Shenanigans Part 9- The halfway mark is the hardest, baby I know

Cliched, but I'm still going to use the phrase "time flies" for the time that, well, flew by, in the past three months. I was suddenly aware of the fact that it was the halfway mark week for my internship last week, and almost the halfway mark this week, when the weather started to change and bugs appeared in our house.

Summer is approaching, or some have said, has come, and even though one might associate the season of summer with youth, sunshine and the beach's golden, silky sand, I only associate it with one thing and one thing only- heat.

Back in winter when all was cold and pests such as mosquitoes were dead, I was okay with squeezing in trains with other people. For we weren't rubbing actual shoulders, we were merely touching thick winter coats together. No bodily fluids were passed and no human contact was established. And even though we were butt-numbing cold, the natural air-condition calmed our inner senses down.

Enough with the flashback. Now the assimilation back to Singapore's blardy hot weather begins. And with that, all the heat, sweat, and most importantly, the inconvenient armpit sweat stain is back in full blast.

Other than this though, I had an intense April 2009. It was a month of working my ass off, then playing my ass off, then the cycle repeats itself. The adventurous housemates would suggest a destination, and we'll buy tickets, pack our bags and whisk ourselves off polluted Shanghai into a magical land where fairies, gnomes and leprechauns co-exist in harmony.

I'm kidding.

I haven't seen my leprechaun lately though, since the last time Ros wanted him to be a Harry Potter look-a-like. What I have seen, and experienced are the bus rides in China when I went to Tsingdao, the land where Tsingdao beer is manufactured in, for a short holiday. And the amazing toilets that accompany these bus rides. Basically there are 2.

1) Toilet in Shanghai Bus Station

This toilet is the epitome of all toilets. It was like a long drain, only you take out the drain grills, add in seperate walls (but not doors), and hey presto, a very useful toilet that allows one to see the side profile of girls squatting with their butts let loose.



Can you visualise it with my mini illustration? Minimal waste of resources (no need flush!) and maximum impact.

2) The toilet on the sleeping bed bus

We were almost late to catch the bus back to Shanghai because of "Guo Tie" issues. Yes, it's the fried dumplings I'm talking about. We only found out that it was a sleeping bed bus after we boarded it, where instead of seats, there are beds for people to lie in. Our beds were near the in house toilet, and Yuan Xi, who went to Tsingdao too, was most unfortunate to get the bed nearest to the toilet. Everytime someone opens the toilet door, they let out a smell similar to "rotten cabbage" and his head is always precariously near the door when it opens. In a bid to reduce the number of people who goes to the toilet, he would stare menacingly at them as they make their way to the back of the bus. Driven mad by the smell, he said, "New fragrance from Calvin Klein- Toilet." He was quite certain that when he got home from the trip (it was a 12 hour bus ride), his housemate would ask him, "Eh, why you smell like toilet ah?" But as bad as it sounded, the toilet was really quite alright, like an airplane toilet, only smaller, lousier, smellier and you have to draw the curtain when you pee/shit if not the vehicle next to the bus can see your whole butt.

Other than checking out these toilets, us GIP students are also trying our best to write 2 essays entirely in Chinese. It has been a definite challenge, and my favourite website during this entire time was translate.google.com. Finally, just half an hour ago, I completed my second essay. It seemed impossible, but I'm really done, and my Secondary 1 self would have been proud of that essay.

As we're smack in the middle of the halfway mark, I'm just torn thinking of having to go back home in 3 months time. I want to go back to Singapore, but at the same time, I don't want to. I want to play my basketball again, start on my FYP with my FYP mates, catch up with my friends, but the thought of going back to somewhere too familiar is just so uninteresting. Looking at my lifestyle now where every weekend is a different youth hostel, bunk bed, Italian/Japanese/Korean/Taiwanese soundalike/British room-mate and almost a mini-adventure, and the one back home where it's always Orchard, or if you want variety then maybe City Hall, my mind gets me in a whirl whenever I think about it. I already forsee myself being a little bit different when I go back- at least I'll be having decent hair and a very reinforced concept of what constitutes a fashion disaster- and I envision a "time gap", a duration where I will keep talking and talking and talking about the things in Shanghai. I can just see it now, the blur faces, the irritated faces, and the faces that roll their eyes to which I'll retort "黑暗带给了我黑色的眼睛，而我却用它反白眼”.

Don't get it right? Nevermind la. It's only the halfway mark. There's still 3 more months to go!

It's 6:25pm in Nanjing, China

Best.

Internship.

Ever.

Funny Story

Joyce, Felicia and I were in Hangzhou, on a bench admiring the view of West Lake. Felicia played a Fish Leong song on her handphone, and soon enough, we were in our own world.

I began to close my eyes slowly, taking in the beautiful image of sunlight glistening on the water's surface. and sang the song to myself. At the height of the song-the chorus- I opened my eyes, stopped singing abruptly and gasped.

In front of my eyes was this beggar-he had been standing there for goodness know how long-with a bowl in his hand, just staring at us.

We gave him biscuits and waved him away, but the mood was forever lost.

AND SERIOUSLY, what a way to lose the moment.