Tuesday, October 24, 2006

a quick update...

17 October: CUMSA Fresher's Formal was nice. :) so far CUMSA has been such a comforting relief from the hustle and bustle of uni life.. u see people that are your close friends and so u feel like u belong somewhere..

18 October: the first rowing formal swap of the year with the Queens' novice men's team. that was pretty exciting as well.. got pennied tons of times and ended up at the JP talking about god (for some weird reason) and bobbing in a circle for no reason whatsoever. hahaha!

19 October: rowing continues.. had to have lunch on the way to the boathouse and when i got there, there was no cox and no coach! we had to have an ergs training and not go out onto the river. pissifyingg. but it all turned out well in the end i suppose..

21-22 October: OXBRIDGE GAMES!!! we thrashed oxford 18-0 in netball! (Whoohoo!) but lost at all the other games. (because i wasn't playing in those :) ) it was so nice seeing all my friends at oxford (debra, kevin, ajay, ruimin...) and made some new ones too. the rooms at oxford are hugeeee! well, maybe cos it's a double room, but they had a couch and coffee table in theirs with separate bedrooms and all... at the same price as mine too! there wasn't enough time for shopping though..

and todayyy i stayed up all night (and morning) and FINISHED MY HOM ESSAY! yesssssssss. my will power is back! tmr i shall read my dissection notes and look like a pro in the DR. hehhehheh... i wish. not with all these smart alects in cambridge though...

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

funkyard yesterday was surprisingly fun! had a blast of a time with my fellow asians in our night out. :) too bad i didn't take any photos, just slipped my mind though i brought my camera!

it was nice receiving TONS of email from home today.. really made my day even though i had to spend like 2 hours replying to all. and don't worry dad/mum. all the updates are only about the interesting stuff, i don't write things like "oh, i studied so hard today", but that doesn't mean i don't mug hard! rmb i'm nerdy, that's how i came here! :) pers would totally agree to that.

well, maybe i should update about my academic work briefly:
  • i've been to 2 dissections already, it's twice a week and it's disgusting but a good learning process i guess.
  • had PBL today, we're doing a "project" on obesity and we have the hardest question in my opinion out of the 4. :( the good thing was that it lasted 45 min when it should have been 2 hours, so that was such a wonderful surprise.
  • covered the vertebra column and anterior upper limb so far in anatomy, the other topics are far more boring with the usual stuff like diebetes and protein structure and function
  • finished my one and only essay so far (yay!) and have been preparing for lectures every single time! (oh dear i sound like a mugger toad now.)

ok that's enough, i'm scaring myself with my efficiency. HAHA. and i shall spare you now.

  • Sunday, October 15, 2006

    it's sunday!

    and i have nothing to do this morning! feels just wonderful :) thankfully i finished my essay last night so i have the whole of today absolutely free!

    yesterday i rediscovered my scoring touch at netball. wahaha as if i had one before... but yes, i managed to score quite a few in the match. it was real fun! had a good work-out running back and forth. played GA and i think i might be playing next weekend against oxford too! yay :)

    i think i have somewhat found my bearings around cambridge; i can find sainsbury's without aid! yessssss. and i might try walking to the boat house today without relying on my trusty cambridge map. if i manage to do that, i have definitely improved in my direction sense!

    yingmei cooked her na-shou olio pasta last night. there was a dash too much of pepper but otherwise it was nice. we cooked too much though :( the doughnuts, lasagnia-like dish and all of yaoyu and mingyan's chinese cooking didn't help. maybe she can cook it again soon without all the you huos and maybe we'll finish it this time. :)

    Friday, October 13, 2006

    i got my skeleton today.. now it's residing in my room, waiting to be named. i only have half though, possibly since right is the mirror-image of left, so according to my friend, we should name our half-skeletons half names. so one left side could be jose and the right could be phine. and together they make jose-phine! haha that was pretty lame but it was pretty funny.

    today i also learnt some of the geordie (people from newcastle; alan shearer's a classic geordie) accent/lingo. that's mint! actually means that's awesome! and... that's all i can remember sadly. i'll check it out soon though.

    the weather's getting chilly. this morning there was smoke coming out of my mouth! i think i really need to go shopping for warmer clothes or i might just subscribe to the layer-layer-layer mentality. my feet are cold as i'm typing this; the curtain's not keeping the cold out very well.

    i had a nice home-cooked healthy vegetarian pasta tonight. we finished up most of lorna's veggies and i think i could have found my culinary speciality here! :) tmr it's another home-cooked meal with yingmei. im so glad we are keeping in touch frequently cos it's always nice having someone to talk about home. maybe i should invite all the singaporeans over for a nice cookout one weekend.. that would be nice :)

    yes and tmr i have to go for netball practice so we can beat the hell out of oxford next weekend at the oxbridge games! althought we have a history of being thrashed, but hey! anything's possible! :)

    Thursday, October 12, 2006

    pictures!

    i thought i should include some long-overdue pictures... so

    here's the view from my window, pretty eh?


















    and this is the very cool notice board of my block... spot my name!


















    and this is the outside of my dining hall with pers...


















    at the bop with katherine (who lives directly opposite me). the theme was around the world.. so i went as japanese school girl. haha she wanted to do it too but she rightly figured that i could pull it off better than she could. haha

























    i just realised i'm taller than most of the angmoh girls too! wellwellwell... i guess they aren't as tall as i thought they would be. but the guys are much taller though.

    i think 2 entries are enough for one day! till next time. :)
    softball squash yesterday was so disappointing. when they said they were a new society, i didn't expect it to be actually NEW. people weren't sure what was going on and what we should do next. i ate a few chips and left together with yingmei.

    the singapore/malaysia cookout was a much more boistrous affair.. haha my first proper meal in agesss. i ate and ate and ate. had second helpings of main course and dessert. ben & jerry's chocolate fudge brownie never tasted that good. :) for the main course, we had mixed vegetables, black pepper beef (with my black pepper sauce!!!), potato and chicken curry and muchrooms with lettuce! it doesn't sound all that fantastic but it wasss. so nice to be able to drop all the brit slang and talk normally and be understood for once.

    just came back from dissection and this time it was more fruitful! in the first hour or so, all of us were totally lost, didn't know what was happening and all, but towards the end, we managed to find all the flexors and nerves that we needed. the most exciting thing was when the proximal and distal interphalangeal joint at the fingers moved when we tugged on certain tendons that we were supposed to find! really, it was just like stabbing around in the dark until we came upon something that was supposed to happen. :)

    i should be doing some work, but well, it's just after lunch and i'm feeling full and drowsy. i don't have anything until 5pm so that's quite a long time away. lalala

    Tuesday, October 10, 2006

    update from cambridge!

    hello all! sorry for not updating so regularly, it's been busy as you might already know. so in chronological order for your sake and mine, here goes:

    Friday 29th September
    i arrived in cambridge! finally after 10 months of waiting and dallying... took the bus from heathrow station all by myself as there was some mix-up at the ticketing booth. yep quite weird how my family was sitting with all the other singaporeans and i was by myself on the next bus but no fear, jay chou kept me happy and occupied. :) it was a 2.5 hour bus ride from heathrow and i wish i could say the scenery was fantastic but really, it was just fields and red brick houses the whole time. nonetheless, i got to cambridge safely, got my room keys and heaved my 5 luggages up to the second floor (which the brits call first floor.. ) with the help of dad, pers and uncle george.
    went the the bank and got my account settled, which has surprisingly encontered with NO problems whatsoever! all my other friends are complaining about hsbc, but i have none :) pay as you go phone line also settled today.
    the singaporeans met up for dinner and we went on a room crawl to assess which end of the straw we got. i apparantly got the long end! yay.. my room has a wonderful view and it's nice and big, "straight out of the ikea catalogue" as christina puts it. I now have stuck loads of stuff on the wall and it actually looks lived-in already.

    Saturday 30th September
    day off with family. we walked around and I packed my room. Daddy and uncle george wanted to follow the river on foot, so pers helped my by sticking all my pictures together to put up on my wall.
    Went for the international student’s gathering and dinner at the old library at night. Oh ok sidetrack a bit, pembroke’s campus is BEAUTIFUL! If you ever have the chance to visit, I’ll show you around. The lawns are manicured, the trees grow just nicely, it’s straight out of a fairytale!

    Sunday 1st October
    Sunday was the start of fresher’s week at Pembroke. It was also the day that daddy and pers left for London.
    Tea in the old library was ok, I left like after awhile cos it was just tooo many people and it started getting stuffy. So we went to zoe’s room to sort out some of her stuff (zoe’s another medic from Cambridge itself)
    Dinner in hall, our first dinner as a cohort! 3 course meal which was IDENTICAL to the meal I had the night before. Cheater bugs!
    The senior tutor gave a talk after that which was so sleep-inducing I think quite a few pple succumbed to it. haha basically he told us to study hard (!) to maintain pembroke’s high academic standing.
    I met my college family after that and went to Becky’s room for chocolate cake and wine. It was nice. I’m glad I didn’t get like drunks in my family or anyone tooooo wild. They were fantastic!

    Monday 2nd October
    Happy birthday Tee! Oh dear I didn’t wish you at all did I? I hope you read this cos I was planning on sending an email or something to you but I just kept thinking I’ve done it already. So sorry!
    Well, there was a self-defense class which I didn’t go to cos…
    I had to meet my Director of Studies (person in charge of my academic progress) and my Tutor (person in charge of my welfare). They were ok I guess. Can’t really say much about them since I wun get to see them often. It’s prob just going to be once at the start and once at the end of term just as a formality.
    JP (Junior Parlour, the equivalent of student’s council for undergraduates) had a societies bonanza in the afternoon, and I signed up for wayyy too many societies. I have to sift through all the emails now.
    The three-legged (literally) pub crawl which I missed cos I wanted to chill out on the night punting, was quite a disgusting affair. Thankfully I didn’t go. There were weird cream and cracker games with honey smeared on faces and stuff. But the people that went had fun, or so they say…
    The night punting was the event that I had wanted to go on, however, because Nicole’s mum treated us to a nice Chinese dinner at JinLing, we ate so much and so slowly that we missed the punt entirely. We just saw it floating away into the darkness. L so in the end we had a nice chat in Liu Rui’s room at Newhnam.

    Tuesday 3rd October
    Matriculation day today! Took the picture with an ancient camera, the type that needs to pull a black cloth behind the camera. I also signed my name into this huge bound book in the old library with a fountain pen and with that I’m “now and forever a member of Cambridge and Pembroke”! haha that was amusing…
    Fresher’s fair at Kelsey Kerridge (some sports hall) where I signed up for even more societies like rowing, CUMSA, softball (!), badminton with the Queens’ people. And then there was the matriculation dinner. The first time I had to wear the college gown for formal dinner! I HAD to buy it for 45 pounds! Bah. It’s nice and important-looking though. This was supposedly the nicest dinner during a student’s life in Cambridge… that must mean their standard is not very high. It was nice, but not fantastic.

    Wednesday 4th October
    My lessons started today. Was allocated a cadaver today during FAB (anatomy) lecture. Spent the day shopping mostly for groceries and pullovers. I didn’t bring enough warm clothing I think. I have clothes for winter and summer but not autumn. First supervision today, my anatomy supervisor’s v nice! We had a real vertebral column in front of us as she went through all them all.
    In the evening, there was rock night held in the new cellars. This is basically just an excuse to come out and party. There was a live band which was not bad, although I thought they could use a better vocalist. But hey, it was nice and I actually know most of the songs they played so hooray! :) I had fun tonight.

    Thursday 5th October
    My first dissection room experience! We saw our cadaver today, and we almost fainted at the size of him! He was very plump and our demonstrator warned us how much work we will be doing in the future during dissections cos there will be layers and layers of fat to cut through to see anything.
    It was family night and we trooped down to watch Twelfth Night at the ADC after a stir-fry dinner. There’s 4 of us children in my college family and they are all super nice. Yue, the HK guy kept laughing at my accent, and I kept laughing at his! Haha that’s mostly all I can remember during the dinner… just laughing.

    Friday 6th October
    Proper lectures started today. So nothing much happened in the day other than me trying to find my way around town to get to my lectures on time. I am so glad that my college is so centrally placed with respect to the lecture sites. I literally just have to walk out different gates of my college to get to the different lecture sites! No other college can beat that man!
    It was Mid-Autumn Festival tonight and a few of us tried to go to this restaurant to have a nice Chinese dinner, but ended up getting Chinese takeaway instead cos it was wayyy over our budget. But the food was good! And we had a nice time after at Ceilidh in the hall, which is a kind of Scottish dance that nobody knows the steps to and just kinda learn on the spot. People kept banging into me and stepping on my toes but then again, I think I trod on so many other people as well.

    Saturday 7th October
    The sporty day today:
    Pembroke’s big rowing day! I went down to try rowing out and it was great fun! It was so fun that I went for my second outing today and I think I shall try to continue with rowing for the first term and see how after. Apparently, it might require lots of commitment if you are on the first boat (ie, the pro people) but other than that, there are boats for recreational rowing as well. The Pembroke ladies are the head of the waters last year (which means they won the inter-college rowing competition) so we have a high reputation to keep. Hahha. I think I’m not bad at rowing! :)
    Badminton in the morning as well. I now have a new racket thanks to Yao Yu. All I had to do was to re-grip it and it was mine!!! Haha.
    CUMSA Fresher’s Squash next at Magdalene. it was nice seeing all the Singaporeans again and made friends with some other people.
    Then the legendary Cambridge Bop, which loosely translates into a party. It’s funny how the brits dance to cheesy songs and not all the shitty R&B and hip-hop we have in Singapore. Hahha. Ancient songs were playing as remixes and so we had a good time dancing to the funny lyrics! It wasn’t as wild as I thought it would be.

    Sunday 8th October
    I had to take a rest day from all the activities of Fresher’s Week. Consolidated all the lectures I’ve had, bought files and more food. Organized my notes. Housekeeping day.
    Went for the bar quiz at night, which was crap in my opinion. The geography questions were really hard, I couldn’t answer any :( the scientific ones though weren’t as bad.



    And now that Fresher’s Week is over, I have more time to do stuff that I wanna do, although I dun think this week will be less tiring than the last. I foresee tons of work coming my way.

    Ok till next time. This is too much to read. Thanks for reading all the way to the end, although I doubt anyone managed to sit through all that above!