getting on race!

the race yest was fabulous! it's all in the pics!

here we are, anxiously waiting the start of the race. we were marshalling at the end nearest the log and just waiting, feeling absolutely cold.. luckily i bought the spash jacket to keetp warm woo. we all look nice and uniform! i love the colours! light and dark blue :) with the red martlet (our mascot) on the front.

and then to keep warm. we devised a plan of exercise. bow side hand up! stroke side hands out! hahha then continue in time with stroke (rosie) with the cox (peter) counting.. hahah! i bet the other boats were mystified at what we were doing, cos we were laughing so hard at the same time too

look at the queue for the start of the race! we were racing at the end of the men's division, so that explains the men's boat behind us. each boat gets set off like 30 seconds after the previous boat goes, and this was a time trial racing the entire bumps course. if we get top 8 out of all the women's boats racing today, we get into BUMPS! which is only like the biggest racing event in lent term! we've been training for this for the whole of term! going out earlier and earlier each week as it gets lighter earlier now. it was 6.30am last week!

Pembroke W4 on the river! still waiting to be called up to the start line.

"all rocking over backwards at the same time! following the person in front!" typical cox speech. haha. oh i should have bought the tech top too! that the picture would look totally uniformed.

cat and i! after the race, totally shattered but looking please for ourselves.

and this is how we were all feeling! woooo helen! i hope she gets to change her flight so i can bring her around singapore during the summer! :):)

right then, now back to the tons of work that has been piling up. :S

BUMPPPSSSS!!!

WHOOOOOO WE GOT INTO BUMPS! YAYYY! 4TH BOAT ROCKS!

omg! i can't believe it! we rowed so hard yesterday in the crazy wind and managed to get into top 8 out of all the 2nd and 3rd boats as well! we're the only 4th boat in the entire cambridge that got in man! it feels amazing! bumps is going to be amazing! i can't wait! 4 days of rowing like we've never rowed before to try to bump the boat in front! and if we can, bump everyday and jump as many places as possible in the line-up! ahhhh excitinggg stuff.

after the GoR yest, ym and i ended up cooking pesto linguini and omelette. yumyum.. i think it was because of the race, i didn't feel full at all when she did, which is a major achievement haha. we hung around, meng came joined in to play mahjong! i won a few times and then we felt it's time to watch a movie. somehow i brought them on a tour of foundress court, although there wasn't much to see, bumped into morna in the music room and i played the piano for one of the first times in cambridge! wooo! i should go down more often now, just so i don't forget how to play it. haha. the common room was empty, thank goodness, and we settled down to watch pulp fiction. which is a pretty weird film and i promptly fell asleep cos i was just so tired.

it's been a rather lousy morning in terms of productivity, all i did was print out my visa form, which took ages cos all the available printers refused to work. and i finally filled out my form.

ahhhh LUNCH now! hungry again!

I HAVE TO BE AT THE BOAT HOUSE IN 57 MINUTES! wooo it's getting excitingg.

OCEP visa application needs to be done today as well. these people give me things last minute.. not good! but i've done almost all of it, photocopied tons of stuff, now all i have to do is actually fill in the form heh.

CUMSA manifestos just came in! it all looks good! ben and i have a devious plan, haha basically our position now is looking steady. have to think of a speech for sunday now.

i'm looking forward to later tonight too! yingsters is cooking me some basil chicken thingy which just sounds so yummy. and butterfly effect! finally! and hopefully i'll get some work done after that too, stay up and do work, that's my plan for today!

ok ok it's now 49 minutes to be atbh! have to change into my pembroke rowing gear woooooo! :)

i'm just so happy that yest and today is over! these has been my busiest days yet! i'm just so relieved..

for the first time, i finished my essay with only 5 minutes to spare.. what with all the rowing practice making me so tired every night. and for the past two days, i have been going out to the river, even earlier than normal at 6.30!! worse still, it started pouring today halfway through the outing.. i was drenched, every single part of me was wetwetwet! :( ughh. surprisingly this was my first wet outing... weather's been pretty good during our outings, maybe we're just lucky. people had to row in SNOW before! although that would have been sooo pretty.

had PfP yesterday..personally, i think it's a waste of time cos you can just go and shadow a GP for a few days and that's PfP for you! but i have to say that the visit to a patient's house was good! lorna and i did that the last time, so this time we were stationed in the surgery and had our own little consulatation room. so we saw the patients and talked to them a bit before their actualy consultation with the GP. hmm somehow it has made me think that being a GP is a relatively easy life, especially from seeing our GP here in cambridge. he has a grand total of 3 patients a day! and his reasons for being a GP is that he doesn't want to leave home that much and also doesn't want to work in the hospital, presumably cos it's too stressful. seems like a nice laid back chap.

yesterday i cycled more than i every did in cambridge. biked to mill road for PfP, biked back, biked to wolfson for isbm supervision and biked (or more like raced) back with hannah and lorna. plus rowing at the beginning of the day and the next morning as well. wooooo exercise overload! my legs are like jelly now.

oooo. getting-on race is on the FRIDAY........ hope we get into bumps! but then i'll be missing like tons of classes if we do. sooo hmm. well, we have to see how to go in GOR. 10 in 36 chance of getting in..

SNOW, FRIENDS AND CNY!

hello again! it's been a rather interesting few weeks and there were loads squashed into the space of a few days. seriously i think i'm doing much more than i've ever done in my life in one day when i'm in cambridge, also cos i'm surviving on 5 hours of sleep on average every night. me and my secret weapon: coffee! :)

several major happenings since i last came here:

1. MAHJONG! wahh our mahjong set finally arrived in the post. meng and i got duped into thinking it's the normal sized one, and it turned out as a little parcel that fit into his pigeon hole! oh well. we love it all the same. it's with me atm, heh cos somebody went to france to ski, leaving me and my mahjong set here in cambridge.

so do i listen to his plea to wait till he comes back to play? no, of course not. it's been rather well-used already woo :)

2. THE GREAT CAMBRIDGE ESCAPADE! from london.

oooh xiufang, whui, caroline, laura and cheryl descended upon cambridge for a whole weekend last week. i'm still feeling the withdrawl symptoms, which clearly shows how much fun that was. even though we didn't get much time to study for steeplechase after. but it all works out perfectly since i still managed to pass. don't know how though..

we did all sorts of touristy things that weekend, made me realise how lucky i am to be actually studying here. it's just too good for words. hmm it's weekends like this that kinda refreshes your perspective of studying at a top-notch university.

went for the customary formal at pembroke (where else?), punting, just having loads of fun. :)

3. SNOWWWW!!

ahhh pretty pretty snow, and proper snow at that! snowed from morning till the afternoon. and the snow actually remained on the ground till the next day! ahh nic and i went around cambridge early in the morning before lectures just to take pictures of postcard-worthy scenes.

view from outside my window when i woke up and opened my curtains to this vast blanket of snowww.. heavenly.

our secret garden unveiled by some magnificent photography (in my opinion haha) it seems so untouched, yet so mysterious. i love this shot. it's my backgroud atm.

nic and i trying our best to catch some snow. to the amusement of pple standing nearby. background's king's college.

and u can't have a series of snapshots of cambridge without a picture of the river cam. this is the view from the tit hall bridge. the snow just makes everything look so picture-perfect!

4. CNY CELEBRATIONS!

it's chu yi today! and we had our own little reunion dinner at queens' the night before. haha cooked up a storm i tell u! so many dishes yet we managed to finish them all! for the rest of the night: drinking games + karaoke = tons of fun and laughter! haha. it was one of the better cookouts/gatherings i've been to so far woooo. poor ian was hugging everybody at the end of the night and had to be escorted back to his room sans spectacles! which i hope has been found and returned to him.

looks like we didn't leave home at all eh?

look at all the fooooood! took us like 2 hours to cook everything but it was worth every single minute! ahh the claypot rice was like better than original! and my ha cheong gai! yummm. lady's fingers, lamb curry!

and finally, the people that made it all work! :) xxx

i realised i haven't updated much these few weeks. maybe i'm not a blogger person. somehow it's not on my priority list of things to do for the day/week. but reading other people's blogs tells me that it might be a good avenue to just write down what i feel. hmm.

well, the start of term has been ok, test and all were sat for and freaked out over, now i've descended back into the normal routine of rowing in the morning, rushing for 9am lectures (cos i have no bike and am too lazy to trek to churchill to pick it up), wondering how the morning can fly by with all the lectures and then, think of what to do for lunch. most of the time, i eat with the singaporeans or morna. manu has recently realised the value of living so close to lectures so she sometimes comes over for lunch if she has afternoon lectures/practicals. then in the afternoon, it's supervisions and normally napping and wasting time before i realise it's about dinnertime, then i try to cramm some stuff into my head, but it almost always never works. dinner is like the time i look forward to everyday, especially if i have dinner plans: cookouts! ooh how i love cookouts! chance to have home-cooked proper chinese food and chat with friends and not have to bother about having an accent or how they think of me.

last night i just had laksa with ben alex mich. oh prima prima, the best thing that happened for instant singaporean food! ben says it's only slightly more expensive in london/cho mae; i should really go down to cho mae one day to see what they have. i'm sure i'll come back a happier jasmine.

it's also time for balloting who i stay with next year and i'll probably be balloting with morna and the economists. i don't know if it's a good idea, cos initially i was just planning on going with morna since she's been my best friend here ever since last term, but now she's with all her economist pple who are also quite close, so i might get isolated at times.. nicole also asked me to ballot with her but it's only up tp 4 people in one ballot.. aye i hope it sorts itself out soon.

recently, i've also been spending loads of time with the singaporeans/malaysians rather than my angmoh friends. they all seem to have congregated into their own little groups, even the medics. i'm alright with all the groups, but not like part of it (as what yingmei said as well). i dunno, i've been rather like a hermit these few days, only going out for dinners and staying in if i can cos i'm so tired after rowing. i've descended into chinatownland somehow. quite tricky to rectify the situation now though cos i'm always happy with the asians and love hanging out with them, but i also want to get back with the angmohs cos it's just a nice feeling to be included in their chitchat and all that.. aiyah see how it goes la. nothing i can actively do anything about but maybe go to more pembroke events!