sway

i have a bad feeling for this term.

class part is the bane of my life !

and so is excel !

the FRS is slowly boring me to death too.

and an impending departure will probably kill too, like term 1 last year. i hate term1s.

FUCK TECHNOLOGY

seriously.

okay, i use vulgarities very sparingly. so when i do use one, i am usually very ticked off, and have good reason to be. or at least i would like to believe so.

first i dropped my handphone for the first time with this 2-mth old phone. and the lcd screen cracked like nobody's business. i cant view anything on my screen. i have dropped my other phones many times and nothing has happened. so naturally i was already quite miffed that this happened, but nevermind. blame it on my carelessness.

then nokia tells me that such damages are not covered under warranty. and i would have to pay $80-$150. fine, but then i would have to wait in the queue for 2 hours at wheelock. so i decided to go to causeway point. woman tells me the queue is 1hour long, which sounds rather reasonable.

then. i looked at my number, i was like 90 persons away from being serviced ! but i decided to wait since the woman said it'll take an hour. after an hour and a half, i am FAR FAR away from being serviced. my mom took over the waiting and i went home. and she gave up, because the fucking queue wasnt moving at all ! and moving backwards, in fact.

like wtf. i came before the supposed peak hour. and the least nokia could do was to open a few more counters during peak hours where there is almost a frigging mob outside the care centre. if i had waited patiently there, i would have waited over 3.5 hours. that, is longer than any queue at a polyclinic, hospital or airport where heaps more customers walk through the doors. i now fully comprehend the importance of my management science lesson i had this morning. nokia's service is disgustingly inefficient.

and yes, i did try to bluff my way to the front of the queue by saying i had a flight to catch (haha ! )but they told me to produce my air ticket. screw them !

and to top off my technological woes, i have my memory card problem which is still unsolved. my useless creative mp3 player with the damaged headphone jack, and my laptop which needs reformatting. BADLY. except cit is bursting with people i can never find the time to reformat it.

technology is unreliable. i should just live in the stone age and start fire with rocks. maybe i'll be better off and less annoyed ever so often.

no faces at all.

really random. will have more of these pretty shots soon once i get my memory card restored. which i hope, is soon.

went to borders and got myself reminiscences of a stock operator. that book better be worth the $40 i paid for.

i just had a magnum. havent had good ice cream in 3 weeks, and the queue at haato today was too long. always thought magnum was the poorer cousin of b&j, haagen daaz etc but the taste of magnum today was sweeter than sweet.

.. and school starts too soon.

this one and only.

i am exhausted. i havent really had a decent rest since i returned. sleeping terribly late and waking up ridiculously early. and i've been in school almost everyday for the video editing which is going to take forever since we have hours and hours of footage.

oh, the stayover last night was fun though !

my friends managed to salvage 40 pictures from my ruined sd card today. at least now i know the data is salvageable. everybody's praying for my sd card because it contains lots of pretty pictures !

i have also allocated sunday as my sleep-in and rest day, but now i have to go for tuition on sunday morning.

and hmm i just compiled a list of books i want to read.
1. The world is flat by Thomas L Friedman
2. A random walk down wall street by Malkiel, Burton
3. Bets and the City by Sally Nicoll
4. Extraordinary popular delusions and the maddness of crowds by Charles Mackay
5. Manias, Panics & Crashes by Charles Kindleburger

and to finish reading Adventure Capitalist. oh and a thousand splendid suns by khaled hosseini.

i'm writing all these down because i always forget what i want to read.............. i feel like buying books.

this is lugu lake, near the borders of sichuan. me pretending to row the boat. i lost the picture where i was really rowing the boat. sighh. peonies
dinner at perhaps the worst restaurant. please dont go to backpacker's home for dinner if u ever visit lugu lake. we were doing the stick-heads-together thing in this picture.
and this picture too.
this is urh, tee kian hin in his own element.

my room.
roomies ! my new 8-yuan hair cut !

this is one of the hotels that we stayed at in dali. it's so quaint. there are seats to play chess outside and people doing taiqi in the morning. how quintessentially chinese.
lugu lake.

perhaps the best day of all: we went visiting at a translator's house and she brought us to swim at this creek !
and we all jumped in in our jeans.
i really like this picture ! except weina's face is blocked !
and naturally, we started the water splashing.
a very mortifying trip leader.

overzealous locals that went to gan bei with us a little too many times.
bbq-ed corn at fuzhong's house. fuzhong is our translator.
the mini trail around his house.
my daily walk to the orphans.
this was after we got the mountains.

view from top ! took about 2 hours to climb up and nearly died.
but it was all worth it, i say.
pretttay aye.
that's the nujiang river.

of floating butterflies and watered sands

us ! minus weina who was taking the picture.
the bridge that i cross everyday to get to the orphans
my first, rather disastrous math lesson.
the view everyday.
a typical meal

my trip was pretty damn fun ! except my memory card died and i got into a fit last night when i accidentally deleted half of my remaining pictures. i really do pray that somebody can extract the data from my sd card. because lots of them used my camera to take pictures. boo.

so now i can only leave you with pictures from my friend's camera. i'm supremely disorganized so i dont think the pictures will appear in order.