Hello summer 2009:) After an extremely trying semester, the holidays are finally here! It's wonderful to be back home. The little concrete jungle, the narrow roads, the unforgiving sunshine and the HORRIBLE humidity. Singapore seems to be a place of constant changes. Even if I am away for only 4 months, there are always differences-new construction work, boon lay no longer the last stop on the east-west MRT line, juicy couture finally coming to Singapore haha.

But more importantly, I guess what is changing are my perspectives. I spent the first semester feeling extremely lost. Living on my own, away from people I've grown so comfortable with was not easy. Spent way too much emoing. Second semester was much better. Was way more focused and successful, most of the time, at putting aside messed-up emotions. Felt pretty good about the courses even though results are still less than desirable. There was a much stronger sense of direction.

Now summer. Sighs, why are all the besties not in Singapore? Miss you guys horribly, its amazing how we are now scattered all over the place. People whom I used to stick with 24/7 are miles away and I see them once a year or something. As soon as I get back my passport, I'll be booking my flight to Beijing. Ha, this internship should be very interesting. Going to make the best out of it. The city should be interesting, had a wonderful time there 3 years ago:))

I'd rather

1) Spend 5 hours debugging my Matlab code
2) Do 6 stats problem sets
3) Take the rref of a 20 by 20 matrix by hand
4) Write another fws essay

...than studying any more for EAS 2200!!!!

Not dropping this course is the single biggest mistake made this entire semester!!!! I got completely conned by the prof omg.

I'm going to burn all my EAS notes tonight after the final and sell back the super expensive and super useless textbook.

Oh joy!

oh god, I keep seeing someone that looks like you at the engineering library. The similarity is uncanny. Perhaps thats the closest I can ever get to you for now; I just want to go back home.

Back from Spring Break! I think it was the much needed holiday after weeks of painful and intense studying:/ San Francisco was great except that it was way colder than I thought, tshirts and tanks had to be layered with sweaters/jackets all the time. Guess the bay area isn't so warm after all:(

What an exciting journey to SF! It is the story we told n-times to the rest of the Cornell Singaporean freshies with a mixture of amusement, delight and exasperation. Since we were dropping by NYC, 3 of us thought that we should go to Nonya for lunch:) Singapore food, yum yum! Being the extremely cheapos we are (just like the parking in Atlantic City), we refused to pay a $2 parking fine. After approximately 30 mins, we went out and discovered a $115 parking fine. 115/2=57.5 times, OMG, not funny at all:/ After that, due to the horrid NYC traffic, we reached JFK only to discover that we exceeded the 24 hours for car rental and were charged a extra day for our car. OOPS.

By then, we were running really late and ran all the way to the boarding gate. The guys ran really fast, with poor (and slow) me trailing at the back. Although we were erm 5 mins early, the idiot at the gate informed us that "the plane has already taxied off." Omg, all of our faces fell and I only remember myself saying that I don't want to go SF anymore. Even more stupidly, our luggages were on the plane, which proves that the U.S. security system is full of loop holes. Thank goddness for the guys who remained relatively calm and rational. We got onto the standly for the flight early next morning and managed to get a nice (though not very cheap) hotel near JFK. We even had the mood to play german bridge in our hotel room:)

Oh well, there are many other things that happened that I am too lazy to type out in detail at the moment. Like my not-so-pleasant rollercoaster rides at six flags lol (apparently I am still as fearful as ever of heights), and the absolutely painful trek to see hr's not that giant trees at Yosemite, or the fact that we got pages 3 times for our flights-.-,or the extremely boring afternoon on the lawn at Berkeley, or spending half of our time at Alcatraz dodging bird droppings-.-, or all the gossiping at the Montery Aquarium HAHA. I guess sometimes its the weird and unexpected stuff that makes a trip interesting and memorable after all.

In addition, you really get to see people more clearly when you spend such an extended period of time with them. I guess on this trip, I had given quite a bit of thought to analysing people, watching them more closely and hopefully evaluating for myself their characters. Some in good ways, some in perhaps less pleasant ways.

More importantly, I realize that I am very grateful to some of the people around me. Like my 2 travelling companions who (whether on purpose or otherwise) still can make me laugh inspite of our terrible luck. For settling all the details like renting cars, finding directions etc. Also, eventually, despite my whinning, complaning, and lots of gu-niang behaviour while hiking at Yosemite, walked with me back in the dark and helping me to stay on my feet when I am near slipping and falling (which happened 89.798% of the time), and of course jy who came back to wait with me when I sadly gave up halfway through the hike and his constant reasurance that we can navigate by the stars and not be gobbled up by bears-.- And of course thanks to yw who always faithfully did the research for us every night:)

For now, its back to the cold (yes, Cornell is STILL cold) and in-the-middle-of-nowhere Ithaca. Oh well, I remember saying to someone that Cornell's isolation is comforting in its own ways. I still think so, this morning it was snowing and by late afternoon, the sun came out and it was absolutely beautiful outside with the gorgeous sunshine flooding into my window. Little things like that make me really happy:)