For dinner today, I found myself alone and searching for a seat in a kopitiam in Clementi. After walking one round around the kopitiam, I came to the conclusion that there were no empty tables to be found and instead switched to looking for people who had a table and looking willing to share and came across an old man. When I say old man, I meant older than my 70 year-old-grandfather sort of age. If I could guess he was at least in his eighties, or he could have just been one of those unfortunate people who aged fast.

After asking to share the table with him in Mandarin, I went off to buy food - chicken rice and returned. As I sat there opposite him, sharing a small two person table, I felt my mind race and sprout out various questions. I wanted to ask him how old he was, his name, where he stayed, who was the first person he ever loved, what did he regret most in his life, what advice did he have for the young? The only thing that really hindered me from doing so (besides the sheer oddity of it all), was the language barrier. What if he said something I didn't understand? Wouldn't it be too weird? So in the end I didn't.

After he finished his food, he got up and left and I said bye to him in Mandarin. He turned and gave me a small wave, and walked off to wherever he was headed.

-----

Today was Bring A Pillow To School Day - so I brought my pillow (actually a cushion) to school. It came in really handy when the Indian Lady didn't turn up for Biology,so I returned to class to nap. Except it wasn't a really good nap; just like how I've been having nothing but bad sleep for the past 2 weeks. But at least I got to rest, sort of.

Ice Skating after school was pretty enjoyable, but for some reason this week the rink was really really crowded. Worse still, it was filled with amateurs and idiots. The problem with amateurs/beginners is that I can't stop, and they can't stop. So I have to worry about them skating onto my path and me not being able to stop in time (this problem I try to avoid by skating away from the sides of the rink). My next problem is how they love to link hands together and skate in one mass of epic fail. When you link hands, you are blocking my path. I don't really want to have to plow through your mass of uselessness. Also when you are skating in a line and suck at skating, when one person goes down so does the rest of the line. Today I saw a few lines skate themselves to doom and people falling left right centre. Once I saw this bunch of kids dressed in school uniform (how the hell did they get in?) link hands and skate, and one girl fell on the ice and a few others tumbled on her. She ended up sitting on the ice crying and saying 'hen tong!' and everyone else just skated around her. Some of her friends even went off to skate, leaving her and a few others of the group to stand around her helplessly.

The idiots part came mainly with the speed skaters, who looked to be in some sort of gang setting - from what I saw last week and this week. They would skate at insane speeds around the rink, deftly avoiding people but making me worry that they would inadvertently crash into me. They also gathered in corners to scrape ice (which ruins the surface and is bad for skating). Two of those gangs even got into a shouting match on the ice - and when one guy skated away the other chased after him. I kind of hoped they'd fight, because it would be some kind of awesome to see people fighting on ice skates, disregarding aggressive ice hockey.

My last gripe were these two kids (about 8 - 10+) I saw on the ice. They were skating with the frames for support (so well they weren't really skating) and were zooming all over the place. They were like the speed skaters but without sensibility, skill and less consideration. I saw them zooming all over the place, indiscriminately crashing into people. When one of them skated into a cone (how the hell? It's a stationary object) and fell over, he couldn't even get up and some guy had to come lift him up. I almost wanted to tell the guy to not help him since the kid was being such a dickhead. They even skated into some girl that I had helped earlier. She had lost her rings when she fell. I can only imagine she lost her rings again when she fell down the second time. The first time when I helped her she was complaining about being wet - now she was even wetter. I saw her complaining to one of the ice skating coaches on the rink who had skated to her when she fell.

On the upside, I managed to avoid falling down today. So this makes it the first time I have been on the ice since P3 when I first went ice skating. I think this is 6th time I've skated before. Today I also managed to skate faster both frontwards and backwards + mastered the wiggle method of skating backwards. I'm really enjoying the ice skating, which kind of makes me wonder what would have happened if I really did have the ice skating lessons with Petrina, Krystle and Linette in Sec 1 - like we planned. But then again life is filled with many loose ends, what-ifs and possibilities and that was but one of them.