Tuesday, September 28, 2010

The First Day Back

I spent my first night back in London at Christoph's.

Never in my life has 12 hours ever felt so trying before. I've never come across so many incidents that make me want to break down, screaming and crying, in a row before. Part of it, really the largest part of it was that my new place was uninhabitable when we were first stepped in. The windows were missing locks, there was no electricity, the refrigerator was covered with mould and the bathroom taps/cistern was leaking water. Coming off a very tiring 14 hour flight (I did watch 3 movies though, on a lighthearted note: From Beijing With Love, Zwartboek and L'Arnacoeur. Zwartboek was VERY VERY GOOD.), it was immensely trying.

Then at the agent's, we find out that we need to pay off 73 pounds of previous electricity debt before we can get electricity, that the landlord who takes care of the property can only come in on Wednesday. I basically counted 6-7 very upsetting things yesterday when I recounted them to Christoph.

Then there was the nasty NatWest lady of eastern european extraction. God. Eventually it cumulated with me listening to the Neon Bible just trying to maintain a semblance of sanity. Finally towards the end of my snapping point, I managed to have a nice conversation with a Tanzanian-Indian shopkeeper around the corner of my place, WHO WAS THE KINDEST PERSON I MET ALL DAY. He told me to take it easy, hahaha.

Then in the silence of my flat (Ching was out with Hardeep and Chen at Argos), I started cleaning my windows and started screaming/crying incoherently.

I felt much better after that.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Gustard Noble

I am already preparing my list of top ten reads for 2010, for there are tomes that I must leave behind in less than 24 hours. My future beckons and looms at the same time, as I do my best to prepare for it.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Separation Anxiety

I have fears about leaving that can't be, and won't be augmented by anything in the world.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

A Suburban War

Some people more than others, find it easier to let go of home.

All I know is, I'm not one of them.

I am so creepy

Bored, I decided to google the asiatic nickname used by an SC2 web commentator and found his blog. It is interesting in a strange voyeuristic manner as he talks in snippets, one paragraph things about stuff like his microwave breaking down to him moving house (and a video of his new house). It is a manner that is distinctly different from how I usually attempt to write here, but yet still captivating.

In other news, last night I watched Hadi's play, Unlike Other People. I must state that of the entire play, the only characters I did not want to strangle to death was Sam (Hadi's role) and Carol. I admit to feeling mostly irritated during the play. I also ran into Asyikin and her friend there. Earlier in the day, I met my uncle for lunch and went to cut my hair, and other little errands. It was a long, tiring day yesterday and I got back at 11:45pm.

Today I went out with Hadi and Cheam for brunch at Wild Honey, then Cedele. Wild Honey is an extremely indulgent place, ohhh the prices! But goodness does the appearance of the food whet the appetite. We wanted to go to TWG, but it was for some odd reason, steaming hot and stifling inside. We left before we even sat down.

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I'll miss those two when I go back to London.

Monday, September 20, 2010

There's a great black wave in the middle of the sea

I have just said "see you next year" to Paul, JLC and Chong Wee (for Daryl I will see in months), for the first time in truth - as opposed to the usual larking about when one is days from a new year. It is a most disconcerting feeling.

Viet Nam

It's been more than a week, and as usual I've been procrastinating about writing about the trip. I've been giving myself so many excuses, that I've run out of excuses. Out of a refusal to accept that I am a bum, I have finally managed to open this damn window and attempt to start writing, if albeit slowly and reluctantly.

Saturday, 4th, Singapore-Danang
We flew it on an early Jetstar flight and changed planes/terminals in Ho Chin Minh city. I was very thirsty in the terminal and wanted to buy a bottle of water, but had 17,000 VND and a 500,000 VND note. A bottle of water was 18,000 VND. The girl shrugged and took my 17,000 VND. Only in Vietnam are bottles of water in an airport lounge negotiable.

On TV in the terminal, there was a Korean movie, dubbed into Vietnamese playing. It was a horror, about some weird skinny ass guy dressed in his underwear brutally trying to kill a girl. As to why he was trying to kill her in his underwear, by hitting her with a wrench, was beyond me. He also missed a blow one time, and hit himself in the hand instead. One wonders if it was really a dark comedy instead. However was was notable about this was that good guy (who was trying to find the girl), bad guy (wrench boy) and hapless girl (who died by the way), all spoke with the same, high pitched, female voice. It's like they could not be bothered to put effort into dubbing and had the same female person speak all the roles, which absolutely no effort into trying to vary the voices. This made the show seem unintentionally hilarious, I mean, how do you take a male murderer who speaks with a girl's voice seriously?

For lunch was ate at a Chinese place, on recommendation from the hotel people. It was apparently one of the fancier places in town, and was probably one of the lower-end places if it was in Singapore. I had wintermelon tea there, which was like shit.

We first took a cab to the Ho Chi Minh military museum in Danang, which was very very old and run down. What was upsetting was not the state of the museum, but that the taxi driver had tipped himself 8,000 VND and refused to return it, so my mood was a little ruined. The run down state was attributable as Danang is not exactly a tourist place. It was then (well and the bigass Communist flag flying out front) that I remembered that Vietnam is still a communist country. From amusing propaganda articles, to even the titles of exhibits, it was gloriously propaganda-istic.

From there, we walked to the Cham Museum (a mistake, since it was far-ish, extremely hot, and the roads were not really walkable), to see sculptures and artifacts taken from My Son (an Angkor Wat like place). Then we walked to Han Market, which was the local market that sold both dry goods and wet ones. It was extremely chaotic inside, and the stores were all packed to the brims. My mother bought a pack of cashews, slightly salted, from there. Tired, we headed back to the hotel around 5pm and rested till 7pm.

On recommendation from Rough Guides, we went to a place called Viet Nam. It was filled with locals, and the waiters did not speak English at all. We ended up pointing at random things on the menu, struggling to ask for vegetables. It was the best meal we ate in the entire trip. The vegetables that came was a salad, with garlic oil dressing, which was wonderful. Then there was the cook coming out and saying beer beer beer, which resulted in her taking my dad's beer and giving him another one (before that she tried talking to me in Vietnamese and failed. This happened many times during the trip. I must look Vietnamese then.), and then returning his beer with like 10ml missing. It later transpired she cooked our prawns in beer... ohhhh lovely. But the best dish, was some beef which was braised in a lime-y, vinegar-y peanut sauce, with larges doses of lemon grass. The taste, was so so wonderful. I spent the rest of the trip trying to look for that dish, but was unable to, sigh.

Back at the hotel, I watched the end of Kung Fu Panda on TV and went to sleep early.

Sunday, 5th, Danang-Hoi An
Early in the morning, we took a taxi to Hoi An. It took about 45 minutes from Danang. We checked into Cua Dai Hotel, and then walked into town. We passed by a lot of tailor shops. We bought the tickets to allowed us to visit different locations, and went into random museums and old houses. Hoi An was very hot. It was the hottest day of the entire trip, and believe me Vietnam was much hotter than Singapore and heatstroke material. At one point I felt woozy, like I was going to faint.

We wandered into an Art Gallery, and there an old lady got up and asked me in English where we were from. I said Singapore, and she replied Xing Jia Po? (Singapore in Mandarin). I replied back in Mandarin and then she started to get all excited and happy. She said when she was younger, the family was all Mandarin speaking. She hadn't spoken Mandarin in years and felt sad about it. She was born when the French were still around, learning it for many years in school and even teaching it as a teacher. She was the 4th generation of Chinese in Vietnam in her family. My dad spoke to her the most, since his Mandarin was the strongest and my mother as usual, wandered off to go shopping. It was sobering for me, because it made me think about how I would never get so excited about speaking Mandarin as I did not regard it as my mother tongue, yet here was this old lady who was practically in tears at being able to converse in the language of her ancestors.

Hoi An was charming in it's sights, and architecture. But there was nothing outright significant about it. It's a place one goes to relax, and was probably the best stop of Vietnam. On Patrick's advice, I ate lots of Cao Lao (hahaha sounds like chao lao), which had all these glorious crunchy bits of what I think was fried pork skin or fat. My mother and I had items tailored there, and I now have a very nice black pencil dress which I am thrilled to bits with. My mother managed to tailor a 3 piece suit for USD99 (talk about a bargain!). I want to go back there again, before I start work.

For dinner, we ate at some place nearby the hotel. The food took ages to come, but was ok. The meal is memorable in that my exposed feet and 1/4 of leg was mercilessly bitten by sandflies while there. Now my legs and feet are all scarred up. The sandfly bites were also severely aggravated by the intense Vietnamese sun, ho boy. It was very terrible trying to not scratch.

Monday, 6th, Hoi An
Woke up early, to a really great spread of food provided by the hotel. Had very yummy pho. Then it was off to My Son for a half-day trip. The bus that picked us up was really weird, because there were no conventional seats but sleeper seats instead, the type that is totally reclined. It was incredibly strange. After a while however, they changed us to a normal bus which had other people loaded onto it. My Son was nice, but also terribly excruciatingly hot. The fact that the Americans had bombed large parts of it to bits helped a little, as it was very well that there was less to see since it was so damn hot. All one wanted to do really was hide in the shade.

Then we took a boat ride, with a small serving of rice and vegetables as lunch, and saw a handicraft village. Watching the wood carvers was quite something. Then the tour ended in the middle of Hoi An. My mum and I went to try on our clothes, which was disgusting since we were coated in a layer of sweat and grime. Then, all 3 of us returned to the hotel where we hid in the nice cool swimming pool for the rest of the afternoon. Night time, we returned downtown to pick up the clothes and had lunch at a nice place there. We ordered Vinegar Beef (again me hoping for the dish from the first night), and it came out as raw beef slices, with a hotpot to dip it in. It was quite interesting, but was not as tasty as originally hoped for.

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I feel lazy to type further. There are still 5 more days to write about. Time will tell if I every really do complete this.

Friday, September 17, 2010

I've probably mentally traumatised some kid from RJC

I've been putting off typing something totally witty and awesome about Vietnam, so here is the email I sent to one of my student mentees:-

"Dear V- (aha, another Wong! Except it is also one of the commonest Chinese surnames around and we probably descended from the same person 1,587 years ago.)

Hello, and welcome to LSE. I'm M- Wong, a 2nd year student, studying Government and History, and will be your student mentor for this academic year. My role is essentially to make the transition into university student life as seamless as possible. This includes answering all those questions deemed too silly to ask during department inductions (or questions perhaps not even relevant to academia), to simply being a friendly figure around an admittedly physically small campus (but nonetheless one teeming to the brims with people). If there are any questions I am unable to answer, I will be able refer you to the relevant departments and support areas in school. I can be contacted during the entire academic year through this email, helloiamanemail@email.com.

As your mentor, I'd like to arrange a meeting on [time, date and location]. Attached to this email is a campus map of LSE for further guidance. This would be to introduce myself and answer firsthand any immediate questions before school starts. Also note that this would be a group meeting with other new students in the Government department, so please let me know if you'd prefer a one-on-one meeting if you think it would be less awkward for you than a group meeting (I promise to try to be as un-awkward as possible in both types of meetings). Please do email me first if you do intend to come to the meeting on the [date] so I can know how many to expect.

For those that have read the email only after the meeting has taken place, or are unable to attend the meeting, also do email me to arrange another meet-up. I almost missed my own meeting with my student mentor last year since it did not occur to me that there would be any important emails sent before school started, so I throughly understand.

Hope to see you on the 30th!


M-


P.S. tiredness, and the hurrah of sending the last email has prompted me to type that odd greeting. If you don't reply I shall assume I have indadvertedly scared you off. Apologies in advance."

Friday, September 03, 2010

B52 Victory Museum, Hanoi

Footprint Vietnam by John Colet:
"This curious place is not really a museum (there is a museum building that always looks shut) but this does not matter because what everyone wants to do is walk over the wings and tail of a shattered B52"

That is the most excellent sentence ever stated on earth for the endorsement of a place of interest. I am so going there.

Thursday, September 02, 2010

Pictures for the words I am lazy to say

An update, in pictures because they are far easier than words.

Last Friday I left M/s A, leaving hand drawn cards for the entire team. Close ups are of those I am more proud of:-











Yesterday I went to the Mooncake Fair at Takashimaya with my Mama and she bought me this lovely mooncake - Almond Beancurd and Longan in Snowskin. It's not really a mooncake, but Almond beancurd wraped in Snowskin. Lovely though!



And today I was out with Daryl at Bras Bersah. We wandered into an art store and I fell in love with this awesome magazine which you cut out pages and have models of real-life Japanese streets/neighbourhoods. I am currently praying I have a nice ledge next to my window in London.


On another note, the Hock Lam beef noodles that used to be on Purvis Street has disappeared >:( I am very upset. Instead, we ate at Yet Con, which while good, was not quite the same.