DRYER 1, MATT 0

Today i did the laundry myself for the third time ever - i dunno why after using it twice i suddenly seemed to forget how to use the dryer - after loading it i swiped my card and pressed the appropriate button but then nothing seemed to happen - so i repeated the process a couple of times, but to no avail. There were no other free dryers available (one of them had a pair of track shoes and nothing else in them and was not switched on but didn't want to take them out just in case the owner would get angry) so i waited patiently for someone to clear her own clothes from another dryer before transferring my laundry to that dryer.

It was then when i realised that i didn't know where i had put the softener sheet that i'm supposed to chuck into the dryer together with the clothes - i had taken it out a minute before but within that minute i had lost it... I searched among the laundry and in both dryers but could not find it. And rather than potentially wasting another sheet, i just happily assumed that it was somewhere in the dryer with the clothes.

It was when the same problem occured with this new dryer that i finally realized that the first dryer wasn't spoiled, it was just that i was not following the proper procedure. Then later on, after i had unloaded the dryer, i took a casual look in the original one and lo and behold, suddenly the softener sheet decided to appear visible to me again, when just half an hour prior to that i could not find it in the same dryer...

So that's basically a long-winded and boring way of saying that i've been pretty blur today - on top of this whole dryer fiasco there also was my leaving the room key dangling from the key hole facing the corridor and earlier on my failure to look carefully at the laptop screen which, to cut a long story short, resulted in my having to pay at least US$30 more than i should have for my Chicago tickets... It's highly annoying...

Well, in other noteworthy news, today also marked my first day in living memory whereby i had a purely vegetarian diet. Glazed Blueberry Doughnut from Krispy Kreme (though i'd think that it must be one of the most unhealthy vegetarian thingies around - and i dunno - maybe they use animal shortening too), Berry Lime Sublime smoothie from Jamba Juice , a free (it's some charity thingy with the Make-A-Wish Foundation) scoop of Cole's Creation at Cold Stone Creamery, a huge slice of artichoke and sun-dried tomato pizza with some fancy name that i can't remember from Pepper's Pizza, and then a Twix bar just now. The food wasn't bad, but this is honestly something that i could never keep up doing - i need my meat...

That ain't me...

Well just now when i was walking back to the room from the library along the road - it was past midnight mind you - this guy in a white pickup suddenly pulled up beside me and loudly cursed "f*** you, n*****!". Then he immediately sped off and that was the end of it - never even got a real look at the guy.

Of course initially i was a little shocked - then i prayed a blessing upon him (seriously) and laughed to myself, wondering if a) it was so dark that the guy didn't manage to take a good look at me before choosing his cuss words, b) the second cuss word has a broader meaning than what i had always thought it meant, c) the North Carolina sun has burnt me so much that i appear dark enough to have other people perceive that i'm of some other ethnicity...

Ah but more seriously - i wasn't like offended or anything (especially since the words don't appear to apply to me) - but still this has been my first overt encounter of anything of this sort since i've arrived here - i've experienced it before, yes, but never (albeit misdirected) verbal abuse - something to ponder over i guess...

Earlier today i had my xiong gender welfare class - which btw i almost never open my mouth at, mainly because my thought processes are so delayed that whatever i want to say gets mentioned before i can say it. Amusingly enough, my prof, this nice German lady asked why i wasn't talking more, especially when (and you have no idea how happy i was when i heard this) my written work was well-written. Then she remarked something to the effect of "but i suppose zat it is more difficult for you because of ze language barrier ya?" (ok she didn't say ya - i just added it in because it's like ten percent of the German that i know...) I immediately responded that no, English is my first language - though now methinks that maybe i should just have kept my mouth shut in order to use that as an excuse to keep quiet...

Shall be booking my tickets to Chicago shortly =)

Retreat

Just got back from the IV student retreat at Emerald Isle - first i'll make the usual announcement that for pics, since i'm too lazy to upload them over here and also because if i did so i'd be posting them in two seperate sites which is pretty redunxant methinks, do take a look over there =======>

Well, the retreat took up almost the entire weekend, which meant that i had to cram as much work as possible before i left - which is also good in the sense of having the bitter before the sweet (xian1 ku3 hou4 tian2 - i like bitter stuff though, particularly bittergourd so maybe that isn't the best figure of speech to use...). Thankfully the more pertinent stuff (the weekly response for the tough gender welfare course i'm taking) was cleared by the time i left on Friday afternoon - and i even had time to clear my emails and waste some time in mindless chilling here and there in between... There's still two tests this wednesday to keep in mind though, especially since i have not really done much reading for either of them, and i looked at the past papers for one of them and i really didn't know how to go about answering the questions asked. I'll see if i can leave them as much for the week itself though - am trying as far as possible to keep my Sundays work-free (it helps to be lazy in this sense i guess =p)

The retreat itself was a great experience - the venue itself was really cool - it's in the southern Outer Banks - basically a chain of barrier islands along the northern NC coastline - which basically means that the island is very thin and long, and you can see the coast on both sides when you stand in the middle of the island - i reckon that as some points, it's no more than 200 metres wide. The water on one side is a sound - an inlet of sea water seperated from the open ocean by the island itself, and needless to say the water on the other side is the open ocean itself...

I don't want to always draw comparisons between how things go about in IV and the same back in VCF, but anyways, basically it's different... But i still had a good time at the retreat - time to spend some good (and some not so good) time alone with God, to meet new people, to have some fun, to have old and new things alike (re-)impressed upon my heart; that sort of thing...

The weather was just at it's minimally-acceptable temperature to be doing stuff at the beach - so i got acquainted (or at least tried to) with American Football - till the end i still was pretty clueless as to stuff like which direction am i supposed to run if i do catch the ball (and i managed to do so once - hooray for that) and that sort of thing... Frisbee wasn't very successful either - cos the strong winds blowing in from the sea muddled the course of practically every frisbee throw. Riding the surf didn't work out too well either - the waves were much stronger than the other time, so often the waves just picked me up and deposited me in shallower waters - but not before giving me nasty scratches on my chest, elbow and knee from rough contact with the sand (looked like i kena mauled by a domestic cat) - there was one wave which even caused me to do an underwater half-cartwheel before landing hard on the sand left shoulder first - not exactly a painless experience - and of course i probably exceeded my day's required sodium intake in all of an hour in the water... But even with all that, it was fun you know...

Yeah and on top of that there was other stuff like singing bizarre action songs (Baby Shark!), stories told that one will never forget, an ice-cream eating contest out of the gutter (that was an experience for sure)... Yup but too bad i have no pictures of those, and it's no fun to just verbally describe all this stuff without y'all actually seeing it, so i'll just leave it at that...

We had good lodgings while we were there - they rented some nice beach houses - far better than what we have in sentosa that's for sure - only problem's that they had to spread everyone out - less than 10 per house, and there were 130 people in total, so it was harder to get to know more people (oops i'm comparing again...)... I enjoyed how i was able to wake up early in the morning and sit on the porch and read the Bible - such a refreshing environment...

This morning i actually wanted to go for a run - reminds me of running at ECP, only far cooler and far more scenic - but i decided to pass because of a lack of time. I was semi-regretting not running afterward cos i helped myself to some Hostess frosted chocolate donettes - then i took a look after that at the nutritional information at the back of the box, only to realise that just three of the little donettes (only two inches in diameter) - incidentally the number of donettes i ate was three - would already account for 45% of one's daily recommended saturated fat intake or something or other - troubling... (though of course those thingies were so addictive that i ate one more anyways...)

Alright, back to school tomorrow then, hope can find time to finalize fall break plans...

ta!

'sup

Random guy on my floor: "Yo man, whassup?"

Moi: *soft mumbles of acknowledgement*

The preceeding is basically an exchange that occurs repeatedly, day after day on my floor whenever i bump into one of the guys. Up till now, i have no idea what i'm supposed to say, or even if i'm supposed to say anything at all anytime one of the guys say hi. Is it a rhetorical question, a matter of mere courtesy when they ask me what's up, or do they really want me to respond by saying what's really up with me? Well, until i find out the answer to that question, they're just gonna have to settle with more soft mumbles of acknowledgement (with a smile on my face, of course) from me...

Gosh, there have been several things happening over the past few days, and as usual i shall try and recap the more noteworthy ones.

Just now at one of my recitations (a poli sci class) they were talking in passing about the coup in Thailand, then my neighbor (who in his defence added the disclaimer that he didn't mean to be ignorant) turned and asked me "hey, that's not where you're from, is it?" Well i guess better one speculating whether Singapore's in Thailand than one placing us as the capital of Malaysia, or that all-time favourite, somewhere in China

When i called home a few days back, one of the pieces of news that i received was that my father has in the end decided to abandon his initial plan of extending the COE of his twenty-year-old 1 litre Suzuki Supercarry by another ten years and instead get around to new car shopping, something that he hasn't really done in, well, twenty years... And i can't for the life of me figure out why, but apparently my occasional semi-joking comments that i'd not get a driving license if he did not decide to buy a new car instead played a part in the decision to get a new car after all. This is by far the closest my parents have come to pushing me to get a license, which in part explains why i have not bothered to get one up till now, which does irk me so, especially when i am in a land where i'd be hard-pressed to find any college student, even those half a decade younger than me, who does not drive. So anyways, yes i promise to finally get down to at least taking basic theory once i get back home.

My left fingertips are very sore now after being roped in to play for some IV thingy just now - just a small thingy, nothing big. I think i in part agreed cos i wanted to have an excuse to borrow a guitar and practice something before i forget everything, but the overall experience was a good one for me - am starting to get a better feel of how IV works - it's definitely very different from VCF, that's for sure. It was an acoustic guitar, hence my fingertips, which even now complain as i type this...

And while we're on the topic of IV, i'm most probably going for Urbana now - starting to get quite excited about the whole thing actually - but i guess i've to keep praying about it cos right now think i'm only set on going cos it's Urbana after all, and everyone's telling me that i should go, and it's in a part of the US i've never been to before.

Which brings me to travelling - am getting a bit of a headache planning when to go where and whether to go where else, cos the time's really tight and i do want to go to as many places as possible. Have to take into account so-and-so and this-and-that, it gets rather troublesome, and furthermore i shouldn't be thinking about travelling so much, at least not at the expense of work, after all i'm primarily here for school, and not to gallavant around the country.

Have more or less settled on a church i want to regularly attend for the rest of the time i'm here. As of and including this upcoming Sunday, i would have spent every Sunday in the US so far (and for the record, the magic number is eight) in a different church. Of course, half of those were because i was in different cities, but the rest consisted of all the churches in the Chapel Hill/Durham area that i was considering going to, as well as to which i could hitch a ride to as well. I won't name names of churches cos don't think that would be very nice, but suffice to say over the past two months or so i've seen a broad range of service styles including worship and messages. Some had worship that i greatly enjoyed and was blessed by, but then would have a message that to me was basically a string of anecdotes with a Bible verse thrown in here or there for good measure, while others had a solid, Biblically-centred message, but had worship that resembled a rock concert of some sort more than a time of focus upon God. At the last church i went to however, there was a balance that to me was good - so what's left now i guess is to find a permanent ride there week by week.

But this weekend i'll be out of town, cos am going for another IV event - the new student retreat at this place in the Outer Banks (part of the North Carolina coastline) called Emerald Isle (and it's not Ireland just in case you were wondering that). Should be a good time methinks - well it is on the beach yet again, though with some of the weather that we've been having here recently (today it hit a low of 47 degrees - that's around 8 degrees celcius) i wonder how enjoyable the beach might be, though i'm sure it'll be warmer there than here...

And talking about weekends, and coming back to the idea of travelling, i must say that i've never been more tempted in my university career so far to skip classes than i've been while i'm here (for the record, i've not skipped a single class in NUS so far), not because the classes are boring (which they definitely aren't) but because i want to travel over the weekend, which only begins to make sense in a country of this size if you take a long weekend or else by the time you reach your destination, you may have all of a day to spend there before you have to make the long and arduous journey back to Chapel Hill. This here isn't exactly the best of transportation hubs so getting to and from places is far more confusing and troublesome than it would be in S'pore - it takes like millions of hours (ok, more like six) to go to Charleston, SC; and even further to get to Atlanta, two places that i'd really like to go to especially in the light of my class on American urbanization (think my latest craze is American architecture, so i want to see all the nice old buildings - particularly in Charleston).

So anyway, basically there's a lot going on here now, and i can't keep up with it all... What's rest assured is that i'm having a great time, in spite of all the work and the hiccups that come my way here and there - i wouldn't go as far as to say i've got a beautiful feeling, everything's going my way, oh what a beautiful day (Oklahoma), that wouldn't be the case by a mile, but i'll take what i've been given ya...

snap

Well, i didn't go to the library after all, cos the 24-hour one isn't open for 24 hours on Fridays, and i was too lazy to go to the other one which opens till 10pm.

And instead i basically did more random and unimportant stuff, culminating in deciding to take a nap cos i had only five hours of sleep last night in between finishing a book for class today.

I just got up, and was in the process of regressing into more time-wasting activities when i chanced upon some news - about someone whom i barely even know - have met this person all of once in my life for ten minutes at max. I shan't elaborate cos it isn't very nice to do so considering the circumstances but well basically it's got me thinking about how wasting time away here in such pointless activities is really not the way to go given how blessed i am to be here in the first place and to have the opportunity to do so much when others have stuff which prevents them from doing so, especially so since i tend to identify a lot with this person in general. I ought to be heaps more thankful than what i've really been so far since i'm here...

So have decided to finally get down to starting a prayer initiative of sorts -something that's been floating in my mind for the longest time and which i think i've shared to some extent with various limited degrees of clarity with some people but has not seen much move towards fruition since. Hmm know that it all sounds very vague and all, but oh well - it's rather vague to me too at this point, basically, i type this here for accountability purposes for anyone who feels like it to check on me and ask how's this going on... I think it's very much an "as the Spirit leads" (and i know, that's like the byword for everything nowadays...) kinda thing so I also dunno what it might develop into, if it develops at all. Hmm looking back, there is only a very spurious link between the aforementioned push factor and this whole prayer thingy isn't there? And furthermore it's been all of fifteen to twenty minutes since i first became aware of the aforementioned push factor too. But it's a link nevertheless, and guess i'm very much just moving in faith... So we'll see how this goes =)

The Strange Case of Dr Chao Mugger & Mr Slacker

I've come to the sad conclusion that i can really only get work done when i am in a proper school environment.

Take right now, for example - I'm now in my room alone listening to online Christian radio awaiting for my laundry to be done in the dryer. I could be sitting at my desk doing some of the numerous readings and subsequent reading responses that are due through next week. But instead i'm at my laptop lamenting away...

Now, if not for the laundry having to be done in the first place, i probably wouldn't even be in my room at this time - since it's pretty obvious to me where the resulting time spent waiting for the clothes to get washed and dried will go - which is down the drain, together with all the dirty laundry water.

And one thing (either good or bad depending on what kind of a student you are) about the UNC undergrad library is that it's open 24 hours a day Sunday through Thursday, something which when i first heard the news of, triggered an eerie glee within the chao mugger side of me which totally spooked my slacker half to no end. Yup - you'd think that the ultimate would be spending enough late nights in the NUS central library until i can memorise the annoying piped-in music that they play to signal closing time, but no, UNC has gone one up (have i mentioned that the studiousness of a lot of the students here really is freaky? I suppose that's why this school is so difficult to get in to). And for the former half of me, the news of this 7-11 quality to the library is one attractive prospect. Now, i'm positive that i would never be able to pull a full all-nighter, but at the least i could get a few hours of productive studying under my belt in the night and get back to the room and then regress into the slacker half - wasting much of the rest of my waking hours doing mindless things such as this...

Well, one other reason why i'm avoiding doing the work for the upcoming week is that the stuff to do is really cringe-inducing. There's actually not that much, but it's a chore to do nevertheless. A big part of it is the readings for that same headache-inducing course that i have on monday nights on welfare. But there also is the reading for another course which is really troublesome. Allow me to elaborate...

I've three chapters of a book on the 1986 Tax Reform Act in the US (scintillating stuff, isn't it?) to read and do a short write-up on. Now normally that would pose little problem to me, but in this case, things are somewhat different.

You see, i decided to order some of my books online via half.com. But owing to some card problems, i was delayed in confirming the order. The result is that my order of the book in question for this particular assignment will only come in after i'm supposed to hand in the write-up.

To make matters worse, all copies of the book have been snapped up in the library. So initially, i was tempted to be a total cheapskate and just hang out in the bookshop and somehow get away with reading 64 pages of the book without looking suspicious. But instead i settled on another less-obvious but far more troublesome way to read the stuff - through looking at the excerpts on Amazon.com - it's been a very troublesome process which is too long-drawn for me to attempt repeating here, but suffice to say it's very draining.

So i haven't been able to read all the pages yet because of the copyright limit, but thankfully i think that after four or five hours spent staring at the computer screen i've enough info to do the write-up with...

And now all that's really left is for me to actually do all the work that has to be done asap so that i'll have some semblance of a weekend left for me to enjoy. I do wonder how i'll be able to handle all the over-the-weekend work whenever i'm out of Chapel Hill for the weekend (which hopefully will be fairly often enough if i ever want to cover a fair number of places on my to-visit list) And that brings me back to why am i still sitting here doing nothing productive? Laundry's done and hung. No chance i'll be motivated enough to get started on anything here. So off to the library i go then...

ta!

Oi! Oi! Oi!

Well i had my class for that killer course that i was mumbling and grumbling about over the whole weekend yesterday, and i guess i emerged somewhat ambivalent from the whole thing. I was slightly heartened by the responses from the rest of the class, of which the general concensus was that those two readings were really hard to understand, even for the prof. But on the other hand that won't make things any easier for me, just that i hope as the weeks go by and there are more readings that are in my comfort zone (i.e. history readings) i'll be less uptight about the whole thing. Oh, and of course the worse part is that this class runs for three hours, starting at 5pm - even though the syllabus stated that it would end by 7:30pm. And the thing is that not one student complained or showed signs of restlessness (erm, well... except for me, that is...) once the time passed 7:30pm, and they even were candid about asking for the class to start ten minutes later so that parking would be easier for them as it would be free after five. I know for a fact that if this was NUS, practically the whole class would switch off once the promised end time is reached, and think that people would rather pay more for parking than have their knock-off time extended by even ten minutes.

I attended IV international students' Bible study just now, it was a nice time of relaxation after the past two hectic days. We hold it at my hall lounge, which is all of five seconds from my room, which is nice. Today i had a bit of a scare cos i thought i had lost my cellphone - it was with me during the study, but somehow it slipped through the gaps between the couch cushions all the way into the deep, dark and dirty recesses of the chair - only found it after ten or so minutes of frantic searching of both my room and the lounge. Well, am thankful i managed to find it - after the loss of my dear nalgene bottle at last week's football game, i wasn't about ready to lose something else of value so soon.

I was just doing my routine surfing through some quality online news reports (read: no channelnewsasia) when i chanced upon this article - well all i can say is that my already bad impression of a small minority of entirely ignorant and myopic Antipodeans has only gotten worse after reading this.

They evade me so...

I type this in another of my anything-but-schoolwork moods, since i am almost about to finish two killer readings on mainstream models of welfare states, after which i then have to proceed to do a two-page response to them to submit electronically by tomorrow. This is the only real killer course that i am taking - and i can honestly admit that at this point in time, i am only not dropping it because it is very favourably mapped. It is interesting, i won't deny that, but the level is just rather beyond me (like half of my class are grad students). For these two readings in question, my general response to them so far is "huh?". And this is only the first set of readings - i'm supposed to do this for every week's set of readings. And i ask myself, how am i gonna write a response to them if i really catch no ball?

And while we're on the subject of catching no ball, that was precisely what the tar heels did just now during the VA Tech game - a crushing loss (35-10) with annoying and very avoidable interceptions (not that i would be able to avoid them though...) - when i saw that the situation for us was helpless by the opening of the third quarter, i just decided to leave the stadium together with other jaded Singaporeans and go back to my room to continue with reading this incomprehensible stuff.

But basically, what i've been meaning to say is that it's extra frustrating because i think i'm really rather diligent a student here - this is like the most productive saturday i've had workwise in this entire calendar year methinks (for me to be able to start work anytime before noontime on a saturday is really an event worth popping open a bottle of champagne to) - and i started at nine... And yet in spite of my newfound chao mugger personality i'm still way behind work wise - i've barely given time to my usual time-wasting pursuits like typing emails at an over-leisurely pace, checking up on US Open scores online or taking forever to tag my facebook pictures...

Ah but it's hardly the end of the world like i probably make this seem like - this work will be completed in time and i will get through this whole atas welfare class which ironically has deprived me of much of its own subject matter...

You see things are already starting to get better for me - in an hour's time, i'm off for dinner at Arby's =)

Football's fine, soccer stinks

Finally since i've come back from the weekend i'm able to relax somewhat - with the two assignments (which turned out to be much less of a hassle than i had imagined it to be at the beginning of the weekend) all done and submitted, and only one small thingy left to do for friday - after which that's it for the week =) Of course, the work never ends and i've lots of stuff to prepare for my toughest class, which is a weekly three-hour-straight seminar on gender and welfare every monday, but still the immediate horizon is clear and that's all i care about for now, though thankfully the procrastinator mode that perennially plagues me in S'pore seems to have taken a vacation of its own, so thing will be able to get myself to get started on the monday work (fairly) early...

Speaking of my weekend assignments, one of them was to read (or more accurately in my case, re-read the first half and finally get down to reading the second half) Orwell's 1984 and then write a character-based response to it. I guess i'll soon enjoy the fact that here a lot of the readings are unconventional by the standards that i've been used to, in that there's a lot of fiction to read too, rather than just sleep-inducing academic stuff. For now, though, i'm still far more used to reading sleep-inducing academic stuff than fiction (i almost never read fiction), but i'm sure i'll enjoy the fiction stuff too eventually...

Oh, but i digress. My point was that right after completing the book [just in time to meet the deadline to return the book to the used book store on Franklin for a full refund (i already have one at home - remember, this is a poor international student typing this here)] and typing out the assignment, i logged on to facebook to find out that they've installed this new feature which is really freaky and weird, in that basically all your contacts' actions on facebook are now neatly listed in front of you when you log in, even all the stuff that does not concern you in the slightest, like "so-and-so is now friends with so-and-so-whom-you-do-not-know" or "so-and-so no longer likes to listen to Michael Jackson (who can blame him)" or other trivial stuff like that. Well, i have not encountered a single person who's for this new invasion-of-privacy program, which to me is really freakily Orwellian in nature, especially after just having read the book. It's such a big issue here (since practically every college student here uses it) that it's made the news, both on the paper as well as online, and is also a hot topic of pre-class discussion now.

So anyway, saturday saw me going for my first-ever football game. It was a very interesting experience - not just the game itself, but the whole atmosphere of the game was just great. Where the game was concerned, i underwent a crash course in how the game works, so that by the end of the game i became really bummed when Rutgers intercepted the ball for the second time - thus ending any chance of a UNC victory. At least when i go for my next game (more on that later) i won't be like clueless anymore, so that's a start i guess...

But it was not just the game per se - the whole atmosphere was just great. One thing i really dig about UNC is the degree of school spirit that they have - it kind of reminds me of AC days - particularly the annual rugby final which used to always be AC vs RJ (kinda like UNC vs Duke) - the enthusiastic spectators with their often too-colourful language, the cheering, the colour-coordination and the like. I genuinely felt involved in the whole thingy, though i've only been here for like less than three weeks - now this would NEVER EVER happen in nus (i wouldn't even go and buy an nus shirt), that i'm absolutely sure of...

The only sad part of the match was that i left my nalgene in the stadium after the match, and when i remembered it and went back in to get it all of five minutes later, someone else had already taken it. So sad... Ah well, the silver lining is that this provides me with the perfect excuse to buy a new nalgene with the UNC logo emblazoned on it...

After the match, had a quick dinner before heading off to Charlotte for the rest of the weekend. Went with Jon and Alex, and Greg drove us there and lodged us at his house. Now, the first time i ever heard of Charlotte was a looong time ago when i watched wrestling and they would introduce Ric Flair as hailing from Charlotte, North Carolina. Then after that i heard about the Hornets, and then the Bobcats. Yup that's basically all i knew about this city.

Although it is hardly the most interesting of places, we all still had a really great time there, to just relax, explore uptown Charlotte, visit the Discovery Place, and take in the sights and sounds of Matthews Alive, an annual Labor Day fair held at Matthews, a town right outside Charlotte near where Greg lives. Of course with your truly being a namesake of the town, it was inevitable that i'd have a field day taking snapshots of myself at strategic places with my name proudly etched on them. Talk about a cheap thrill heh... But anyway it definitely was a weekend well spent - and i'm very thankful for the hospitality of Greg and his family =)

Came back to school again - which is pretty uneventful as usual, maybe the only noteworthy thing that happened was that i went for my first-ever soccer match just now (as you'll probably know, i hate the sport) between UNC and NC State. I was willing to give soccer a chance since it was a UNC game after all... Admittedly however, i just could not tahan watching the full match and left at half time. It's just not my thing - though how i could last through three hours worth of football but can't even last through 45 minutes of soccer is beyond me.

Oh, and this morning woke up really early to head down to the Dean Dome (where the basketball team plays) to get into the line for the remainder of the UNC-Virginia Tech football game tickets. Went together with Clement, Jon and Sarah-Jane - we got to the place just before 7am (tickets were released only at eight) - needless to say we got the tickets, so i'll be off to football again this upcoming saturday... Should be great fun again, though from what i hear, i don't fancy our prospects...

I'm feeling too lazy to post the pictures here as well, but you can easily see them on the pics link there =======> Captions and descriptions coming soon...

My Labor Day labour

Well, the Labor Day weekend's almost over and i've just gotten back from Charlotte - yup there's lots i want to talk about the whole weekend, starting from my first-ever football game [which was a total bummer of a loss to Rutgers =( ] all the way to the trip to the Queen City, but unfortunately a huge barrier to me doing that exists in the form of two assignments that were given over the weekend that i have to submit on wednesday of which i've just finished reading the book for one, nothing for the other, and have written a response to neither, and being the super-motivated and guai(1) student that i am (yeah right), i shall try to complete at least a sizeable portion of them first before i transfer my attention to more fun but far less pressing matters...

So you'll be hearing from me soon enough ya...

ta!

Coolness

I've always taken a liking to cold weather - which is actually one of the (secondary) reasons why i wanted to go on exchange in the first place - to spend a prolonged period of time away from the oppressive heat and humidity of S'pore.

So therefore when i first got out of RDU airport, i was kind of bummed to realise that the weather was almost identical to what you'd get back home, with the blazing sun in fact being even more intense than it ever gets in S'pore, with the saving grace probably being the slightly lower humidity over here, though still in general, it was hot. And it has pretty much stayed this way ever since - until today.

I suppose it's due to Tropical Storm Ernesto supposedly passing over the eastern half of North Carolina, but anyway today's weather was just great - unlike the past few days it was not raining heavily, and the weather stayed in the high fifties to sixties (to convert to Celcius, just subtract 32, divide by nine and multiply by five - or you can take my word for it that it never got above 20 degrees C). In fact i was one of the few jokers walking around wearing a t-shirt and berms without a jacket of any kind and without an umbrella either - not the wisest thing to do if i want to stay sickness-free, i'd admit, but it felt shiok i tell you...

So tomorrow i'm going for my first football game - UNC vs. Rutgers - and i'll have to say that i've never been this on about attending a sporting event before, particularly one where i know next to nothing about the sport in question itself. But the whole school culture here is one that is really in to sport, and i guess i kind of got caught along in the wave. Can you imagine it, i even wouldn't mind watching the soccer team play if the opportunity arose (which i think it should) - something that i wouldn't even give a fleeting thought to doing if i were back home. Anyway, think that the atmosphere tomorrow will be great...

After that it's off to Charlotte, NC for the rest of the Labor Day long weekend - and it should be good - guess you'll next hear from me from there then - ta!