out of place

NIE stuff has started - this week there was registration on tuesday, briefing stuff on wednesday and something called 'teacher's prep program' yesterday and today - four days of travel to and from the school that seems to be closer to Gelang Patah and even Kukup than it is to my house equals around $20 of transport money being spent - which means i've had to consciously work at changing my usual habit of topping up my farecard with just $10 at each go, cos i've realized if i kept that up, i'd be topping up my card almost every day. That aside, the sheer act of traveling from my place all the way there and back is tortuous enough as it is (i may be a travel buff but that's strictly restricted to travel outside of S'pore, although come to think of it traveling to NIE is just about as close as one can get to doing that without leaving the S'pore mainland...).

These past two days was the aforementioned tpp - admittedly (and i mentioned as much at the end of the session during the checkout session) i was not looking forward to the thingy at the start - i believe i described it as "(moe/nie's attempt to make us) waste two otherwise perfectly free days." To my unexpected surprise it turned out hardly like i'd have expected it to, in good part because our facilitator was this cool lady who was discerning enough to do less of the program and more of the sharing of rich personal experiences (and boy does she have a lot of them), and also cos of the people met/friends made.

No secret that in any case though, at the start of the week i wasn't in a good mood - and to that end one thing i was consistently praying for during my qts in the morning was for (pleasant) surprises of any kind to come my way - and by the end of the week thankfully God delivered a lot of those my way, stuff like how the tpp turned out, bumping into someone i've not seen in four years, catching-up/bleah-ing opportunities etc - all these definitely helped to de-death-glare-ify my face as the week progressed...

A string of semi-related random things that happened to me this week:

1) Went to the Malay stall to get lunch one day - the people before and after me were both addressed and served using Mandarin, but when it was my turn, the lady took one look at me and went "abang!" in order to catch my attention. That was followed by "lagi" and other random Malay words when i was pointing to the dishes i wanted, she even told me the cost of the plate in Malay...

2) Today during class our facilitator was telling a story which somehow involved porridge (she tends to digress a lot), and she was talking about something called "um," which most of the class seemed to understand immediately - i was left clueless until my groupmate informed me that it is some chinese dialect (hokkien?) term which refers to the liquid part of porridge - she was so surprised that i had no idea what that was, and then she asked me (with a serious face btw) "are you local?"

3) Later on she somehow came to the topic of patriotism (i forget how), and she asked the class "would you stand up for S'pore?" My cynical self's immediate reaction was to cringe and roll my eyes, i thought she was jokingly asking a rhetorical question. I was thus freaked to realize that several people immediately said "yes!" rather assuredly. Not that i'm about to betray the country, but i'm not one for such strong outward displays of patriotism, just never realized that most others are quite unlike me heh... Eek who's the one who needs NE lessons now eh?

Anyways, think i've come to the conclusion that the best way to deal with the situation is avoidance, in whatever means it may take - hmm that seems to be a common theme in me life eh...