oink

"I'm taking a tour of France, without ever leaving my kitchen" boasts Laura Calder, in the promo to her French cooking program, French Food at Home, which they air constantly on AFC (and incidentally, where camera amgles, seductive poses and grandiloquent, mellifluous usage of vocabulary are concerned, she's basically Canada's answer to Nigella).

Whenever i see that, i'm inclined to think to myself "well Laura good for you but i'd rather leave my kitchen and hop on a flight to the real France and eat the food there.

But well, since there's something called work, Ms Calder's option is the best i can do at the moment i suppose. And along these lines something i've been spending more and more time on nowadays is surfing random food sites and watching random food programs. For example, even when i'm not hungry, HungryGoWhere is a frequent stop for me, just to ponder upon places i've eaten at and others i want to eat at.

Oh to have a nice $100 per pax steak dinner at Mortons including a hearty onion soup with cheese topping and some Godiva hot chocolate cake. Paying $100 (or more) for a meal is just not right to me though (perhaps if i thought of it in terms of foreign currency it might be less of an issue to me), and especially when i've been trying (with little success) to cut down on cow-related products just so to do my part to discourage the farming of too many of those methane belchers (and farters). Then there are all those hotel buffets with an amazing range of delicious stuff. I manage to keep myself away from those mainly by considering how a significant proportion of the hefty price tag for one of these meals would go into paying for the sashimi and crab legs and oysters and what have you, things that i don't eat (and it's not just cos i watched Mr Bean in Room 426).

But still, there is a whole host of food that i do eat, and would like to eat a lot of. I suppose the good thing though is that i am prevented from extreme gluttony by the fact that inspite of how many rave about the food scene here, i personally am not too enthusiastic about most local food, and, again like Ms Calder, get really interested only in the food from places further away (The trouble being that with the way i prefer to travel nowadays, it makes it hard to actually eat a lot of that sort of food from sit-down establishments when i am away and instead i subsist mainly on a diet of grilled paninis and ready-to-go salads, which coupled with the amount i walk is probably why i always lose weight whenever i go on holiday). Until then, it's back to more virtual pigging out i suppose..

unbalanced

Almost four weeks into school term and the pattern in posts here is becoming very apparent - seems like most, if not all of my life as of late has to do with school in one way or other, since there's been precious little else that i've talked about.

Ironically, this comes at a time when, at least compared to practicum time, i spend at least an average of an hour less in school than i used to, something i guess is a result of not having to draw up detailed lesson plans for every lesson so far. Actually, the truth being that up till now i've not done so for any one lesson this term :p, though the tediousness that is the teacher's record book is something that i'm still coming to terms with.

In fact, the time has now come for me to be the one to urge the new practicum people to go home, rather than be the one chased home once the a/c is switched off come 6:30pm. I used to have the twelve-hour rule, whereby i make sure i leave school less at least than twelve hours after i've signed in for the day. Now, i find it hard to top eleven, though it's not so much about not having enough work to do (far from it!) but more from a reluctance to do it, and an even greater reluctance to bring it home..

My reticence towards most Chinese stuff has thus far has had to necessarily take a step back for now, in view of having no choice but to help Mandarin-speaking students translate words into English and vice versa. And after today's parent-teachers' meeting, i realized that things will only get mroe interesting since there'll be have to be a lot of communicating going on with Mandarin-speaking parents/guardians in the future - my attempts today were laughable at best... Even in invigilation duties, i was not spared - some of today's instructions for the MT listening comprehension over the radio came purely in Mandarin, which meant a lot of careful listening on my part just so i didn't screw anything up (and believe me, especially for something like listening comprehension, the invigilator can feel just as , if not more nervous, than the exam candidates, since any wrong antenna positioning or flat battery here of a wrong button pushed there can cause the prospects of a class full of students to dim significantly all thanks to you...)

le quatorze

It's been close to two-and-a-half weeks since the new school term started, and not a moment too soon, i think i'm finally starting to get used to the pace of things. However, considering that due to all the measures put in place against H1N1, things have hardly been going along at the rate in which they are rightly supposed to, perhaps once all this is over and done with, there'll be more to adjust to.

Thus far i've been having pretty mixed reactions to this whole H1N1 business. On the one hand, there are a lot of directives given by the people up there that my cynical layman self cannot help but roll my eyes at. Perhaps the cherry on this overfluffed cake is the seven-step handwashing theory and practical test that was conducted for all students. While admittedly until this moment i don't recall ever having used soap from any public washroom soap dispensers (even the fancy ones in hotels), and now i use them fairly infrequently due to all the handwashing hype - which is a step up in any case), to spend minutes on end scrubbing my hands and wrists in every possible configuration known to man just doesn't do it for me. It's not as if i'm about to perform surgery rite...

However, on the plus side, i couldn't have thought of a better time for CCAs to stand down, and oh what a pity that they start again next week. Ah well, three weeks off is already three weeks longer than i thought i'd have ya... But this still means that from next week onwards, once CCAs come into the picture, and i step up the pace of my lessons, things are going to get a whole lot more interesting for me. It certainly has been a lesson in itself for me in terms of being adequately prepared beforehand for lessons, especially since i think my teaching load is pretty much close to doubled since practicum. And i'm trying to get away from the counting-down-to-the-end-of-the-week mood that i've perpetually found myself in since the beginning of term (and for the record, half my load for the week is over :p), just cos i think my underlying attitude towards it is wrong.

It being the fourteenth though, i can't help thinking of holidays again. And since i belatedly realized that part of my long-forgotten travel wish-list was partially (and unknowingly) fulfilled through my past two trips since writing it, i wonder where i should head to next. Now here's hoping that H1N1 doesn't pull a SARS and lead to an extension of the school term into the holidays. At least on my part, i'm willing to wash my hands till kingdom come if that's what it'll take...

Don't Turn Around

I'm quite amazed at how quickly this past week, the first back at school, has gone by. It's not been much of an issue getting adjusted back to the school environment, but perhaps the same cannot be said about the school hours. Especially when coupled with the remnants of jet lag and late nights, this has meant that i'm sometimes wide awake when i really shouldn't be, and conversely very sleepy in school, of all places. I'm still trying to figure out how purposely sleeping an extra two hours the previous night contributes to me being extra sleepy the following day. I've all but lost count of the number of times i found myself at the sink splashing water on my face. As such, i'm very glad to see the weekend come, and a long one at that. I have to say, never have i been so happy to see a youth day holiday, not even in the twelve years as a student. Not that school has been bad - on the contrary, i think it's been quite a good first week (aside from a giant cca bomb dropping on me, that is), but i really do need the break.

Not that the last break that i had was a long time ago. Why, it was only last Friday morning that i got back. But it really was a good break, and i don't see this first week back at school having gone as fairly smoothly as it did without the holiday beforehand. If there's one thing i regret (ok, actually there are many things i regret - that's just the nature of me and my sometime overanalytical mind), it's that the holiday wasn't long enough and so unlike what i ideally look for in a good holiday, which is a nice, relaxed pace, due to a shortage of available time out of here i spent much of my time on various modes of transport shuttling from one city to another, and much of the rest on my feet shuffling from one place of interest to another, with little time left to just sit back and chill. Ironically, perhaps the most time i had to do something like that was when i was shuttling from one city to another, but as at the time it was on a sixteen-hour ferry, the opportunities for chilling (literally too) were too plentiful for me to not take them up.

If i could sum things up, perhaps the one thing i really enjoyed about where i went was that, degree of modernity aside, it was refreshingly different from here. And as you would probably know by now, the Singaporean-ness of Singapore is at times what makes me so inclined to get out of here so often (and i'm already thinking about where to go at the end of the year, though with the aforementioned giant cca bomb dropping on me, that might be of a far less grand scale than i hope for - and that's before taking into consideration the northern hemisphere flu season rearing its ugly head). While at the same time many of my illusions/fairytales of the place were gently shattered by the end of the trip, methinks that just helped to make the place more real and less artificial/functional/clinical (i.e. less Singaporeanesque).

At least one out of two people who find out i travel/travelled alone give me that kind of "what are you thinking?!" kinda look, and i can definitely understand why. My rationale for doing so basically boils down to the people. I just find it too difficult/troublesome to find people who want to go to the same places as me with a similar worldview (i realise now how important that is especially when travelling), on a similar budget, and for a similar period of time. I mean, each day there there would be a time when i would think to myself that if there was someone with me and he/she were any different from me i'd probably be abandoned anyways.

That being said if i could find good travel buddies i would probably enjoy that at least as much, but from the way things have been going maybe there would be a need first for much prayer and fasting...

Loneliness when travelling is definitely an issue - i don't doubt that one bit. My solution to that during much of this recent trip was CouchSurfing, and i think it probably turned out far better than i had expected it to. At least for me at this point in my life, on holiday i think you can't beat not only meeting up with locals but even staying with them, and this trip made me all the more skeptical of packaged tours too (particularly the Singapore-based ones which never fail in bringing busloads of S'porean tourists to a whole host of exotic cities around the globe, and then taking them for dinner in a Chinese restaurant - oh the shame). And the fact that on the trip, with the help of my hosts, i got to do so many things that a packaged tourist would come nowhere close to doing, just punctuates my point. Apart from that there also was the chance and arranged meeting with friends, which i really enjoyed as well.

Comes as no surprise therefore that the only time i felt rather down during the trip was on my last evening there before flying off the following morning, when there were no more people to meet, and instead i found myself wandering solo for hours on end in an amusement park. As cool as that place is, after eight whole days of quality human contact, the anticlimax perhaps could not have been more anticlimactical.

But well, the highs far outweighed the lows. And speaking of highs (no innuendo, if you got any, was intended), here's one for the road: definitely something you won't see gracing any S'porean tourist attraction anytime soon.


Well, at least when i was there, i didn't do this (caution - R21-ish shot, and if you see nothing that looks like the above, try some of the following pictures)