Countdown begins...

In exactly a month's time i'll already be back in sweaty S'pore preparing for the new school term - thirty days - that's just about as long as the MEET Thailand trip earlier this year - but somehow at the start of that one i was like "gosh a whole month - that's soooooo long", and now i'm like "ahhh only a month left till i go back - so short =(" Granted, of course that the activities involved in each month are totally different, but in any case think it's fascinating when you come to think of it...

Well, things are definitely beginning to wind down over here - today was the last day of lessons proper, and tomorrow is reading day (yes you heard it right - reading day - one day, that's it) and then finals start on Friday. I myself have four papers to do, one of them being a take home, and the other three being non cumulative (i.e. they only cover what's not been tested so far this sem, so i'm hardly skipping a beat over them (hence my typing of this post). Should get down to more prep soon though...

I originally had five papers in all, the other was for the really killer gender of welfare course that i'm taking, but somewhere down the line my prof also concluded that this was a really killer course, and to that end during our last class this past Monday she announced that, with our approval, she'd scrap having a final altogether - and you can imagine it didn't take much persuasion for us to approve that... Anyways, as much as i initially was dreading every moment of this class, i'm glad in the end that i took it (and not just because it turned out to be non-examinable) - really broadened my horizons a lot... To celebrate the end of the very gruelling course we all had dinner at Los Potrillos - a very nice but still quite affordable Mexican place here - good food - have already been there a couple of times in fact - had enchiladas done three ways, one of them in mole (moh-lay, not as in the animal) sauce, which in fact contains lots of chocolate - and it tasted really good in fact - first real taste of chocolate in an entree - too bad though, it's got no nuts =p

Some of my gender of welfare class with our prof at dinner
- and speaking of gender, apart from me only one guy and like five girls are missing...

Yesterday had another farewell event - this time dinner with IV international small group folks at Jim's (our staffworker). [I wanted to post a picture here but too leche (sp?) lah - so once again you'll have to look there =======> once i post it] We had really good food cooked by Jim's wife Beth, and good fellowship too - fun - looking back, i'm really thankful for how the Lord has provided a group such as this for us international folk =)

Just now it was yet another farewell-ish event - the bunch of us from nus met for dinner with the unc people who were at nus last sem and the unc people who'll be in nus next sem - probably the last time i'll get to see some of the middle group, but it also was good to meet up with the next batch - got me a biiit excited about next sem when they'll be in S'pore. We ate at this place called "35 Chinese" though, and if you know me, judging from the name of the place you'll know how much i enjoyed the meal...

Yup, the time for farewells and goodbyes has come - quite sad i must say - time here has really gone by so fast, have only just over a week left here on the Hill before i go travelling. Well, i'll be back here early in the new year, but don't think will get to see too many, if any people at all in those few days. Though i haven't met as many people here as some of the others have, i'm definitely very thankful for those whom i've met - they've all really been a great blessing to me during my time here - again it makes me realise how important it is to not ignore foreign students back home, which i sometimes tend to do - a little bit can definitely go a long way...

Oh and did i mention the weather these past few days has been wonderful? (Well at least to me, most others are complaining about the freezing cold). Great weather to just take a nice walk in and enjoy the cool, fresh air. No snow though - whenever the temperature is well below freezing the forecast always seems to be for 0% chance of precipitation of any kind *bleah*. And i know when i get back, i'll suffer all the more...

Hope none of my flights kena this sorta thing - talk about a story to tell the grandchildren eh ;p...

Give and take...

Ok once again i've a backlog of things that i want to talk about over here, thanks to the need to clear work first, so humor (American spelling cos am in America) me here while i go about the process of trying to recall all the stuff...

Well, this was like from two weeks ago, but anyways i saw my first wild deer since coming here - It was when i went running in the nearby woods (believe me it's much less dangerous than it sounds) two Sunday mornings ago and went off the main trail onto some rougher trail up a slope when i heard a lot of rustling, then i turned to my left and said "Oh, deer!" (ok so i didn't say that =p) as i saw the rapidly bobbing away backside of a white tail, either a female or a juvenile methinks (If it was a female then i wonder if when she saw me she went "Doh!" (geddit? =p)... Well, anyways i was thinking that the deer was a little kancheong, cos i would not even have noticed it had it not decided to flee in fear of its life. If i were a hunter, it would so be dead meat now (or more specifically, venison)

Speaking of running, i've sort of decided to do so every Sunday morning somewhere around UNC cos the church service that i regularly go to (i.e. i've been there twice so far) is at 11am, and my ride only leaves campus at earliest 10:30am; so there's more than ample time to exercise in the morning before service. The weather is also way more condusive for running, at least 10 degrees celcius cooler and way less humid too - which means that i don't end up with a shirt that carries a wading pool's worth of liquid in it. And talking about pools, maybe one Sunday i'll try out the indoor pool here instead, if not just for the been there, done that experience of swimming in an indoor pool...

And from the way i've been eating here recently, i think i'll need all the exercise that i can get. It's especially so whenever i end up eating at one of the two dining halls, which basically offer buffet-style stuff all the time. Thankfully i didn't get a meal plan, or i'd be eating from these places far more often... The problem is that, true to the url of this blog, not only my language (dis)abilities, but even my food preferences also are very angmoh-oriented (including potatoes), so i have no problem with wolfing down burger after burger, pizza slice after pizza slice, wrap after wrap and then some - you get the picture... Even when i hit the salad bar the veggies are inevitably smothered in ranch dressing - heck - i even smother my pizza in ranch dressing... Yes, i know for many of the readers of this blog it's basically the same old same old, but ah well i guess this will be a constant lament of mine...

I just had my first two midterms on Friday and this afternoon - they were not the best of papers, but they're definitely passable - though honestly i am still aiming for something higher than that - but will make do - i don't want to be obsessed over grades again - it would be really toot of me to do so when it's pass/fail after all... In other academic news it was quite a surreal experience just now when i went for my Monday 5-8pm class only to find a note pinned on the doorpost saying that lesson was cancelled for the week - this is the class that i'd been having loads of problems with before, and that i've to do a book report and a presentation of the report + of the other readings for the week of too - and did i mention Monday 5-8pm? Of course once it hit me, i was pretty happy - and i celebrated by eating a giant steak burrito (about a foot long) for dinner at Cosmic Cantina (oh gosh that makes me sound like a real glutton doesn't it... well in my defense, i had a voucher...)

Oh ya, frisbee - did you know that they (i.e. IV) play ultimate every friday here? And the attendance when i went was really big - like more than 40 people over four teams - and each game definitely had an abundance of people as a result. We should do that back home - though i have the feeling that the attendance would be pretty bad if not solely cos of work - which is quite tragic given that on average there definitely is more work to do over here than back home - yet over here the people still come down for an hour or two or de-stressing... It was great fun [even though i re-aggrevated my left pinky injury (kinda like Joce's from Mongolia only far less gross-looking) that i obtained two days earlier while i was playing ultimate with some of the guys on my floor; and had also just recovered from another finger injury obtained a few days earlier when i was, you guessed it, playing frisbee at the beach during the IV new student retreat - thankfully all the affected digits were on my left hand so i could write properly...].

Ok think i should do something about my food issues - right now all i can think of is the bag of day-old bagels that i'm planning to buy tomorrow from Alpine at only $1.70...

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...

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.

Bojangles breakfast and beach bumming

Well, i've certainly been settling in fairly nicely so far, contagious diseases aside =p. The first three days have gone by fairly uneventfully, with the most significant stuff being that by God's grace i was able to get all my courses in the end. Of course that also means that i have quite a demanding semester ahead studies wise, cos my core courses especially (but the other two also) require quite a bit of reading and other stuff that is rather leceh by my standards (though for me practically any work is very leceh to begin with - it is really only by the grace of God that i get through each sem ( with this one definitely not being any exception).

To make matters more complicated, there also is involvement outside academic matters per se to bear in mind - involvement in IV or other Christian stuff, non-academic school-related stuff [on a whim (and a prayer) i auditioned for and ended up in a choir here - which i am quite excited about, though not about the added hours though], just plain slacking =p, and travel, which i really want to do a lot of, though with the limited time at hand i dunno what's possible (methinks i shall have to be more buay pai seh with respect to tompang other people's cars to wherever they may want to go...).

But anyhoos, yesterday and today involved getting involved in various activities organized by various Christian groups catering to new/international students. The whole way that things are done here is definitely something that i can take away lots from, with regards to the organization and the heart behind it. Of course there's still a long way to go (contagious diseases aside) so basically think that even apart from academics there's still a lot to learn...

Yesterday's activities consisted of an international students' welcome dinner by IV international, followed by bowling at the student union (yes, there's a fairly large bowling alley in school - which is really cool save for the fact that this is the first alley i've been to where you still have to write down the score on a piece of paper yourself) and dessert at Cold Stone Creamery (more ice cream, more good stuff). Now that's a lot of stuff for one evening alone - and i'll say it again, to have the tables turned, so to speak, where i'm now in the position of a blur new student who is quite unaware of what's really going on, and threfore in need of lots of guidance in part provided by helpful folk such as these, is a very humbling learning experience.

Today was really exciting - through the first (of many) ice cream social that i went for we (most of the NUS folk) signed up for a day trip to the beach - specifically Wrightsville Beach, just outside of Wilmington, NC (where they film Dawson's Creek and One Tree Hill - not that this matters anything at all to me - just a random fact) - a good three hours' drive away from Chapel Hill. Although it basically took up our whole saturday, it was definitely worth it.

After never having ever eaten it, and on the positive recommendations of several of the local UNC people here, i ate food from Bojangles twice today, as there's one at practically every I-40 pit stop between Chapel Hill and Wilmington, and therefore it's a logical choice for food - be it for breakfast on the way to the beach, or for dinner coming back from the beach. It definitely lived up to the positive reviews that i've heard, and i guess i'm glad that there isn't one too nearby where i stay, or i may be too frequent a customer there to the extent that i may put on too many pounds (cos whatever the food is, one thing that it certainly ain't is healthy).

And what blog post of mine would be complete without a matt-and-his-hopeless-mandarin story? This time what happened was that i was seated shotgun in the not-so-mini-van thingy that we sat to the beach and back, and one of the organizers, who also happened to be the driver; Chad, happened to be able to speak Mandarin (and he's a white American). So he was asking me some questions about Singapore in Mandarin, and i didn't know how to reply in the same language so i had to drop out and answer him in English instead - soooo paiseh i tell you...

Just experiencing the beach - which by far is the best beach i've ever been to (though i can only ever recall going to beaches in Singapore and a random few in Malaysia so that isn't much really - oh maybe Waikiki was better, but much more crowded and commercialized) was great in itself. God blessed us with perfect weather for a day out on the beach - sunny but not oppressive. There was more than enough space to just spread out a groundsheet and lie down and bake in the sun. The water was really salty, but was blue in colour (unlike much of the coastal water we get in S'pore - and as a former boat spec, think you cantake my word for it) and just the right temperature. Also, unlike the dirty sea water in S'pore, the water here did not dry leaving a sticky feeling all over, which makes me wonder (but not want to know) what extra additives (or more specifically, pollutants) are located inside S'porean sea water hmm... The waves were strong enough for us to ride them for quite a distance, yet not overpowering to the extent that we were dragged out. And of course, the people met and conversations had throughout the course of today (as well as whatever other events that i've attended) are just sweet. Aiyah, so basically it was great lah - i just hope that i'm not too burnt after today.

For beach and other pics, as usual click on "US PICS" over there =======>

TB or no TB, that is the question

Two days ago i went for the compulsory TB skin test - the usual shallow injection of some protein derivative into the left forearm. The reading was today, and it came out like this:


Hmm as much as the above looks like a shot of a solar eclipse or some sort of astronomical event or other, it is merely a picture of my left forearm with the flash on - and i suppose this serves no purpose at all since you can't see anything...


So this is how my arm looked after 48 hours (looks quite gross i know) - the result being that i need to go back for a further evaluation just in case i indeed have TB (though i went to check up on this test on the internet and found that there are many other possibilities with regards to why the skin test looks like that - so don't be rejoicing that i'm not in S'pore now coughing infected droplets repeatedly onto you just yet).

Well apart from this possible health scare which may see me back in S'pore far sooner than you'd expect it, things have been going quite nicely here. Attended another ice cream social today followed by an IV welcome event, and met many nice people at both events too. It was interesting to see the latter and how things may be the same or different from how we do it in CF back in S'pore. Well i'll say this - some of the people there were very friendly and approachable, while others, well, were not. But then again, who am i to frown upon such things here when they happen back home too, and sometimes even with me playing the role of an unapproachable person...

Am in the midst of doing my first piece of homework - nothing much really - but in any case, looks like my lack of focus in doing schoolwork has manifested itself again...

Go and sleep ah!

[i realise that in recent posts that i have been, well, posting, i've tended to for the large part just do a log of what noteworthy stuff (i.e. no "i brushed my teeth" or "i opened the door" and that sort of thing) has happened to me - apologies if you're bored stiff]

Went for the first time to Southpoint Mall today, only a ten minute bus ride away from campus - the bus ride however costing the princely sum of $2 - so will have to think carefully before going there each time... It's a really sprawling place though - lots of neat shops that i in time will want to visit like Banana Republic (though they're opening in S'pore soon am i right?) and Cheesecake Factory and what not... It's always only when i'm abroad that i really feel like shopping - and think that the next time i go there i'll seriously feel like shopping =p

Then for dinner my mother and i (or more accurately, my mother), treated Brian and Lani, the very hospitable couple who've been putting my mother up here since we've arrived (and me on the first night too) to dinner. We went to Penang, which rather self-explanatorily (is there such a word?) serves up Malaysian food. Apparently, Malaysian food is rather trendy in the US as of late - i remember going to another branch (they seem to have several scattered throughout the US, or at least on the east coast...) in Philly years ago, and most of the clientele were the of the young urban professional variety, and even the staff were all very classily dressed, they definitely were not wearing sarongs that's for sure... Surprised though to see a branch in Chapel Hill of all places... Anyways the food was not bad - and definitely was catered to ang moh tastes (the beef satay was sour!), though i can honestly say that i did not miss the stuff that i ate - and probably won't - at least for a month or two...

The four of us at Penang
(that's popiah and tauhu goreng in a severely adultarated form btw)

Incidentally, Lani also happens to be the daughter of one of the main speakers at Urbana '06, who also happens to be my mother's former colleague in IVCF Philippines decades ago - quite a cool connection - and one that has me thinking even more about going for it. Yup but need to pray more and talk with the IV people first though...

Yup i'd love to say more but it's now 2:13 am and hwy just told me to go to sleep - nitey!

Gresham goodbyes...

If you’ve been wondering why i’ve been so efficient in posting here, it’s simply because i’ve a lot of time on my hands as of late – since everything begins to wind down in the late afternoons till evenings – since while there’s a lot of time, there conversely is not enough time to explore far beyond metropolitan Portland itself, save for the day trip up to Seattle (which was quite a bummer), especially since Uncle Rico (my mother’s friend and the owner of the house we’re living in) has not more leave and has to go to work – making going to far away places that much harder.

It’s times like these when i feel like kicking myself for being too lazy to get a driving licence up to now – (not that there would be much chance that i’d be able to loan any of the cars from Uncle Rico but let’s just magically assume that i would be able to) cos that would make exploring that much easier – then there’d be tons of places that i would want to go to around here. The half-day with Mark driving opened my eyes to some of the possibilities that could otherwise have been open to. I could of course ask my parents to drive, but they are of the too-scared-to-drive-on-the-other-side-of-the-road variety… Oh well, hopefully by the next time i come here (which ought to be soon) i can drive already...

Hmm so hence especially since Uncle Rico’s leave ended, going out has meant either going to eat out or to visit what appears to be every single outlet store in the suburban Portland area – today alone we went to seven different stores –Costco; Walgreen’s; Grocery Outlet; Old Navy; Bed, Bath and Beyond; Borders and Target. And let’s not forget WalMart, Kmart, Safeway, Craft Warehouse, Payless Shoe Source, JoAnn’s and many more where that came from. That’s one thing that amazes me about here – how despite the relatively low housing density here (at least compared to S’pore), there still appear to be so many of these stores of Mammoth proportions that don’t go bust… Sigh did i mention that Ben & Jerry’s retails here at under $3 a tub? And that Post Cereals sell for like $2, and Ritter Sport goes for 5 bars for $5 (all USD)?

Hmm well at least there's something that Singapore's cooler in...

Well one thing that i appreciate about the time that i have on my hands is the opportunity to spend time of better quantity and quality in prayer – that’s something that i feel the Lord is challenging me to pay much more attention to nowadays. And prayers not solely for myself (cos in the current state that i’m in, i need lots of that) but definitely also for others – that’s probably why many of my correspondences to friends now end with a “So how can i pray for you?” bit – i suppose that’s partly because now that i am separated from the community of believers that i am most familiar with in S’pore, i realise the importance of remaining connected in a sense through a better identification with what others are going through especially since you don’t see them… And prayer is definitely a great way that God has given us to do that (among the many other great things about prayer – such that i’ve begun to feel a new freshness in my walk with God – though there’s still a long lonely road ahead). Yup – so to whoever is reading this – do feel free to let me know ya – think that it would be a blessing and privilege to pray for you, especially in the absence of the opportunity now to be able to physically pray WITH you...

Tomorrow i leave Oregon for good to drier and warmer pastures in Fresno, California. It’s an 18-hour overnight bus ride (methinks akin to S’pore to some restive southern province in Thailand) which ought to be interesting and tiring. Perhaps one highlight is passing through Sacramento – California’s state capital – maybe i can say hi to governor Arnie hehe… As a result, i’ve had to try and reorganize my baggage in the light of added winter clothing from Mark – decided to Ziploc them since firstly they take up a lot of space, and secondly i won’t be needing them in the foreseeable future, so there’s no problem with stashing them away somewhere for now… The entire process of sealing them (the result of which can be seen below) taught me to never attempt to Ziploc stuff without first cutting your nails – i ripped through one bag and have almost punctured another one while not heeding this piece of advice just now… Additionally- i’ve realised that i’ve seriously overpacked- so once i get to school i’ll have to go through my bags again and take out what is really not necessary and hand it over to my mother (thankfully she’s around =) to bring home.

Hmm and speaking of nails that need to be cut - there's a guitar in the room that i've been staying in for the past week - it's an acoustic and it sounds great - the only problem being that it's tuned down by more than one semitone and since it's not mine i don't want to change the tuning... Anyways, think it sounds so good because in the exact opposite of what happened during MEET trip, now that i've been using solely the classical at home for more than a month, any acoustic that i pick up sounds tons better. Well, hope that there'll be a guitar somewhere around when i'm at school - and think when i get home i'll eventually go guitar shopping =)...

Here’s one thought that has been swimming in my mind as of late – since i’ll be in the States all the way till early January, i am theoretically able to attend Urbana, something that i had always thought about but also always put on the backburner. But after having a taste of what IVCF is like over here through Mark’s contacts, i’ve moved it over to the frontburner (if there’s such a thing). Have visited the website and things have looked promising so far. That’s something that i suppose i’ll be praying a lot about and asking around about once i get to school proper – especially since i don’t want to end up there solely for the sake of being there…

I ramble on...

It’s a sleepy Sunday afternoon here now, and after two and a half days I finally have the opportunity to recollect what has been happening – cos things have practically been zooming by so fast…

Friday morning we went blueberry picking – there’s this place just five minutes’ drive from where I’m staying where you can pick your own blueberries for around US$0.95 a pound. So I suppose you could therefore say that we had a blueberry morning of sorts haha – except that this time these were fresh-off-the-bush blueberries rather than the dehydrated and shrunk variety found in the box of post cereal. It was great fun – and at least it felt more legal than the previous day when we just happily picked raspberries growing off an abandoned lot. And have I mentioned that these wild berries literally are everywhere? Almost any abandoned fence or roadside that you chance upon will have a cluster of berry bushes growing there. Apple trees are another common sight – and there are so many of them, and so much fruit on them, that you can see trees full of fruit with the ground below them similarly carpeted with fallen and unwanted apples…

Oh but as usual I digress, basically it appears that Oregon in general is a very fruitful state – over at the farm there was such an abundance of berries – with clumsy picking meaning that hundreds of them littered the ground below as well. The whole experience was definitely something off the beaten track methinks – and at the end of the day something tells me that by the time I leave Oregon I won’t want to eat another blueberry for a very long time coming… My blueberry morning will become blueberry mourning =p

And there's tons more where that came from...

In the afternoon Mark (who looks vastly different from the last time we all saw him) drove down to the house from Eugene – was great to see him after so long – and I always think that it’s so cool when two people from place A somehow cross paths in place B halfway across the world. He’s now officially my biggest single supplier of winter clothing, which makes things that much less ma fan for me =) Hmm I really dunno how I’ll take to the cold when it comes though – I love cold weather but for a prolonged period of time I’m not sure – but at least I know now that I won’t be suffering from hypothermia…

But I digress again – anyway, he took me around Portland crashing a birthday party of a friend’s friend (or in my case a friend’s friend’s friend), driving around Reed College and visiting some church/cell thingy – it was great to catch up and get a better idea from him of what my time in UNC may be like ministry wise at least. After that we watched Talladega Nights in town with some of his friends and some of their friends – but not before some car trouble which I shall get back to later – anyway it’s a Will Ferrell movie about Nascar – with some laughs but generally too crude for my tastes – the scene where he said grace was a big turn-off for me – and I am saying so much about it because I figure it won’t be shown in Singapore due to the heavy American references (how many people in Singapore know about Nascar anyway?) so I guess I can spoil it somewhat for you…

The car trouble was quite freaky – but anyway to cut a long story short I ended up having to spend the night in his friend’s house (I only first met her that very afternoon – but she was very hospitable thankfully) and in the morning we went to rectify the problem which turned out to be spark plug trouble – and suddenly all my memories of boat maintenance came flooding back too me about twelve hours too late… God was very gracious in seeing us through the whole thing =)

Matthew, Mark and our friend (neither Luke nor John)
(i am not sure how to spell her name so i shall refrain from doing so)

Somewhat abruptly, I was soon whisked off to Seattle, WA with the folks and the people we’re staying with. Was quite looking forward to going there initially (have been there before, but it was only a short transit at the airport) – I had visions of sipping a coffee under the cool shade of the Space Needle while using the café computer with a Microsoft operating system, watching Boeing planes zip across the sky, and imagining a scene of Frasier happening right in front of me. Instead I was stuck with close to 90°F (32°C) weather under an intense sun shying away from the numerous fresh seafood stalls in the Pike Place Market (i was especially grossed out by a stack of giant dismembered crab legs as long as some people are tall). Was basically like San Francisco only hotter and sunnier… Oh well, at least I can say been there, done that =)

The best shot i could get of the Space Needle
- there's one with me in it but my face is all black

This morning I went to the church with our host family – my first church experience in the States for a long time now – took some getting used to (my father had a lot of comments =p) but all in all a very interesting experience for me – at least after meeting some IV people with Mark and church today I have a better idea of what things may be like for the next few months…

Just now we stopped by an Asian supermarket – was confronted by strange things like pigs’ organs laid out in the meat display looking like a Jack the Ripper murder scene and frozen whole durians and rambutans – the latter looked particularly gross – they were a uniform dirty brown colour and all suffered a very bad hair day…

So that’s in a nutshell how things have been going so far – overall I’m glad for the whole experience – so many new things, and meeting up with Mark was great too – at the same time issues to work through have already developed exponentially since I’ve arrived – that’s like only four days - and think that I’ll have quite a bit to deal with throughout the rest of my time in the States – to elaborate would take too long – but suffice to say it’s gonna be a bumpy yet positively eventful road ahead – maybe like a funky rollercoaster ride…

Oh and btw, now that my baggage and hence my mic is back - i should be able to use all of skype's functions now - so no more of that shouting into the plug socket business =p