I cant say I am not looking forward to this event, although I have not seen my family for slightly more than one month, well perhaps as one of the survey I did recently suggest, I tend to miss them more once we are separated for a period of time, even if it is only a mere one month. Especially under such a hectic environment and not really many people around to pour your feelings to, I tend to miss my family and close friends more than usual. For this year, I will be going back to Malacca by bus from Singapore. Meanwhile yesterday, my sister left for KL, where she will catch a plane today to Melbourne, Australia, to pursue the course of her choice in Monash University, and will probably be back in November for holidays. I guessed she will eventually feel the same as me, though I don’t think it will be as hectic in Australia than in Singapore. Nevertheless, I wished her all the best in her future undertakings.

Coming back to the topic on Chinese New Year, I went to Chinatown with my friends last night, ate in the Food Street there where there are a lot of nice food. Actually I wanted to buy some CNY goodies from there, but I realized I picked a wrong time to go there, shouldn’t go at night where there are SO MANY people..so crowded to an extent that I find it difficult to squeeze into a stall to buy something. In the end went home empty-handed. But the decorations were quite nice though.

This week’s lessons were just like normal, nothing special happened, except one lesson my GP tutor was so furious with our class since most of the class didn’t do their homework (I wasn’t one of them), she went on saying it was not the problem with not doing homework, it is our attitude towards learning that she is furious about, she actually just packed up and walked out of the class. Speaking of GP, our school went for a movie trip on Wednesday and Friday to VivoCity Golden Village Cinemas for a movie (actually it was a documentary) called “The Inconvenient Truth”. It was about the dangers of global warming and the misconceptions people had about it, and also political and economical issues behind it. It was made by Al Gore, former vice president of USA, and I must say he did a good job, though the documentary was quite boring (I fell asleep for about 10 minutes halfway through the movie when the most boring part was shown). Anyway it is quite 壮观 to see the whole movie theatre full of Saints, and when we are making our way there it was like Saints coming from different directions and converging to that place. At the end of the movie I had to rush to NUS for my tutorial, thus I missed my class dinner.

In addition this week the MRL organized a competition called “Oy, I stumped the librarian!”…students can pose us questions and we have to answer before 5.30pm everyday, failure to do so will result in the student getting a prize. Well, this competition was by far the most successful competition we ever organized, but also the most controversial. Firstly there are certain loopholes in the rules and regulations that our president (whom I shall just call MSP – Micro-small president, due to his body size) carelessly omitted, resulting in us getting weird questions like “why is 邓小平 not called 邓大平?”, “How many times a week is a potted plant in SAJC fertilized?” and sometimes we gave away prizes in that way. Another example of questions which we disqualified include “How many leaves are there in SAJC territory?”. Secondly there are obviously people who wont be satisfied with our answer and challenge our answers, stating theirs is correct. Thirdly, the purpose of the competition had changed, people did not just ask questions out of their curiosity, like a student asked us “Why did Super glue not stick to the walls of its tube when it is still inside?”. They ask questions more because they want to “kill” us, stump us, to satisfy themselves. I am referring to one particular class in this case, where most of the students came up with this sort of questions. The same class, which I can never understand, liked to make fun of librarians. I cant forget the smug smile on one of the contestants when we told him we fail to answer his question. Well, big deal. We had around 60 difficult questions per day and obviously there will be questions which we cant solve. Dun have to give me THAT look. Makes me feel like slapping him.

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