Rant on bus 0 lalalas
Annoyed at buses going to-from NUS. Last night went to watch a free jazz trio performance (piano, bass, and drums) - fell asleep through half of it due to lack of sleep and due to jazz music's lack of adrenaline-inducing beats unlike say, Korean percussion drums.
But best part is after the performance ended. I was waiting for #96 bus to get to an MRT station to get back home. 2 minutes passed, a completely full bus passed by. 15 more minutes, another completely full bus. Another 15 minutes, 3rd full bus. It was 9 something pm when the performance ended so I didn't realize it was that hard to get a bus at this freaking non-peak hour. So tried to walk to the MRT seeing that it was 4 stops away or so, not too bad what, ~30 minutes of walk ma. Guess what, got lost but later thought I saw road signs pointing to the correct direction that I need to go (because I roughly know the location but not the precise directions). So I walked on like a MFSH and somehow they don't have walking spaces beside the roads. I have no choice but to walk on the sidewalk that is not parallel to roads. When I get out, !@*&^$$# already on a different road. Luckily there was a bus stop nearby. Even then I waited for 20-30 minutes for one bus to turn up (there were 3 buses going to my destination, talking about efficiency). The rest was business as usual, 40-50 minutes of commuting.
Although I admit I am partly to be blamed for not knowing how to walk to the MRT, I am of the opinion that if you can't get a bus after waiting for 40 minutes in your World's Top University at 9 p.m. that is pretty screwed up (almost as screwed up as those Malaysian buses last time I was there). Anyway the latest strategy to improve commuting experience is to introduce a more accurate predicting system. Let's apply this to my case. The system detects the bus is full, so from saying "Arriving" it displays "15 minutes". Then after 5 minutes aiyo another bus also full wor, so from say "10 minutes" it becomes "25 minutes". So what am I supposed to do with that information? Call a cab and pay $5 for what you usually get for $0.69? Continue waiting? What if the bus is your only way to get there and you keep getting all these full buses for the next 30 minutes? Judge for yourself how useful the perfect prediction system is.
Then this morning, I only managed to get into the 3rd bus after about 30 minutes of wait (on a good day, it takes 10-15 minutes to complete the whole journey). If this is Malaysia, I won't be surprised. But this is Singapore wor, developed country wor. Another interesting thing that my colleague pointed out was that during university vacation period and now that school reopened, the bus frequency is still the same whereas passenger volume has increased by maybe four- or five-folds. In UBC, in the same case, there would be more bus services available and frequency will be increased. I guess it's not that flexible here.
Paise la. Another one of my rant and rave session. Recently commuting and lack of sleep has taken its toll on my temper. But very tired dy right now, so going back to sleep...
What's going on, Wei Kee? 0 lalalas
The day before yesterday, Wei Kee went to shopping and he bought a good deal of (useful) stuff - jam, butter, plates, bowl, plastic containers, hangers, bedsheet, etc cetera. It costed him about 100 dollars including the taxes and plastic bags. The plastic bags cost 4 cents each, while the texts are simply exorbitant, totalling in 13%! That's like what the heck! He's paying 13 dollars for every 100 he spends!
Then yesterday he went to get some stuff: staples, stapler, paper, bread, milk. So it's almost complete now. He still needs peanut butter though! Today he's got the orientation for the first years - Imagine UBC (thus the title of this post). It's pretty ok. His leader, Prince Nimoh (Nemo!!) was pretty good, a funny guy. Basically, they played some lame ice-breaker, learned the engineer's chant:
"We are, we are, we are the engineers,
We can, we can, demolish 40 beers,
Drink rum, drink rum,
Drink rum, drink rum,
Drink rum and follow us,
For we don't give a damn for any old man who doesn't give a damn for us,
Yeah!"
Then some talks, free pizzas (Yeah! He ate four slices of that!) and there's a competition: they got to build a catapult to project an egg across a distance, which Wei Kee's group sort of did a so-so job, because the idiotic Wei Kee just sat there like an.. idiot and didn't contribute any ideas (duh!). Another thing worth mentioning is the pep rally. A few thousands of first-years had to squeeze into the War Memorial Gym to listen to some old farts talking. Nah, Wei Kee's joking, but about the second parts only. The event was pretty cool; it's like watching a game and you got everybody cheering, chanting, and booing. Then when the important people (the campus president, the chancellors, you get what I mean) came in, they played the Star Wars Darth Vader song and that's cool. I mean you don't get this in Malaysia right? It's boring and uninspirational there. Then when all the professors and important people speak, they are pretty funny and you don't ask questions like "when's this old fart gonna end?". And people cheer and have fun, so there you go: it's pretty fun.
Next item was the Main Carnival Event where there were a lot of booths set up. Wei Kee got his laundry bag from a Christian booth (neat!) and he stuffed everything he picked up into the bag. There were gay booths, gentlemen booth (they're so vain!), reiki club (Japanese healing arts, Wei Kee actually came across this term once when he played Sacred as a battle mage; and this Malaysian girl that Wei Kee saw got this reiki treatment said she felt nothing! Ooops!), kung fu club (aah, now you're talking). There were this library booth where they let you see for 10 seconds a card showing what materials you can find in different libraries then you have to match the libraries with their materials. Sneaky Wei Kee sneaked nearby and watched others played it and thought it was easy to break their 16-second or 23-second record and he attempted it with an retarded timing of 30 plus seconds (Congrats, smart-ass). Wei Kee collected lots of freebies and by the time he finished the tour his laundry bag looked like Santa's goodie bag. However, looking for a club that suited his interest didn't went well: he could find neither computer games club nor badminton club, too bad.
Next was a meeting for Frosh retreat, some kind of "fun" activity for engineers. After that, Wei Kee watched a weird comedy performance performed by UBC Improv. It's sort of like "Who's line is it anyway?": Impromptu comedies with twists. Interested in knowing more? Please visit UBC campus. Bad thing was, Wei Kee, ignorant as he is, didn't understand almost all of the jokes. He was clapping his hands with the others and wondering all the time what they were laughing about. That guy's gotta improve his practically non-existent listening skills (and something to do with the Canadian culture stuff).
Crash! Signing off (Wei Kee's hasn't had his dinner yet, growl~)
Drunk 0 lalalas
Yesterday I went to collect my U-Pass and UBCCard: UBCCard is my student card while U-Pass is a cool card which you can just flash to the bus driver and board the bus for free. Then my friend and I went to the Bank of Montreal on our campus to open a bank account. It took us about 1 hour plus and I found out that was because there's a lot of documents to handle and lots of explaining to do. The banker that attended to us was damn hot!
After that, we went to a talk about things we need to know as an international student: visa, study permit, working on-/off-campus and other things. Some parts were pretty useful.
Then came the fun part. My senior brought us to Stanley Park to participate in the Merdeka celebration. We took a few buses to get there and boy were they bumpy; I can hardly stand straight when the bus is moving or stopping. The celebration only started after an hour or so after we arrived. We met some war veterans and officers like the general of Malaysian consulate in Vancouver. That guy gave a speech and his grammar was pretty inaccurate I'm sorry to say. Next thing we know was that we started to eat. The Malaysian food was superb and I felt for a moment that I was in Malaysia (damn I miss home!). Like a foolish idiot, I drank 2 glasses of red wine and 2 glasses of white wine, just to test out my drinking abilities; and I got drunk.
My first time being drunk, it's a new (pretty exciting) experience to me. It's like losing control of your faculties - movement, speech, thinking, etc. An analogy would be a lagging computer: You're inputting something but the computer takes a long time to do it. I felt as if I was dreaming, but I was still able to control what I do or say. It's pretty hard to walk straight though - my friend swore that I walked exactly like a drunkard. But I felt quite good. It'd loosen up me a bit and I felt bolder that I can do anything. I felt quite sleepy though, and I felt that I could just lie on the ground and sleep straight away.
Despite my drunkenness, I managed to get back to my senior's place. I fell asleep in his bed immediately. When I woke up just now, I got a hangover. My head felt like it's breaking apart. Arghh, the agony! For a moment, I thought that I'd transform into some kind of Hulk-like monster. Anyway, I am feeling much better now, thank you. I have a lot on my hands today, so posting pictures will come later as I get settled down.
Signing off...
Bye Malaysia (for now) 0 lalalas
29th of August, 11.50 p.m., I boarded the airplane to Frankfurt, Germany from which I'll take another flight to Vancouver, Canada. A kind friend of my mother drove my family and I to KLIA (Thanks auntie, although you were a bit late). So touchingly, the Si Da Cai Zi (Cai as in Fei Cai) - CK, CS, YS, and Ah Hey - came to bid me farewell. They even gave me a pink T-shirt as a parting gift (Thanks, cowboys)! After inciting vows to continue to be faithful to each other (as well as to keep in touch) and a ceremonial (as opposed to useful) briefing and lengthy photo-taking sessions and a heart-wrenching and tear-inducing farewell, we marched off towards the check-in counter.
After an hour or so of waiting and some procedures,we boarded MAS' MH0006. In addition to that, my nailclipper passed the screening ('cause it doesn't have a blade) and so did my dvd which contained the pirated version of the excellent unwatched movie of the Shawshank Redemption. I did it, Ben! The flight was mostly pleasant, I'd say. The air-hostesses wore close-fitting attires, the food was excellent and the alcohol was.... intoxicating. We get to choose what we want to watch from tens of channels on a small screen located on the back of the seat in front. I tried out the vacuum-sucked toilet hole and it was pretty cool. What else? There was a hot French chick sitting a seat and an aisle away from me. The space between the seats were a bit narrow and it's bloddy cold in the plane. My only serious regret was that my friends get to enjoy the golden club member seats while I and another guy that's going to UBC enjoy the economy seats. To my bewilderment, despite the difference, our tickets cost about the same.
While I repeated the routine of watching movie and sleeping, we reached Frankfurt airport, which looked like an industrial area. The Germans looked pretty much like those I've seen in games (Gothic series, Return to Castle Wolfenstein). Good job, game developers. And they have a sort of counter for smokers with the ever effective warning of "Smoking kills". After queueing for an hour or so to get my boarding pass, there wasn't much to do. I saw some people quarreling over cutting queues (which involved the chick I mentioned above). Then I went around to look at the shops, the bar, the McD. The first cultural shock hit me: there were magazines which features topless girlies on their front page. CC, stop drooling, will ya? The newspaper's price was exorbitant: I saw one at 1.5 Euros, which is more than 5 times the price of The Star in Malaysia, not to mention the thinner content. The other items were also very un-affordable, and I lost my interest in buying anything.
Finally my friend and I (both UBC student) get to board the Lufthansa's plane to Vancouver, AC9101. Checking in was a bit troublesome. I have to show my passport, offer letter, financial affidavit,and traveller's cheques and answer a few questions. For a moment, I thought there's going to be a problem as the officer looked very hard at my affidavit.I worried too much.
On board of the Luthansa plane, I automatically compared it to MAS, in which MAS prevailed. First, MAS's seat was slightly more spacious. And the hand luggage space was also larger. The largest gap, though, was the on-board entertainment. While on MAS you can watch all you can (hmm, this reminds me of Street Fighter) and want, you have to watch what they let you watch on Lufthansa, and there're only 2 movies to watch, not to mention that the TVs were shared instead of 1-per-person on MAS. However, Lufthansa wasn't that bad. They have a wider choice of alcohol: the Bailey's - a mixture of something sweet (maybe caramel) and alcohol was my favourite. Lufthansa has more toilets (although the vacuum failed to suck out the (yucks!) toilet papers. Another advantage of Lufthansa is that their passengers consists of more (foreign) beauties than that of MAS. In addition to that, I saw with my own eyes and spectacles the wonderful scenery of Greenland on route to Vancouver, a breathtaking sight if you ask me.
After 10 hours, we reached the beautiful airport of Vancouver. Both flights were enjoyable and fresh to me, although I myself wasn't fresh (despite my being a freshman) because of the long flight hours and the lack of sleep. After going through the immigration, we collected all our stuff and documents, and jumped into the welcoming arms of my senior, Mat Shafiq, who, being not warned about the delay of our flight and the short stint with the immigration, waited for us an hour earlier than our arrival. Happily, we took a taxi to UBC, my new home. Vancouver is a really beautiful city, something we hardly find in Malaysia, whose cities are constantly marred by the heavy traffic and air polution and inefficient public transport and busy people who are always chasing after Time. The air was very cool, which I compared to the old Genting Highland when boys were boys and girls were girls.
My senior helped me to move in my new residence in Cariboo House, Place Vanier. Fortunately, I live on the 4th floor and there's no elevators, which is a boon to my health and fitness. The campus is very beautiful; it would take me months to take the photographs of the gorgeous scenery. The people there are helpful: A guy who didn't know me greeted me, "How's it going? Are you looking for something?" and he showed me the way to the International House, where I got some materials for my international student orientation, known as Gala, tomorrow. Drivers patiently stopped when I was about to walk through the zebra crossing. At the moment, I don't feel very comfortable with the people's (what I call) over-friendliness; I'm much more used to passivity, as I think most Malaysians do. It's going to be tiring greeting and offering to help anyone you meet and don't really care about, isn't it? Somehow I think of myself as being inferior to them, both in nativity and height. Ah, worrisome brain.
Tomorrow will be better! (I hope). Sorry mom, you asked me to be disciplined and sleep early, yet I failed you on my first day here.
p/s: I'll update the photos later, ya?
Settled and yet to be settled 0 lalalas
This morning I woke up at 1.40 a.m. - with the aid of my dear mother - so that I can call the UBC Engineering Services (it is about 8.40 a.m. over Vancouver) to inquire on my problem with the course registration. As the saying goes, "One call solves it all" (My saying, by the way). After I called the department, the problem that's been causing me great distress for 3 days was solved in a breeze: I immediately registered for my favourite (and rather radical) timetable.
Now that this is solved, I got other things to settle. For one thing, I have to apply for my visa which involves quite a bit of work: getting the documents (including my certified copy of transcript), buying a bank draft, ready, travelling to the Canadian High Commission for a few times, undergoing a medical check-up, etc. Besides that, I'm planning to buy a camera for myself (I've been depriving my family of their camera for a month or so) and a laptop (perhaps later). Certainly I need to purchase new parts (memory and hard-disk) for my ageing computer at home and perhaps a compressed air can to do some cleaning and a new mousepad.
I'm so looking forward to the days that I can watch World Cup and anime and chat without care.
[Exeunt]
