如果 If

I like this song! It is very meaningful :) For those who can't understand Chinese here are the lyrics in English. (Chinese lyrics are in the MV itself.)

If my existence is just like a shooting star in the night sky
Why do I dream of eternity
If my being here is just an accidental chance
Why do I long to be loved

Who can hear me, hear me,
Hear the crying deep in my heart
Who can tell me, tell me,
Where I can find true love.

If my existence is just like a shooting star in the night sky
Why do I dream of eternity
If my being here is just an accidental chance
Why do I long to be loved

Who can hear me, hear me,
Hear the crying deep in my heart
Who can tell me, tell me,
Where I can find true love
Please tell me.

If your existence is just like a shooting star in the night sky
I won't be waiting patiently for you
If your being here is just an accidental chance
I won't use my life to exchange for that.

Do you understand me, understand me,
My heart is bleeding because of thinking of you
Do you know me, know me,
My love towards you will never change.

Who can hear me (understand me), hear me (understand me),
The crying in my heart (my heart is bleeding for you),
Who can tell me (know me), who can tell me (know me),
Where can I find true love (my love towards you will never change)

If my life is not a temporary shooting star...

Hol Storage, Rag Day and Start of School

School is starting on Tuesday (Monday is a National Day public holiday), and after making a rough timetable for the week, I realize that I already have tonnes of work to do. This is going to be the toughest semester yet. I hope I'm able to survive it!

My previous week was mainly occupied by holiday storage. Holidays are over and people are coming in and out to collect their luggage from storage rooms. I have to open the door and refund them their deposits. Although I was only on duty for four consecutive days in the week, I was quite sick of doing it at the end of it all. People called every hour of the day, waking me up every morning, and calling whenever I was eating, napping, talking, even when I was in the toilet! There was never a moment of peace. I walked from my room to the storage rooms about 30 times a day.

Still, this business is a very good source of income for hall. (I don't get paid for doing this, just earning CCA points to stay on next year). Look at the little space before you:


You see that rectangular area enclosed by the four crosses? That's one slot unit, which is as big as half a toilet cubicle. And believe me, that unit can hold a lot of things! If you're experienced and know how to pile up your luggage properly, it can hold up your whole room, or even too, if your things aren't a lot.

You can pile as high as you want. The sky, no wait, the ceiling is the limit.

We charge $8 per week for each slot. The price has gone up this year but if you think it's too expensive, I guess you must take into account three things.

1. The convenience of being able to store your things on campus.

2. The service - IC's to open the doors for you throughout the day, and keeping everything nice and locked up. But we don't help them to move things in and out. That would be too much.

3. We're a monopoly. No matter what price we set, there will always be a demand. And we do want to earn enough to cover our orientation costs ;)

Anyway, I never store my own things in those rooms. Haha.

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Rag Day came and went. I love our float and shirts! Azi designed the rag day shirts and they were cute. Junda thought it was some sort of environmental society shirt though, because it was green in colour and there was the slogan 'Go Green!'. Green is our hall colour you see.

The float was quite well cladded this year. I guess it's because the bulk of work is done by the floaters themselves since we don't have incoming freshmen. We were also the hall with the smallest number of supporters. But I'm glad our cheers were loud enough to be heard. And many alumni came back to support us too. :)


And surprisingly, this is the year we've broken the curse of not winning anything for years! We won the shield for lowest cost float! I think part of the credit should go to OMC for sourcing materials sucessfully, hehe. But to be fair, Float didn't give us too much work to do this year, in fact they were very innovative and found a lot of things themselves. So all in all, it's Float's credit for resourcefulness and good planning in material usage.

I think our cheering was more wholehearted this year even though our number was halved. I guess when times are good, all we do is complain about hall, but when we know we have to be united, we are a united bunch.

Hopefully, the winning of a rag day shield is just the start of a tide of change to flood into Raffles Hall.

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I visited my granduncle's house on Saturday night. My aunt flew back from America, so we had dinner with her family. The triplets are so interesting! One of them ate twice the amount of dinner that I did. And then we watched transformers, and the kids kept asking me for the time because it was already 9 something and their bedtime was at 8!

Don't think this will ever happen in Mable's case, whatever age she's at. Ahahaha.

Wai Pheng's Birthday

Yesterday was Wai Pheng's birthday. We planned a birthday surprise for her, but it didn't go exactly as predicted. Still the effect was good!

Abigail came to have dinner with us Rafflesians two weeks ago, and suggested a birthday surprise for Wai Pheng. We bought and made her presents! Then I was supposed to ask her out for lunch/dinner and the others would surprise her by suddenly coming out.

Just the day before yesterday there was change of plan. Abigail wanted to contact her boyfriend, Mark, to ask her out instead - then we'll suddenly appear out of nowhere. But it turned out that her boyfriend would be late from work, so the plan reverted to me asking her out. Then I had to tell Tirza who just came back to Singapore from home, and Jiun Ming of our last minute changes.

We asked Wai Pheng to meet Tirza and I at Coffee Bean, where the dinner was supposed to be. She didn't know where that was so we set out meeting place to be at Cold Storage instead. Jon and Abigail then suddenly decided to switch to somewhere else because all of us haven't had dinner, and it didn't do to have dinner at coffee bean. I was supposed to ask her to a certain Thai restaurant and Jon would direct me to it.

Tirza and I shopped in Cold Storage while waiting. There were no directions coming!! And Wai Pheng had already arrived.

"She's here" I texted Jon, after telling Wai Pheng we'd have dinner elsewhere.

"Ok... Coffee Bean then." Was the reply.

" I told her we'll be having dinner somewhere else!" texted me. Since I heard him mention some Thai place earlier, I had suggested Thai food to Wai Pheng, who knew where Thai Express was and was heading towards it.

" OK... Pho Hoa, 2 shops after coffee bean," came Jon's reply. Pho Hoa was a Vietnamese restaurant next to Thai Express. By the time I got this message, we were at Thai Express looking at the prices.

I felt instantly that Jon and I had zero chemistry.

I sighed inwardly, and glanced at Pho Hoa wondering how to direct Wai Pheng over there next. I suggested we go over to Pho Hoa to compare prices.

" OK, so we wait at Pho Hoa," texted Jon.

Pho Hoa was more expensive than Thai Express. Wai Pheng didn't want me and Tirza to spend so much money so she went into Thai Express instead. Giving up, I texted Jon and told him to come to Thai Express. Which they did! And we moved to a four seat table to a six seat one, because JM was coming later.

Abigail asked Wai Pheng to close her eyes and presented a 'cake' with candles in the shape of a heart.

This is what the 'cake' looks like with the melted wax in the middle.

And when it's lighted it looks like that!

The Thai curry was delicious! Pity we didn't take a picture of that. I want more but we can't eat this often as it is expensive.


We did, however, take a picture of ourselves. Thanks to the mirror everybody was in the picture. And Mark turned up later to join in the celebration too. Though we were quite tongue-tied in front of him, and him more so. =p

After having dinner, we got Wai Pheng a cake from Coffee Bean too.

It was yummy-licious! :D


After the cake cutting and cake-eating ceremonies, we headed for home. Simon happened to be in NUS when we were going to the bus stop, so he detoured to Holland V to fetch us back :)

Yay! Was so happy Wai Pheng enjoyed her birthday :) Thanks Campus for celebrating my birthday last Sunday too! I love the choc and green tea cake!

Amazing RHace Part II

I finally decided not to be lazy and continue with writing up part II of the race. Read part I of it in the previous post if you haven't! I highlighted the places we went in the previous entry, to make it a better read. My legs are still aching, but at least I can walk properly now. Stairs are still a bit of a problem.

On Saturday we got up at 730 am and kept our tents. We forgot to take a picture of our tents though. Then we were supposed to go to Changi Village (our next station) to have breakfast, and after that, predictably, go off to Pulau Ubin. Being economical, our team decided to take bus trips to Changi village. Big mistake indeed. A bus which we got on was travelling at snail pace. It was incredibily slow. After putting up with it for a long while, we got down and took a taxi to Changi Village instead.

The bus ride had ruined all our winning chances (however slim). We were the 5th team to get to Changi village and have breakfast. Azi and Rochelle had lots of quiz questions about Raffles Hall, and we had to pick one nasi lemak related food item from the icons of Restaurant City if we got a question correct. After getting 3 correct items, we could eat breakfast, which was nasi lemak! I didn't look carefully at all the items and chose tomato for one of them instead! (Because some nasi lemak do have tomatos.) I should have picked rice! The most fundamental item on the list. But anyway it hardly took much time to rectify the mistake.

Nasi lemak breakfast.

After breakfast we took a ferry to Pulau Ubin. The name means granite island! Then we met Yiqiao there, my roomie for the hols. She and her friends were going for a visit too! So we boarded the ferry together.

Picture taken with Yiqiao next to me.

Our team!

Pulau Ubin was an intersection stop. Two teams had to work together to get a mahjong tile sequence. Since our team was the 5th team, we had to wait for the 6th team to arrive. And they took ages to do so! The reason was because we were a competitive team, while unknown to the RHOCers, the team after us was a leisure team. And being a leisure team, they had no reason to hurry at all. While waiting for them (the first two teams had left the island when we arrived, and the next frantically riding all over for mahjong cards), we biked a little round the island and went to have coconut drinks. This was when I found that I could bike after all! I was soon confident enough to start riding faster and faster on the bike. It was fun!

After one or two hours, Gant's mega team arrived. They were actually two different leisure teams combined.

The mega team. You can see they don differently designed shirts.

We finished the activity at Pulau Ubin quite quickly once we were started. In fact I believe that if there was no delay, we would have been quicker than the first two groups. Everything went quite smoothly. Back on land, we took a taxi to China Town next, which was our next destination. Met poor Liling, waiting patiently for us with a clue. We learned that the team before us left two hours ago. The clue was a CD, and 'Chinatown Complex'. We were actually supposed to find someone to play it for us, but we thought that there will be a RHOCer in a CD shop or something. After going round and round Chinatown, we were hailed by an auntie at a CD stall, who knew what was going on. We managed to get the CD played and there was an image file with a certain seat in a hawker center on top of the complex.

Rushing to the seat, we found another poor RHOCer sitting there, Crystal, who never drank Redbull before, with Redbull to keep herself awake. Ate lunch, and to save time (we were supposed to be waiting there for one hour plus before moving), we converted ourselves to a leisure team too, because we wanted to have enough time to at least go through all the stations. Crystal left with us to Little India, because the other leisure teams will all skip her station. Liling went with us too.

At MRT station station with RHOCers Li Ling and Crystal.

In little India, we had to do three things. The first was to thread a flower garland, actually it was just a few stalks. This was to be done by two of us.

That's me with the garland on. This isn't exactly one of my fav pics.

Jerome was supposed to learn how to make and flip a prata next. But they couldn't let him do that, so instead he had to sell a prata which was bitten at one side for 80 cents! I'd rather make the prata if you ask me. But he managed to sell it to an ang moh (which is what we call Eurasians here), who was sporting enough to buy and eat that. Lastly Jia Voon had to do a henna (google images if you don't know what this is). Jerome and Jon volunteered to be subjects so they both got a circled 'RH' on the back of their hands.

Our last stop was a Botanic Gardens, where old RH once was. We were to do three things - walk one whole round and back on a foot reflexology path (advanced version), take pictures of 10 mystery things around the gardens, and find a mystery person who has the clue to the next station. We decided to only do the reflexology path. Gallivanting around Botanic Gardens, which was really big, to find 10 obscure things certainly didn't sound fun. And since we were a leisure team now, it was ok to skip that bit of the station. Imagine, team no. 4 which was an hour or two ahead of us, was still there searching when we came round.

The foot reflexology path walk was painful, but kind of refreshing too. I was the only one who walked the whole round among us. Jerome almost made a full round too. As for the mystery person, it was Mr Leong, our hall manager, who was supposed to give us the final clue that says: "Advance for home. If first, collect $500.' We didn't find Mr Leong, because we already knew what to do. So off we headed for home, and towards the $500 which has already been collected.

Jon had this brilliant idea of eating ice-cream before going back. So we enjoyed choc ice-cream with oreo bits in them costing $9.00 between 4 of us. It was really a lot of ice-cream, so it was worth it. :) On our way to the bus stop, I finally got to enjoy the luxury of being able to hobble at last. Before that I was still running and striding on my poor legs.

Back in hall, I anticipated we would be among the last or almost the last because of the ice-cream delay. But, as Su Bee solemnly announced as we stood on the 'mat' with a Singapore map, we were the 5th team to come home, and the 1st leisure team! Sadly there's no prizes for the 1st leisure team, but the whole experience was already like a prize itself.

JV and the last clue box. Note that our boxes has a green stripe in the middle!

Su Bee (keeping a straight face): You are team number... 5.

The team that won the $500 were 4 'strong men' as we termed their team. It was a close fight between the first and second team. I wonder how many teams have cabbed all the way, and incurred big losses. But still, the bikes, the ski tickets, the hamster ball experience as well as most of our food were free. And the whole experience was so different from the conventional orientations and senior's camp.

Have to hand it to RHOC that we have such an awesome time! No regrets doing more holiday storage opening and closing to get this in return, with BBQ dinner to boot. I was rendered an invalid for more than a day, but I'm moving quite well for now! :D This is the first time I really overstretched myself physically, and I have mixed feelings wondering whether I should do it again next time, if there is such a chance. Still, thank God for good team mates, organizers, and BOPers! I hope they took lots of photos of us!