The Procrastinated Post: PJ Trip Part II

OK, here's part II of the PJ trip, complete with pictures.

After shopping at Sungei Wang and Times Square for one whole day (refer to part I in the previous post), I had a good rest in the next day for the shopping spree began a little later than usual. Dawn had a late day in school and by the time she was back it was dinner time. I joined her Christian Fellowship in UTAR for dinner. After that we went to Midvalley to shop. By the time we reached Midvalley it was already past 8 p.m. So you could imagine how we rushed when we toured the place.

Some pictures in Midvalley:

Teh Tarik Man at the door entrance. Dawn dragged me to take a pic with him as soon as we got in. Charming, is he not?


Dolls in front of an already-closed shop. Could imagine how late we were then.


Fluffy toys being sold. We sneakily took pictures of them (hence my funny expression), since we reckoned the sellers won't really like it.

We had ice-cream at Baskin' Robbins too. Dawn had chocolate mint (as usual) and mine was apricot mixed with white chocolate or something. It had some complex name that I had already forgotten. Too bad we didn't think of taking pictures with those and messed around with soft toys instead.


Pictures of previous days: Nandos Dinner at Sungei Wang.


These two pics above are of us taking silly photos until the food came. We did a range of expressions. You could check out the whole selection in Dawn's facebook photos. My photos were decidedly worse because they were saved at the first take. Dawn deleted most of her previous photos and had around 3 takes before she proclaimed them decent.

This is another picture of the food we had. The drink is Coke (unlimited refill). The refill somehow became Ice-Lemon Tea though.:S

Emo Dawn tired after a walk in Times Square. This particular photo comes in a range of colors as well. To know what I mean, view her Facebook photos. The bag in front of her contains doughnuts. Again, I didn't think of actually taking a nice picture of those doughnuts. And the doughnuts accompanied us for 5-6 hours in the remainder of our shopping spree.


This picture was taken at 1Utama - the place called Bar B Q in my previous post.

Happy-me with funny expression. My pictures always turn out weird somehow.

Happy Dawn with normal expression. See, she always takes better pics then me. :(

Yes, yes, Hunny came too. Dawn has adopted her as a daughter. She told me she ate a little and drank some soup. :S

This is how you cook the food. Interesting, isn't it?

And here's what we ate between us. There was unlimited refill of green tea too.


This was my comfy mattress on the floor which I slept on throughout the stay. Biddy (the nice round pig there) is as good as a pillow herself. She's fallen from Dawn's graces somehow (by being too boring I suppose), and Hunny is now the new pet.

Yes this is Hunny. Cool Hunny, though she might have sore ears at the moment.

Another picture of cool Hunny, with Dawn's purchase of the day - her Strawberry bottle!

There - the job in done. The PJ Trip Narrative Series is over! :)

PJ Trip Part I

Went to PJ with Dawn (my sister) these few days. Took some silly pics with my phone but have to wait till I'm back for it to be uploaded (provided D doesn't delete too many of those unglam pics of herself). Hunny came too.

I slept on a mattress on the floor with a nice squishy pillow and Biddy, who is almost like a pillow herself. She's this nice round pig belonging to Dawn. I like Biddy, she's nice to hug, squeeze and irritate Dawn with. Dawn, on the other hand, is obsessed over Hunny, my Carebear.

We Dawn's place in the late evening on Sunday so didn't have time to go anywhere. Dinner was an event worth remembering though. I never waited over an our in a cafe just for a plate of fried rice (which we shared).

The next day, XJ treated us for lunch. After that we went shopping at 1Utama. Brought a blouse, jeans and shoes. Dinner was fun. It was at this place called Bar B Q and it was both steamboat and bbq in one. Dawn went home empty handed for once. She said it was alright as the next day she was sure to come back with lots of things. According to her, no girl comes back empty handed from Times Square and Sungei Wang Plaza. Those were the places we visited yesterday.

So yesterday we set off to Times Square and Sungei Wang, and shopped the whole day. I never shopped so much (as in brought so many things) before. And surprisingly Dawn came back empty handed too! Maybe I just wasn't her shopping buddy, she said. In the end she brought a few hair accessories to pacify herself.

Dawn is in class now and we're going to Midvalley later. :) Somehow I still prefer the public transport in Singapore by far. It's faster, cleaner, and most of all, you don't have to worry so much about your safety when you go around in unlighted areas at night. But oh well, this shopping experience has taught me one more thing. Clothes and food are SO MUCH cheaper in Malaysia! I have a good mind to convert all I spend in ringgit over there so that I can cut down my expenses a little bit more.

Results and Expectations

Results are out and they are really unexpected. Those that I could have done better in I didn't do well (except the one that cannot be saved anyway), and I didn't know that I had to use an SU this semester. Anyway, I was thankful I checked my results on time. If I just confidently let it be, I will be whacking myself or something at the end of the sem haha. On the other hand I didn't do as badly as I expected in some of my other modules. Overall it was better than the last two semesters, but my CAP dropped all the same. Anyway thank God for the results. Another motivation to buck up next sem.

Everything is so uncertain, with the economy crisis and all, but this holiday has somehow brought me to realize that it is sometimes my own expectations that are pushing me down. I have learned to let go after struggling with my ego - and somehow, I had learned even more to just do my best and be satisfied in my studies, and let God do the rest, including plan the rest of my future. I don't know if I'm not cut out for this course or something, but I'm happy to be where I am, and everytime when those clouds of doubt come in, I just have to focus on His promises for providence to shoo them away. The future is such a big thing, with such uncertainty. But God is the Rock of the Ages, He is ever the same.

Oh yes, after moving to blogspot, I realized that my entries are terribly long. I didn't know they were that long, they looked much shorter over there. Do note that this new blog is still under construction until whenever I please. :p

Reality Shows

This is my first individual, public blog in blogspot. I moved at last! But my entries will always in Windows Live Spaces still :) It's my very first blog space and I'm not letting it go! But there will always be more pictures here, and as I mentioned over there, blogspot is more flexible if I want changes of any sort to be done to my blog.I have been watching two reality shows lately. I do like reality shows a lot, but more than one at one go seems to be a bit of an overdose.

One of them is Malaysian Dreamgirl which is already over by now, and they already have a new dreamgirl (Juanita) for Season 2. Oh well, I was supporting Ming and Dawn all along, but then again, it was quite evident that by the end of the show, Pinky was giving better pictures than Dawn. Juanita's pictures were not bad too. good in the view of professional models, but nothing too striking from the eyes of a viewer. Anyway, she bagged the prizes with a margin of 20, 000 votes. Those producers are sure raking in a whole lot of money.

Having watched this series of Malaysian Dreamgirl, I turned to watch the episodes of Season 1, which I have painfully sustained myself from viewing all throughout the semester.

I found the modelling more interesting than the current episode, but with unexpected results -some of the better girls were eliminated earlier, and those that were left behind, especially for the top 3, had very medicore performances. And the girl who won (Cindy), in my opinion, should be eliminated way back in the earlier rounds. Hmm. SMS voting isn't fair at all, to the contestants who fought hard to win this, only to lose to the cash-support factor. At least this year's season (Season 2) was slightly better because Juanita definitely had way more potential in modelling than Cindy, and she worked harder too. It's just that the side of her character on camera irked viewers a lot.

I have been wondering whether it would have been better if they could somehow limit it to one vote per phone every week or something like that - or just judge the competition based on the opinion of a number of judges. But then, by then the show might not even exist because there's no big profit in it! Hmm. Reality is reality. Anyway, the Malaysian Dreamgirl series were good entertainment, even if the outcomes were not really fair.

Another series I watched and finished is called 'S Factor', which Dawn introduced to me. It is a Singapore reality show (and I don't even know they put up shows like this), in the search of the one girl with the 'S factor', who is going to win $10,000 in cash, and gets displayed on the cover page of the FHM magazine. It's uploaded on Youtube every week and the last (8th) episode is over.

$10,000 is a lot of money (at least to me - think DOLLARS not ringgit), but getting it is not easy either. Somehow I kind of think this show is weird. They contest in the funniest things ever - for example to test their intelligence they test their speed in performing a secondary level experiment (which, I'm sure even a smart primary school kid could complete but then some of the girls had great difficulty even finishing it). And the debate which followed which was judged by professional judges of a national level was nothing more than picking out the 'best of the worst'. Put one Sec 4 kid in there who could speak English fluently and think maturely - and he or she could beat the whole lot of them at one go. Other competitions - like handling kids, and fine-dining proved to be better. But the intelligence episode was certainly a pain to watch, though it was funny in its own way too.

Anyway the whole show is over now and one girl walked away with the prizes. But she had a price to pay for it too - for she (as well as some of the other girls), had exposed so much of the weakness of her character in the process, that it was hard for people to feel the same about her again. Especially in the way she treated the other girls. $100,000 to show the ugly side of a beautiful girl, plus your picture on the cover of a magazine to boot. Is it worth it at all? Sometimes in a way, society does let us think it is worth it.

Take for instance something said by another girl in the competition - that it was necessary for her to blog and 'bitch' about others because otherwise, people will just think that she's some boring, goody-goody girl, and she'll lose all her readers. Is this the trend and mindset today?

In our school days, we learned from moral education and such that you reap what you sow, and how much you put in is how much you get. Also, be kind to others so you get treated kindly in return. We learn to be fair to others so we should be treated fairly too. To respect others to be respected. Well, the irony of all this is, you go out into society armed with all these things and then very, very quickly; you get conditioned into accepting another set of values - the fast way to climb the ladder of success. The good guy seldom wins, or he never even gets to win at all. Pride is rarely followed-up by a fall for people who always get it right. Bad is exciting, being good is boring. How much you reap is just a tiny portion of what you sow. Isn't it disheartening?

But I don't think it's the end of the story yet. The Bible has a much larger view of things. Look at the example of the Beautitdes:


It expresses the consequences of our actions and thoughts - they do have the rightful consequences, though in heaven and not on earth. There were be weeping in the night but joy in the morning. The end of the story is in heaven, not on earth, where there's always the hierachy of the social ladder to climb, and when there are times that being good just isn't worth it's while.

All the more why Christians should learn not to love the world and its values, and practice patience and endurance for the better things ahead :)