I'm spending the Sunday holed up in my dorm trying to study for my test on Wednesday. Yesterday I went out to buy my rations for today, and as I was slouching on the bench staring at my readings pretending to read, this family was enthusiastically flagging down a taxi. When they finally found one that did not have "HIRED" in a red sign on top of it, the Dad bundled everyone into the taxi and smiled brightly at me. I mustered a bright smile back, and he asked me where I was going. I said Jurong Point, and the next thing I knew, he bundled me into the taxi as well =D
There you have it, I hitched my first ride in Singapore, and I wasn't even sticking my thumb out. Who would have thought. It was a very friendly Singaporean family, Mum and Dad visiting Daughter in the campus and presumably bringing Daughter out for dinner. Their random act of kindness really lifted my spirits, several degrees up from minus. It was not like I needed the ride, because from the corner of my eye I saw the bus coming up from the rear, but it was nice, really nice, to have some warmth in the coldness of Singapore. Figuratively speaking, of course.
*smile*
I slept at about 1am yesterday night, and today I woke up at 10:45am, which is an amazing feat because I have been having so much trouble having good quality sleep lately. I'd go to bed around 2am, and wake up at 7:30am. Every morning without fail. Maybe it's the stress. I am looking forward to the end of the finals, when I can finally go home and muck around for a bit, and come back and move house (sidenote: I found out that my wall map can be removed with quite minimal damage to the wall!) (sidenote of sidenote: Kazakhstan has Couchsurfers. I checked.). I'll be getting the notice from the AEJMC Conference held in Boston around that time as well, fingers crossed.
I was wandering around Fairprice Xtra yesterday and saw so many things that I could have in a month. Couscous. Wooden stick to be used in frying stuff. Foldable clothes hanging thing. Muesli and milk, had separately of course. Soup ingredients (they package everything - the vegetables, the spices etc. into one set, what you have to do is just put in some meat and voila!). Pasta sauce. Mushrooms. Bread. And what comes with bread is Nutella! I'll finally be able to have breakfast like a normal person. Right now, with no kitchen and no fridge and only boiling water at my disposal, I can only buy drystuff and fruits (to be finished within a day or the ants will come).
For my rations this week, I got:
- three persimmons. (not sweet kena conned =_=)
- 500g of seedless green grapes (sweet but not crunchy)
- Some healthy-looking cookies, sesame oat thingies
- A bag of Cheezels
- A bag of prawn crackers
- 100g of mixed raisins and chickpeas
- some packet soup.
- a spoon to drink the soup with. And a fork to accompany the spoon.
That's pretty much a whole day of eating only interrupted by studying. Or blogging. Or watching movies.
OK before going back to doing whatever I was doing, does anyone know where to get modest-priced furniture, in Singapore? Somewhere between the price of Fairprice and Courts. I need to get a mattress, and the $300 ones in Courts is just too much for my meagre student budget. The ones at Fairprice though, are cheap but they're also very thin, too thin for my meagre student back. Why does everything about a student have to be meagre?
