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haven't been updating for the past 6 months cause my life's been really crazy. not crazy-fun like i'm-partying-too-hard-to-blog fun, but more like crazy-my-life-really-sucks crazy.
first, a quick recap.
most importantly, i AM NOT IN TAIPEI ANYMORE. haha! i still get the occasional email and sms asking if i've stayed on in taipei for good considering my previous post was just before i flew off to taipei, and someone actually asked if i got married to a taiwanese!! LOL. so it was a fun but very wet trip since it rained while i was in taipei everyday.
came back from taipei, and it was a quick jaunt to nearby phuket with some of my old secondary sch classmates. it was a laidback, slack like hell trip, coconuts by the beach, eating icecream nonstop, indulging in some gambling in our monstrous hotel suite.. haha. definitely one of the best trips ever.
being in the faculty of no-holidays medicine, i returned back to school for an onslaught of short postings which truly, was pretty enjoyable because i knew the 2 major postings that were coming up after that were definitely not my idea of fun. rotating through anaesthesia at cgh, ophthalmology (eye) at ttsh (a lot of early days though, that was excellent!), ENT at cgh/ttsh, and finally the eyeopening experience in pathology where we got to go into the mortuary and watch autopsies right in front of our very eyes. the whole 8 week period doing these short postings were a breeze, with an occasional end of posting test here, and writeups there.
after that, my hell started. paediatrics posting. something i thought i'd be looking forward to. turns out, i only like kids, even though they're sick, but i really hated studying why they were sick and how to help them. i think my liking for kids should be channeled towards another job like a kindergarten teacher, and not a paediatrician. i can make funny faces and make them laugh, and carry them without dropping them, but ask me to diagnose a kid who is wheezing away with fever and a funny rash and some other concomitant problems, and i'm totally stumped. end of posting clinical test was a complete disaster, what was supposed to be a straightforward case turned out to be a total horrifying experience for me. i suck at vivas and oral tests where i'm supposed to come out with answers instantaneously. argh i just really hope i pass this posting overall.
thankfully, there was 2 week break where i took off for another quick jaunt to hongkong and macau. anson was the excellent tour guide and saved us loads of time. also realised how nice canto songs are! (despite not being able to understand a single word) and i realised that all hongkongers can sing. anson and his hongkong friend both sound like superstars, i think anyone in the street can just sing and sound like eason or sammi.
well, the worst was to come with the obstetrics & gynaecology posting. having heard so many horror stories about this posting from batchmates and seniors who have entered the realm of o&g and come out shaken, it is hard not to be filled with fear when we started this posting. so many rubbish paperwork and mini-clinical examinations where we had to hunt tutors to fill up silly little forms for review.. and then the horrible writeups, and late late times for tutorials (tutorials at 6pm?! you've got to be kidding me.) and more often than not, the doctor will say 'sorry, busy today. can't have tutorial.' o&g comprised of an osce examination, where basically its like this circuit of 10-12 stations with simulated patients and the doctors mark u in the 10mins u have in the room. remember when i said i suck at vivas and oral tests where i'm supposed to generate answers on the spot? well, as usual i crashed spectacularly in some rooms and from some rooms i emerged not knowing whether i passed or failed. ahh heck. whatever. we ended school on 22nd december, just 3 days before xmas.
and after a brief respite over the festive holidays, now i'm back to patho hell. pathology has really come back and bit me in the ass really hard after i did so badly in year2. now they expect us to go back to revise the whole year's worth of stuff and test us in like 2.5 weeks time from today.
seriously, at this time every year i really wonder why i am in medicine. a fellow classmate recently shared with me this online website where we found out that there are numerous pple out there who are disgruntled with medicine and it is scary to realise that i am finding myself agreeing more and more with their viewpoints as time goes by. i'm reading an entry eg. "101 things you wish you knew before entering medical school" [eg. #90 The best time of your entire medical school career is between the times when you first get your acceptance letter and when you start school. and my personal favourite, #47 Anatomy sucks. All of the bone names sound the same.] and i find myself nodding my head in agreement as i go down the list wishing i really knew.
but it is always during the preparation for the final exams of the year that i find myself REALLY hating the course i've chosen, and once the damned exams are done with and i'm given the all clear to proceed on to the next year, i find myself rid of these negative thoughts. but as the impending inevitable of the final year and eventually becoming-a-houseman approaches, i really wonder whether these negative thoughts will dissipate like they do in the previous years, even though as the years pass it gets longer and longer..
seriously, in all frankness, i really wish i had some time off school, sometime off all these damned clinical postings and associated tests and whatnots, and just give myself a time to think whether this is really what i want in life. sometimes i wonder what i'd be like if i weren't in medicine but i guess the grass is always greener on the other side, no?
thankfully the electives are coming up after the horrible horrible pathology exams, and hopefully the next 4 months will give me the boost and inspiration i need to see me through to the end of medschool.
and to you, the reader, thanks for reading this entry. pls post a comment, just say anything, it would be nice to see who's still regularly checking back on this blog (and wondering whether i'm still in taipei, haha)!
i'm off to taipei for a 6-day jaunt with some of my medicine friends! shiok. this holiday took waaay too long to come, and i'm so glad that it's here at last. and tmd i just know that it'll be over before i know it. so better enjoy it while it lasts.
the trip to the airport was pretty suay. my mum's car broke down right in the middle of the PIE! i was driving when suddenly the car lurched (i thought my mum had accidentally pushed against the gearstick) and to my horror, the rev-meter (whatever it's called) suddenly plunged to 0. and the car just continued rolling.. heng there was enough roll left in the mazda to roll to one side of the expressway.. ergh. waited till my mum called AA before i called for a cab.
flying alone for the first time today, since i'm flying on an award ticket on SQ (big thanks to my uncle!) while the rest of them are flying on jetstar. i'm using the free internet at the transit lounge of terminal 2 now cause its so damn boring. after a few times in t2 u realise that the shops never really change. there's a new chain of luxury fashion stores but well, being luxury and all that haute couture entails, i'm priced out! haha. well. so other than pretending to be a snob and walking into the ferragamo and hermes shops, there really isn't anything much to do.. ESPN is showing baseball now and everyone basically looks bored... being alone doesn't help matters as well. got no premier lounge access as well. also no one to help me take photos or to talk rubbish with. yawns.
but well, i guess flying solo is a brand new experience for me. i hope it turns out fine (hope no one sitting next to me on the flight later!! or if there is, pls let her be a nice person. preferably pleasant on the eye as well heh) and taipei summer weather wun be too rough on me. mouth ulcers galore now no thanks to the late nights and late suppers and late pubbing i've been putting in since ortho posting ended last friday (hooray and thank god THAT'S over).. wonder how i'm going to stuff myself with the famous taipei street food when my mouth is basically screaming pain now.
will be back on the 11th june, so i'll see you all then, and hopefully got loads of nice taiwan stories to share!
p.s. to my friends who are travelling (or going to travel) to london, new york, LA, cambodia, vietnam, hongkong, tokyo, australia: you guys have a great time too!!
this has been a most glorious weekend! no studying needed, just plain lazing around and of course checking out the great singapore sale that has just started.
and all this because my ortho test is over!
well my ortho clinical test was held on friday, and ohmygosh i got a heart attack when hsienmin and i were only informed of the test on wednesday afternoon!! yes, that's less than 48 hours before our test cause the secretary told us that we were to meet him at 730am on friday morning!! that's some scary shit cause i was really banking on the weekend to study.
so in the end, i had to cram in 7 weeks of ortho learning (sorry, i'm not terribly diligent as hsienmin can probably attest to that) in less than 48hours! i think i learnt more about ortho in 2 days then i did in 7 weeks. FINALLY figured out the anatomy of the hand (calling it hand bones and hand nerve didn't go down quite well with a certain hand surgeon at nuh heh) and physical examinations
considering that i hadn't done more than 2 physical examinations in the whole ortho posting, i was really sweating it out when i decided that hey, i need to practise on someone! so poor mama teo who was at home cooking had no choice but to lie down on the bed while i tried to examine her hip. and in the end i confused the whole hip examination with the spine examination cause both had something to do with lordosis or smthg like that. and in my utter desperate attempt to cover up my ignorance, the woman who has known me all my life immediately called my bluff.
"eh, you know what you doing anot? i think you're going to fail!"
damn sad la can. even my own mum could tell that my physical examination is damn pok. really utter demoralising crushing blow.
soon the last minute panic set in cause i really knew nuts about orthopaedics considering the scant interest i had in it (pls refer previous post). lucky some friendly tips from manny vicliang and ortho HO from nuh, chiak, saved my ass!
so onto the test proper. when the doc gave me the case he said "ok i'll be back in 30mins and u'll present to me ok?" then he zao back into his journal club meeting. so off i went to find the patient i was supposed to clerk, and the shittiest thing happened! the patient is no longer there!! like TMD!!! turns out she had already gone to OT so clueless and helpless me had no choice but to go look for the doc. this was when i realised that i dunno what's the doc's name, i dunno how he looks like (cause i only saw his face for like 10seconds), and i dunno where they having the journal club meeting!! jialat sia. really sweating liao. heng i walk out of the ward and straight away heard some mumblings about 'orthopaedic surgery has come a long way...' coming out frm a room and then i had to stick my head in to look for the doc!!
when i just push the door ajar, everyone in the room turn to stare at me, thinking like waddehell this student in labcoat doing man. but luckily the doc saw me and came out... phew. and gave me another case.
overall the test was okay. then hsienmin and i went to orchard to start our great singapore sale hunt!! shiok. to be in town on friday afternoon when everyone else is probably still in wards/lectures/clinics/polyclinics/IMH/w
so on hindsight it was great that the test was over so quickly for me so now i got a short breather before the MCQ and OSCEs next friday. oh well, to those taking the ortho test in week 8, good luck and all the best!!
pooi la!
i hate ortho posting. i guess this is what happens after u've been through a whole run of slack postings prior to this posting which actually requires u to do some reading and clerking!
fyi, my m3 timetable was as follows: genmed (CGH) - general surgery (SGH) - psychiatry (SGH/IMH) - radiology (CGH) - emed (TTSH) - chp project (had a side trip to cambodia in the process) - m3 study break - m3 exams - family medicine (GP/Polyclinic posting) and now finally where i am - orthopaedics surgery posting. guess only fellow medicine students can understand what i meant by 'whole run of slack postings'.
well. argh today was just a really bad day, and it doesn't help that when i try to answer at grand ward round today the doctor say "Oh no! this answer will make you fail your final MB!" how encouraging is that. (at least now i know why foreign construction workers always agree to have operations)
anyway, 4 weeks of ortho have passed surprisingly quickly (honestly) and i just pray the last 4 weeks will pass even faster cause its back to the hellhole of NUH for the last stretch of orthopaedics. i dun like NUH, and i dun like ortho. add them two together and oh man, just a shitty combination.
wish me luck man
haha it is only the start of week2 of family med posting, and i've finished my gp posting! hooray. so i get tues and thurs off.
but guess what. now i'm sick. with a nasty bout of flu, phlegm and sore throat and everything, so i have to spend the first tuesday off at home.. =(
anyway the reason why i get this week off is cause my gp had to go to manila, philippines (Haha rob couldn't spell it correctly) for a conference FULLY sponsored by glaxosmithkline!! shiok eh!! when the drug rep came to brief him on the trip last week, dr tong (that's my gp) told us that he had no choice but to go for this trip since it was free and he needed a holiday. then asked us what there was to do in manila since he had no idea.
i wouldn't mind. i like free holidays. (i was mouthing behind the drug rep - i want to go too!)
so yesterday was the last evening session with him, and i think the powers of bringing peace and harmony and tranquility are really really strong in hsienmin and i. i asked him how last week's schedule was, with two of us sitting in at the clinic. he said, "well, on the days when u guys are here, it was slow, so slow it was embarassing. on the days when u guys weren't here, i was so busy i didn't even have time to eat my dinner! but its ok, i like slow days once in a while... but not so often. haha"
then reading other fellow med students' blogs on how they're doing at their emergency medicine posting (which i did last dec). they have busy nights, busy ambulance runs, busy busy busy! a total contrast from the peaceful times i had there, when even the MOs in the ED said, 'eh ? how come tonight is like running a GP clinic?'. and we even managed to neutralize the always full TTSH A&E dept to be completely empty, no patients whatsoever, no one, nothing, zilch, no ambulance, nothing.. for one full hour. until one patient came in complaining of 'leg pain'. i rest my case.
and then, when our night shift ended at 7am and we were stumbling out of the ED (just woke up, you see, there was nothing else to do) and walking to the carparks, what do we see but 4 ambulances driving into the standby area. and our MO telling us the next day "oh why why why did you guys leave just before my shift ended at 8am?? we were so busy!!!"
so it's definitely not hard to believe that i went through the whole emergency medicine posting and i didn't see any dead, or near dead patients. it's good for them really, but bad for my learning, cause i really don't know what a dead person looks like. (no, year 1 cadavers from anatomy class do not count.) or what to do in emergency cases, since i think i saw a grand total of 2 throughout my whole emed posting. definitely not as power packed as lynn's busy nights at the same hospital where she's doing her emed now. haha. and and it's not that i'm slack cause i did go for all the shifts i was assigned to..
are we powerful or what. ohmygosh. hsienmin and i are the powerful bearers of peace and harmony and tranquility.
i think in the future, i'd make a very good house officer since i probably won't see any patients. and we'd be very popular with the whole on-call team that night.
freaking funny............. yet one of the dumb things we learn from family med posting.. (was it communication skills? or importance of messages? or some cofm shit)
listen out for the hidden number 3! i think the ah ma forgot to key in 3.. clearly got no head injury if u can remember such a long number.
haha to those doing family medicine posting (and actually attended the lectures), here's the damn funny ad!!
i want those sweeties!!!!!!!!
p.s. this is the crap we are learning in fam med. but i'm not complaining. hahaha
they were together for 6 years and counting, when one day he realised that she didn't love him anymore. he was still very much in love with her, but he sensed that it was slowly evolving into a one-way thing and she was just staying in the relationship cause it had become so much of a status quo that no one was willing to shake the boat.
he was too much in love with her to put her through a relationship which she no longer had any passion for, so he made the really tough decision of ending the relationship. he lied to her that he no longer loved her anymore, and the 6-year-relationship just crumbled into nothingness, just like that. and now the girl is (apparently) attached to someone else, blissfully unaware of the heartache she had caused.
i felt compelled to tell his story because it made me stop and think, are the relationships we get in now going to last? and those so-called long-lasting relationships we see in some friends now, can they truly say they are as in love now as they used to? and if its diminishing, wouldn't it run out someday, when all of us are just holding onto the relationship merely for convenience's sake?
kinda sad, dun u think so? it took a lot of drinking sessions to get the guy restarted and going, and man i just feel overwhelmed everytime i think of the situation he had to go through. if i were in his shoes, would i selfishly hold on to the relationship, wishing that she would fall in love again someday, or would i just let go, and let her seek her true happiness?
sometimes this sort of thing has to happen to someone close before you can truly understand the agony of this catch-22 dilemma.
cheer up, pal. don't give up the forest just because of one tree.
| Name: | RI 2001 Guard Of Honour |
| Type: | |
| Description: | Hey peoples, this is for anyone who... 1. Has spent any time at all standing outside the teacher's office waiting for Mrs A during recess being a Guard of Honour, quite possibly the highest mark of distinction a Rafflesian can ever hope for. 2. Has, due to collective incompetence, had to sprint to touch the big tree and back at the now non-existent field behind the RI junior block while getting yelled at. Not to mention spinning around on same spot. 3. Has stood in class on chairs / tables with various limbs raised in the air while nervously answering questions from then-brutal SAT verbal tests for class discussion, in full view of the HM walking outside the classroom's huge glass windows. 4. Once dined at the cantin; studied about lareeenxes and phareeenxes in biology class. 5. Has sat in math class, waiting for recess to come and wondering what thumb it was. 6. Inexplicably produced "yellow ppt" during a tit-ration experiment... only to incur the wrathful vengeance of the inevitable "BOYYSE!" 7. Squirted cold, distilled water down the backs of tight-shorts-wearing, overly muscular individuals. 8. Has had the testicular fortitude to be at the wrong end of a Walls of Joelicho special move. 9. Knows the eternal lyrics of "My Heart is Like A Cabbage", and witnessed J-Dub's rendition of "Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now)". 10. Meets any of the abovementioned criteria, but most importantly, is as constant as the northern star, and has more sense than mere "blocks, stones, worse than senseless things". |
oh my gosh.. all these really bring back so many memories of my secondary school days back in ri... argh!! i feel old. of course, only the guys from 4b would understand ALL the points... ok la and maybe those guys from 4i too considering we had the same maths and chem teachers.
shit man i feel old.
anyway, i just got facebook! so those who are already on facebook, pls help me out by adding me! haha. just search my name and i'm pretty sure you can find me.
see ya on facebook!
damn sian right. and i'm doing family medicine posting, which is basically a 2-week attachment at a neighbourhood GP clinic, and another 2-week attachment at a polyclinic.
how did we choose the place to go? oh, the dean's office came up with this really funny plan of making us ballot for our gp clinics and polyclinics, meaning that we ballot for the order in which we get to select our gp clinic/polyclinic from a set list. but it certainly is a refreshing change from the usual routine when the dean's office would just send us an email 2 days before the posting starts with a huge long list that says 'Teo Zhongyang CGH (Medicine)'. so this time, they kinda let us put destiny in our own hands right?
but in the hands of someone as suay as me... argh...
there were 38 pairs waiting to be balloted in my session that morning, and guess what number i picked. number 21!! argh!! 21 out of 38!! then it didn't help that jasper ngoh just drew number 1 and was showing it off to me. ergh! i had half a mind to shove that number one slip down his throat man.. hahaha. and then u see around and pple drawing single digit numbers... wahlau really damn sian. but thankfully the whole thing turned out not too bad for me cause i selected a gp clinic at beo crescent which no one really knew where it was, which is precisely why i still stood the chance of actually selecting it. all the others near my place like great world city, harbourfront tower, jln bt merah.. all gone by number 12 i think. argh!
needless to say hsienmin (my partner for this posting) wasn't very pleased and he say, "wahlau! why u pick number 21!"...
so the whole gp clinic balloting had ended, and it was time for the polyclinic balloting!! this time it's by CG and so there were only 10 polyclinics up for grabs. of course i had my hopes up high for bt merah polyclinic which is just a 5min bus ride from my house. so we sent our cg team leader, hsienmin, to go draw the number while the rest of us just stood back and prayed. pls remember that anson, fuqiang, yuzeng and i had a combined total of over 100 with all the numbers we had drawn earlier so we really hoped our bad luck would not persist.
jayne's group went before us, and they drew number 8!! anson fuqiang yuzeng and i just laughed out loud cause 8 out of 10 is damn bad!! like kinda practically no choice for any polyclinic liao.. damn suay la..
until hsienmin uttered behind her.. "eh guys i got number 10."
WAHLAU.
we just peng-ed on the ground la.. much to jayne's amusement. (i can still remember how cruelly she laughed at us.. ooh damn bad!!!) number freaking 10 leh!!! alamak. so we ended up with hougang polyclinic.. we din have much of a choice anyway, since it was the only one left. just thankful we didnt end up at pasir ris polyclinic otherwise my cg was contemplating of booking a chalet at costa sands for the whole 2 week duration liao......
so sian when for once you have destiny in your own hand, but your bad karma and bad luck just ruins it for you.
argh!!!
mug hard everyone!
cause in the 2 days running up to cny, i had been hard at work (who am i kidding, really) studying, and we all know that in chinese, study = 读书 right?
so when i go to the gambling table, i end up 赌输 = lose in gambling!!
tadah. mystery solved.
but the lousy zy express has broken down countless times on day 1 of its ardous journey towards those damned pros. its on the 18th day of the 1st mth of the chinese calendar!! oh those dean's office pple are asses i tell u. but anyway, back to that pok train of mine. i kept falling asleep every 2hrs whilst trying to study.. and you know how there is this period when u are nodding off and basically nothing goes in (this is abt 15mins), then after that it's the konked-out sleep proper (this is abt 20mins), and then the after-nap grogginess (which is another 10mins or so). so basically each cycle wastes about 45 mins!! can u imagine. so when i come back from washing my face and deciding to do the other subject (i.e. alternate between cofm and pharmaco), it's not long before the whole cycle starts again and i just find myself swearing silently when i find out that tmd!! i fell asleep again. argh!!
coffee doesn't work for me, cause i've been a coffee drinker since pri1 and basically tolerance has set in long long ago. eating sweets is no good for my already horrible teeth, and i actually fell asleep chewing chewing gum today. can you believe it. i have no idea why i'm so exhausted! more like sian actually, studying all these foreign things really doesn't make much sense and it doesn't help that next to me lynn is furiously highlighting and scribbling little notes on her papers. i look over, and see 'cholinergic drugs', and there is this mental block in my head. like what the heck is she studying?! how come i've never seen it before? (fyi, it's in the exam scope.) i am so dead i tell you. luckily i haven reached a stage when i'm so demoralised i just wanna stop studying. (that usually sets in 2 days before the exams when everyone crowds around during mealtimes and discusses answers nonstop and i find myself totally zoned out in all the foreign gabrah.) i told myself yes!! i will study till 12midnight today in school!! but no, i left school after the library closed and went out for supper. argh.
oh well.. hopefully i can settle down and start some proper studying soon. who has any useful tips to aid me in my quest to pass the pros, pls feel free to leave a msg!
and good luck to those nus peeps having mid-sem tests next week... i understand the pain man.
now on to barcelona vs liverpool!!!
at last count, i have 23 cousins, another 8 grand-nieces/nephews and two more kids (whether their cousins/grandnephews is still to be advised) on the way this year of the pig!! goodness gracious me. my parents were like, how come the kid population seems to be multiplying every year? they actually ran out of angpows to give to the kids and i had to go hide in the toilet to stuff money into last-minute angpows. my parents say they have half a mind to just hide in some cave next year cause they really bleed damn alot every cny, and with at least one new baby born a year... haha... poor parents.
i may be more of the exception rather than the norm, but i actually look forward to seeing all these relatives every chinese new year! yes, i may only see them once or twice a year, but still it's nice to know that there are so many people in this world who are actually blood-related to me! okay, maybe only vaguely, but still?! exchanging silly stories and all the mindless small talk, some pple find it superficial but i find it strangely entertaining. it amazes me sometimes at how much crap can come out of my mouth during these endless conversations but thankfully i am always saved by some relative asking me to 'eat more!! you're very skinny!'. so that is the cue for me to leave and hunt for miscellaneous cny goodies like bakkwa. egg rolls. pineapple tarts. chocolates. bakkwa. kuehlapis. kuehbangkit. egg rolls. bakkwa.
(i really love bakkwa)
anyway according to a whole load of fengshui masters, this year of the golden pig is gonna be a bad year for all those born in the year of the ox!! argh. love life will suck, money matters will suck (beware of conmen, says the taiwanese guy), health will suck (beware of extreme weather, says the china guy), and those studying (beware of distractions!). argh they are so right man!! i've got my pros coming up in two weeks time. and i haven even covered like 1/3 of the syllabus. and i only have 2 weeks. 2 weeks!!!! and here i am still going for mahjong parties and texas hold'em gatherings. ergh! and of course, my luck is really bad according to those fengshui masters, and tmd they are right. i actually had to bao a man-tai during the very last round of mahjong!! if that's not bad luck i dunno what is man.........
alright but anyway, happy chinese new year and i'm looking forward to meeting up with a few more pple over this coming weekend!
p.s. weight situation is still bad. so yea, health definitely sucks this year.
of course, this is the last week of the cofm project module, which also means that its the end of holidays (for most of us anyway). have to really thank those pple in my group who worked their guts out and declined our countless offers to help! i think they just didn’t want us to come and ‘help’ and screw everything up, too many cooks spoil the broth! so maybe it was good that i didn’t do much after my assigned job was done otherwise i’d have probably spilt the broth and pissed everyone off. ahh who am i kidding, i’m just a lazy ass. hope i dun get destroyed by the peer review.
managed to catch the singapore-thailand match at the national stadium on wednesday night! i think that it’s finally the LAST competitive national game at the national stadium before it gets torn down at the end of this year. honestly, i have no idea when the authorities are going to tear down the national stadium. everytime i ask someone, the same reply is “the national stadium will be torn down at the end of the year.” they said this in 2005, 2006, and now in 2007. kinda like those long drawn-out taiwanese dramas where you see those dying pple who are able to speak to their whole extended family about how much they love them, yes, even the unfilial son who takes a 23-hr flight from goodness knows where can make it in time to the hospital to shout, ‘ma!!! no!!!!!!!’ (cue sad taiwanese songstress music) heck even the commentator at last year’s NDP kept saying “oh, this is the last we’d see of the grand old dame...” and look at her. she’s still sitting there! haha. but nevertheless, i will definitely miss the national stadium.
back to the match itself. oh, the atmosphere was simply electric!! it was a sea of red everywhere within a 2km radius of the stadium, see fans from all over singapore converging on the stadium! as hb said, it is probably the only day when manutd, arsenal and liverpool fans unite as everyone’s red football jersey is probably from one of these 3 clubs. of course, being the football-clueless-noob, i just wore a simple nike flaming red shirt. but still better than the faded red shirt that hsienmin wore anyway. heh
after endless waiting at the entrance for latecomers and taking some photos for posterity’s sake, we all ended up separated amongst all the other 55,000 pple there so in the end it was jiayang yauhong and myself sitting together, and the rest just simply dissolved into the crowds. we got up to the stands just in time for the national anthem, and this is my favourite part of the whole experience. when the whole national stadium sings the national anthem in chorus (despite most pple mangling the song with atrocious tones), the feeling is just electric, and there is this patriotic rush in me that shouts out that i’m so happy to be a singaporean!! haha i am just a patriotic sucker la. sheesh.
so the match began. of course, being at the stadium itself meant no television closeups or commentators, so it took us about 5mins to figure out which colour our side was and which side they were supposed to score. don’t blame us, the lions were wearing blue! but they have to wear blue because everytime they wear red, they lose! it’s true!!
the match was pretty fiery, with the thais making spectacular falls. when pple like you and i trip, we just fall very unglamly with a loud smack on the floor. but when the thai football players trip, they fall on to the floor, roll around for about 4 times, and lie on the ground. haha. the most confusing moment came at the 82nd minute, when the whole penalty fiasco began. like i’ve said earlier, being at the stadium meant no television replays, and no commentators (yes, it’s really time to change the stadium), so all of us in the stands had no clue to what was going on! those at home could watch replays, but what we saw was just the thai goalkeeper walking off! and there was no timer at the stadium so we all thought the match was over or something before someone was smart enough to point out that it was waaaay too early. i still haven seen the television replay of the contest so i can’t say whether the penalty was justified, but the thais were just wrong to walk off like that. i thought timewasting = red card, and abandoning the match = forfeiting the match = singapore winning the cup!! haha. that would have been a rather ridiculous end to the whole tournament, singapore winning by default. but then again seeing how scrappily we played, i think singapore can only be in the world cup if we ever host the games. or if north korea goes mad and there is a nuclear holocaust and the whole western part of the world is wiped out. basically you get the idea.
so the match ended on a pretty crazy note, in typical controversial fashion. we trooped off for supper at geylang with some other friends and of course, supper at geylang is always great. so ends my final experience at the national stadium.
thurs evening was a welcome breather from all the chp presentations we had during the day! went out with some fellow classmates for a sakae sushi dinner, and then ktv! really miss ktv. and the crazy thing was that we actually sang from 730pm to 130am!! madness i tell you. but extremely fun! this time we sang more english songs from our secondary school days, like TLC (i can’t believe i actually remember the rap from ‘no scrubs’) and celine dion. like ohmygosh man. i feel old!! i really enjoy ktv. so who wants to go ktv soon, pls jio me too! i am shameless i tell you when it comes to ktv. haha
my usual gang of med friends are unfortunately, not huge fans of ktv, and being the busy bees that they are, it is almost impossible to meet up with them for outings! i’ve actually tried planning like 3 outings in succession but they always fall through. i dunno why, maybe we’ve drifted or something? or maybe i’ve been pushed away since they are all in one chp group while i’m the only one in another group. haha. it would be really nice to be able to meet up with them soon before all the crazy mugging starts, so you guys!! this is as desperate a plea as it can get!! if this doesn’t work i dunno what will work man... haha
and adding to the lonely misery, its been two weeks since my ditzy pal flew off to another part of the world and argh we suck at using skype!! i’m just such a techie idiot. just look at my plain boring blog and you would’ve probably guessed. come back soon, so that we can stop tearing our hair out over this skype thingy. haha.
and its also been two weeks since the food poisoning episode and i am very sad to announce that i still have not gained back that 1kg that was stolen from me. my BMI has reached new lows and it is very perplexing to note that of 4 pple who raised up their hands during my health promotion behaviour tutorial today to admit that they had problems with weight management, i was the only boy. argh!! let's just say i will definitely be banned from madrid runway fashion shows, not even close to the 18.5 cut-off.
cny is coming soon. i may order donuts from donutfactory by phone and throw a pre-cny donut party, so look out for it!! who’s keen, leave a message!!
plspls 1kg is all i ask for. or maybe i should just eat lard. ergh.
went to jalan besar sports stadium at jalan besar (ok, that’s stating the obvious) to get tickets for the singapore-thailand asean championship football final leg1 match tmr! funny huh, i think only in this part of the world is our ‘final’ actually a ‘semi-final’, where there are 2 parts to a final. kind of like how cheapskate channel5 always likes to show ‘season finale... part ONE!’ and then ‘season finale... part TWO!’ over 2 weeks. kind of defeats the meaning of the word ‘final’ right? well. just my two cents’ worth.
so anyway, today’s front cover of the straits times showed a really long picture of the long queue at jln besar stadium! amazing. apparently 28,000 of 50,000 tickets were sold yesterday, and from the advice i got from friends last night, i decided to go down to jln besar slightly earlier to beat the queue! so hsienmin and i set off in a quest for the tickets. we drove into rochor area, got lost around some kitchener area, made a few wrong turns, before realising that we were just metres away from the stadium!
thankfully we didn’t have to queue up very long, it took us only about 10mins to get our hands on those tickets! hsienmin suggested i buy the children ticket for kids aged under 6 (“It’s $2 only!”) but argh.. damn sian of all these jokes. haha
so mission accomplished. then hsienmin and i had some fun queueing up for those darn donuts at donut factory at raffles city marketplace! for the uninitiated, it’s this uber new donut krispy-kreme-like shop that has recently opened and attracts really long queues. according to the most recent issue of the sunday times, they marked an average waiting time of 1hour. that’s actually quite obscene, waiting one hour for donuts?! but then, i am a sucker for krispy-kreme donuts and i think aaron is quite sick of having to fly specially to sydney just to cart a box of krispy kremes back for me (i'm still waiting for you to fulfill that promise ).. so hasn’t qingxiang from the UK. argh! and liana of course, who forgot all about my krispykremes and offered them to me like 2 weeks after she came back! goodness. i like krispy kremes, but not that badly.
so hsienmin and i decided to join the queue at a ‘slack time’ of 2pm on this lovely tuesday afternoon, when all the office workers should be hard at work boosting our economy so that more shops like these can be opened, and honestly, who would be hanging out at 2pm on a tuesday afternoon right?
we were so damn wrong.
ok, so the queue wasn’t extremely long to begin with. there were about 30? pple ahead of us in the queue. how long could it possibly take right? so we joined the queue, and i opened my newly-purchased 8days to eat up some time... and there was one big article about donutfactory with the big fat headline
“THREE-HOUR DOUGHNUTS” (pg72)
arghh!!!! my eyes nearly popped out! three hours?!
so we waited.
and waited.
and waited somemore. (some nice cg-bonding time there haha)
so in the end, we were almost at the front of the queue, after like, 2.5 freaking hours!
“the end is near, we are near our prize”, i said to hsienmin. but then, some irritating fatty decided to prolong our agony by ordering like 12000 doughnuts, and he left the shop after another agonizing 20mins holding like 10 boxes of doughnuts!!!!
ergh!!!! talk about greedy man. no wonder he’s so fat. even the girl with him was pudgy.
so in the end, we got our 18 donuts (we decided not to be so greedy. i dunwan to be pudgy too) after a wait of 3hours. really 3-hour doughnuts. and it amazes me, the length of the queue had actually increased after all this while! no one in front of us or behind us left the queue at anytime ! except hsienmin and i who tag-team to go toilet, but that’s not counted. hmm actually i think only we went toilet, i am darn sure the 2 guys queuing up behind us never left their positions thruout the 3hrs! amazing.
it’s just mindboggling to think how we singaporeans can be so silly to waste 3 hours and queue up for donuts. like what the heck man!! donuts?! but haha evidently singaporeans have more free time on their hands than we’d like to imagine. (like yours truly) even the cashiers from some shop nearby (shan’t name them in case they get in trouble.. haha) tag-team to queue up for the donuts! and boy did she have a long list. i’m glad she was lining up behind me and not in front of me!
today, i cultivated the patience in me that i thought was long gone.
and my review of the donuts? THEY ROCK!! better than krispy kremes!! you don’t get so gelat after eating them, so the original plan was that i buy12 original glazed ones and bring 6 to school tmr to share with my chp groupmates, but they were so yummy, i ate 4 of them at one go!! and now, i only have 3 left! oh dear. greedy me.
they really are delicious stuff. but i doubt i’d be queuing up for them again anytime soon. 3 hours? no thanks! but for those who have plenty of time on your hands (and want to test the limits of your patience and stretch them to levels you never thought possible), pls go and queue up and buy one box of 12 original glazed donuts for me!!!! haha
p.s. don’t call me greedy, i still need those calories to gain back the 1kg i’ve lost thanks to the stomach flu from cambodia......
but i made the fatal error of eating this dubious looking dish from this dubious looking stall along this dubious looking road ( outside this dubious... (well, you get the point) ok, just outside one of the angkor temples cause it was the only place within 10000km that served food! and of course, my lousy stomach couldn't take it and now, 2 days later from that fateful meal, i'm back in singapore suffering the full blow of gastroenteritis!! stomach flu!! gastric flu!! ba tor bo song!! argh.
so after a really bumpy ride on the plane, (who of all days, had to be a flight that needed to make a stopover at danang, vietnam hence prolonging my agony) i made it back to singapore and my mum rushed me tstraight to my family gp from the airport when she discovered i was running a temperature 38.5degrees. how shitty. first person i see back in singapore is my family doctor. ho ho.
this is how the clerking went:
doctor: "so how are you?"
me: "ergh."
doctor: "not feeling well i see?"
me: "ergh"
doctor: "what's wrong with you?"
me: "nausea, bloatedness, fever, no appetite, weak... "
doctor:"hmm, ic, have you been eating anything? travelling anywhere?"
me: "yea, i just came back from cambodia...."
doctor: "WHAT THE HELL YOU DOING IN CAMBODIA!!!"
me: "ergh"
wah i really suck man. 3rd world country really doesn't agree with me. but then again i'm glad the only 3rd world country i've been to is cambodia, and i managed to see the famous angkor temples of siem reap! travelling with a good friend is fun, only cause he had the same budget as me (both willing to splurge abit), both willing to live it up (splurge a bit), and finally i'm not the shortest guy on the trip!!! haha (sorry daniel)
anyway it was great fun. but ask me to do it again? i quote from a friend of mine who had already gone to angkor before and when i asked whether she wanted to go back to angkor again....
"ME?! CAMBODIA?! AGAIN!?
ARE YOU MAD?!"
haha ok maybe not to that extreme. but i'd have to train up my stomach to be able to tahan roadside stall food before i consider going on such trips again!
shall blog more abt the trip next time... when my appetite catches up with me again. i've lost 1kg already for goodness sake!!!
this is the first time i'm breaking out of my comfort holiday zone and embarking on a journey to a less developed part of the world, and i'm damn psyched up! hopefully all the promises that everyone has been making about cambodia being a really beautiful place will materialize and i will have great photos and stories to tell when i get back on monday (it's a really short trip this time)!
alright, gotta go grab a bite now before the flight. see ya all when i get back on monday!
having to do a cofm project sucks. being in a group that chooses to have 900 people as a sample size makes it even worse. argh! and then there are some other groups who just seem to be having a holiday, arhh!! that just adds furthermore shit. but well, c’est la vie.
i’m going to be tied up with this project for virtually one whole week, everyday frm 3pm-930pm, going door-to-door at some random HDB block in clementi to interview pple for our cofm health survey study. how shitty! thought its gonna be a nice holiday away from the wards, turns out to be not-so-nice holiday after all.
which reminds me, yay! i’m going off to cambodia for a weekend jaunt next friday! finally decided to make a departure from the usual megacity holiday destination and embark on an exciting journey to a less developed country. hope it’ll be an eyeopener and everything since everyone who has been to cambodia/vietnam always gushes about how great the place is!
of course, some pple clearly have doubts about me being able to survive in cambodia, saying that i won’t be able to tahan the hardship and everything. ok, you say it once, hahaha, i laugh along with everyone. you say it twice, haha, i still laugh and try to play along. you say it thrice, the joke starts to get stale and honestly it is starting to be mildly irritating. you say it AGAIN and &*@^%#(^^@#?............ well, you get the picture.
i mean, maybe everyone has this perception of me being this big softie who can’t endure hardship and stuff. hello?! i also went through army shit right. ok, maybe not the whole deal since i disrupted, but at least i went thru bmt and half of ocs right? c’mon. give me some credit for that. personally, i see no point in roughing out unnecessarily since i’m now a civilian and not in the army serving NS. how i choose to go about during my holiday is really my own choice right? just because i choose not to stay in a US$1-a-night shithole with holes in the ceiling and mosquitoes buzzing around doesn’t make me less masculine just because some other guys can endure living in such unsanitary conditions. if you want to live on a US$2-a-day budget, c’mon man, it’s your own freaking choice. don’t make it the status quo for all guys who go backpacking to have to find the most dirt-cheap hostel to sleep in so you can be perceived as more ‘macho’ and wear that tag proudly on your chest. honestly. its not like you can bring all the money u save into the grave with you in the future right (and you can’t save much staying at US$1 hotels anyway).
it is quite irritating when others impose their own method of holidaying onto you when hey, i’m not asking you to come along and spend, say, oh, two more dollars a night with me in cambodia. then they go along and start saying i do this because ‘oh, zy is damn rich and can afford to spend’. wahlau. of course i got more money to spend la, the simple reason is cause i dun spend (note that i use the word spend and not waste, cause i think if the car is modded up pretty snazzily, it really is money well spent.) money souping up my car or wasting it all on booze (well, not anymore haha) la. this perception is quite unfair to me, really. just cause i choose to stay in a US$2 hotel, pple say i’m rich. but when someone else spends $500 modding his car, no one says anything. see? unfair right. just because i like spending money on myself, pple say i’m rich. argh! c’mon man, you guys have loads more money than me, just that you can’t touch that 6-figure deposit that you have squirrelled away in the bank! i have no such secret untouchable account to speak of (even though i really wish i had). and if you want to torture yourself by denying yourself good food and shopping while on holiday, it’s your own choice. i don’t go around saying that you are a miser just cause you don’t spend, so don’t keep tying everything together and making hasty generalizations about me.
really la, this has got to stop. enough questioning about my spending choices and tying the whole masculinity issue along with it. i work hard for my own spending money, and i think i am entitled to decide how i want to spend it. i didn’t actually intend to blog about this but it has been getting on my nerves of late and i’m just afraid i’d outburst at someone one day if i didn’t let off some steam regarding this irritating issue. ergh!
With 2007 comes brand new new year resolutions. one would be to blog more regularly! I give up on the resolution to gain weight. Never works and i doubt it’ll work until I’m like 50 or something (that's years-old, not kg.). Oh well! Shouldn’t be complaining la.
so anyway happy new year everyone. but before i get on with making a quick summary of 2006 (that’ll be the next post), i have an exciting tale to tell!
so here’s how the story goes.
today was a sunny monday, where 300 medical students get to go to exciting factories, to learn more about occupational health hazards! ahh who am i kidding. firstly i woke up late today, then nearly missed the bus, and i’m sure visiting a wafer fabrication (no, not chocolate wafers like kit kat) is damn fun leh... haha. ok but that is not the exciting part of the tale.
so group6 set off on a tong tar transport bus company chartered bus on the long ardous journey to the factory in woodlands! we were just driving towards the science carpark exit when all of a sudden, there was this horrible screeching noise from the left side of the bus!
SCREECH!!!!!!
lo and behold!! the bus had scraped this red mazda 3 parked innocently in the carpark!! oh crap!! immediately someone shouted “red mazda 3! is it hanboon’s car?” hb reacted pretty calmly to this, because i know for sure that i’ll be pissing in my pants if i heard that a gunmetal grey suzuki swift got hit! us kaypoh medical students then looked out of the window, trying to ascertain the damage and realised that the licence plate got knocked off!! and some paint got scraped off the front as well. crap man!! whoever that poor nus student is, it really is your unlucky day!! (it wasn't hb's)
and guess what the bus driver did? he just went down and look see look see, then returned to the bus and drove off!! waddeheck man!
ok, so our trip was off to a pretty exciting start (not so exciting to that nus student though, sorry dude), and off we went, to our destination in woodlands... and i dozed off.... zzzzzzzzz
hsienmin woke me up when we were reaching the wafer fab plant, and i saw that the bus was about to turn into the premises of the plant. the bus driver and teacher stopped to talk to the security guard at the guardhouse, and i was feeling damn sian at this point cause firstly, i can’t sleep anymore and secondly, wafer fab production just doesn’t sound exciting. so the bus started making its left turn into the carpark after saying byebye to the guard...
then, AHHH!!! the bus mounted the guardhouse’s kerb!! and those of us sitting at the back saw the roof of the guardhouse come precariously close to the windows of the left side. in fact...... it was getting closer and closer....
then....
SMASH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
oh shit man!!!!!! the roof of the guardhouse smashed into the side window of the bus!!! and we saw with our own eyes as the glass splintered and like one hundred gazillion cracklines started appearing! and bits and pieces of the guardhouse roof was also crumbling off! together with one huge chunk of aluminium metal thingy attached to the guardhouse roof!
ahhh!! by now we were all like going “oh shit man!” and both charmaine and jayne had fled from their seats cause the windows had splintered exactly where they were sitting (thank god for tempered glass – the glass din shatter). the bus was still moving forward.....
and then it dismounted the kerb and landed with a huge...
BOOM!! (with a shockwave to go with that as well.)
wahlau. so the bus driver stopped some distance away (i think he must be having his most unlucky day ever) and we looked at the damage to the guardhouse.. ok la, just one long long piece of metal piece hanging loosely off the side of the roof, plus some paint scrape marks on the roof, and a very pissed off security guard!!
so after the guard and bus driver exchanged some words, the suay one returned to his driver’s seat to (hopefully) complete his mission of sending us SAFELY to the factory. by now we were all just happily taking snapshots of the splintered glass and saying what a shitty driver we had...
then! he strike kerb again!!!
BANG!!!!!!
alamak!!
damn scary la. so we got off the bus, everyone posed for some photos in front of the splintered glass (we are damn pointless people, really), some took photo of the bus number plate... and the wafer fab plant visit excitement level paled in comparison to the trip to the plant itself.
and on the trip back, the SAME bus (yes, with the splintered glass and everything) and worse of all, the SAME BUS DRIVER (yes, the suay one) came to pick us up!! wahlau i wanted to hide behind a pillar or something before he ram through all of us who were just standing in one big cluster in the middle of the carpark la!! luckily i think the suay one was the suay one no more, and the journey back was pretty uneventful. (thankfully).
just hope the bus number comes out on wednesday’s 4D draw!
P.S. (tmd din manage to get down the mazda 3’s number, cause the licence plate fell onto its printed side)
