Heart of Greed.

Recently the drama series Heart of Greed (溏心風暴) has been really very hot and it seems that everyone is so hooked on it. If you talk about the plot, it’s actually a typical Hong Kong drama series. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s just nice – the kind of show that you will really rush home to stick in front of the TV to catch. As the series is nearing its end, I bet there will be more and more people staying at home to catch it – or download it and watch it in class, like some of my students did during my lessons.

For those that prefer to spend time in my class watching drama series, I honestly don’t know how to help them. Deep inside I really want to just ignore that lot – I don’t know what else I can do. If they can’t be bothered about their own futures, there’s really not an awful lot that I can do for them.

I honestly don’t think I’m cut to be a teacher. I just don’t know what to do with some of these people. It’s like, for every one hopeful student you see or come across, there’ll be 10 others that will dash your hopes.

Rain.

The weather is still being irritating. It was pouring heavily yesterday night, and then today was horribly hot again. When me and my sister went to Kwun Tong for lunch, it was getting cloudier, and when we were walking inside APM, it was pouring again. The rain lasted for quite a long while, so much so that when we were going home, we had to endure the rain and gotten ourselves wet. Stupid weather, if you ask me.

A very peaceful weekend for me to recuperate from the tiredness throughout the week. And I really am not looking forward to going back to work tomorrow.

Hot.

The weather has been acting up strange for the past couple of days. On Monday and Tuesday, it was raining very heavily, virtually non stop for the whole day. And I had to cover myself with a light blanket at night because it was rather cool. Then on Wednesday morning it was raining heavily again, but it was horribly sunny and hot in the afternoon. Today was worse – it was terribly hot again, and I have to resort to switching on the aircon again because I couldn’t handle the heat. Mind you, it’s 11-plus here at night, but it was still as hot as ever.

The heat in Hong Kong is very different from that in Singapore. In Singapore you would feel just feel hot and humid, but in Hong Kong, it’s hot, humid and stuffy. The air seemed to be all trapped within the environment, and thus making an already hot place even hotter. It probably doesn’t help when the quality of the air is so bad.

I’ve booked my tickets to Singapore, and if everything goes well, I’ll be back in Singapore around noon on 5th July, and will stay there until 11th. For those of you who are keen for a meal or something, it’s time to start crossing out dates on your calendars!

Taipei.

I’ll be going Taipei!

(Click the picture for a bigger view)

I think this has to be the craziest thing I’ve done in 2007. My sister and I bought tickets for the Mayday concert in Taipei and as such, we’ll fly over to Taipei on a Friday night, watch the concert on Saturday, and come back to Hong Kong on Sunday. I think that sounds daft, but after the great experience at the Mayday concert in Hong Kong a couple of weeks back, I guess we only wanted more!

And for those of you who were genuinely concerned about my PSP, here’s what happened after that great fall in the Cheung Sha Wan train station:

If you are asking is my PSP perfectly fine after that fall, my answer would be a near yes. On impact, my PSP did broke into a few pieces, but apparently it was those detachable parts such as the battery cover and the battery. The MTR staffs actually managed to re-assemble the whole thing back after they picked it up, and the whole thing was actually bootable, and I was acutally able to play on it! Before I collected the thing back, I was already telling myself that I’d be collecting a few pieces of whatever that remained, so when the MTR staffs handed the whole thing back to me, I was more than surprised. So whoever still thinks that Sony stuffs are crap probably need to do some rethinking! A real-life experience has shown that the PSP can fall for a height of about 2m and still be perfectly intact.

(Well actually it wasn’t perfectly intact – my 2GB memory stick didn’t survive the fall and actually broke. But that was a SanDisk memory stick, not a Sony one. So the rationale of the story is – get an original Sony memory stick!)

I was actually very pissed after today’s class, but a chat with two of my colleagues after work during “evening tea” kinda calm me down. One of them was very right – just do my job, and as long as I’m OK with my job, everything should be fine.

More classes tomorrow, but to be honest, it’s more enjoyable to be conducting the classes for my FD kids. I think I like them more.

Rain.

It’s been raining rather heavily for the past 2 days, which was a good thing because it made for a very perfect reason to stay at home and rest, especially after a whole week enduring the smothering heat.

Friday was a bad day for me. It started with me getting fed up with some controls on my N95 (I didn’t really learn how to play with the phone so I kinda asked for it) and spent almost 20 minutes trying to send out a SMS (partly also because my fingers are too big for the phone’s keypad).

Then I lost my way trying to find the Chai Wan campus. It would have been OK if I was walking that much and the weather wasn’t hot, but it was terribly warm and at one point I thought of giving up and just return to my own campus, but for one reason or another I didn’t, so I endured the heat and all the perspiration and continue my march towards the Chai Wan campus. It took me 20 minutes to get there from the Hang Fa Chuen station to the campus when normally it should take only about 10 minutes.

When I arrived at Chai Wan for the talk, I realised that the talk was actually meant for students rather than staffs – I had the feeling of being cheated because apparently the talk was promoted through the staff email system, so I thought it was meant for staffs. When I entered the lecture hall and saw almost everyone was a student, I felt so cheated. It didn’t help when the talk was covering things that I already knew when I did all those marketing courses in university. I didn’t bother to stay till the end of the talk.

And then because I have to rush back to my own campus, so I decided that I would take a cab (partly also because I don’t want to walk back to the train station as it was horribly hot). In the end, the trip from Chai Wan to Cheung Sha Wan cost me $190, with the tunnel surcharge alone costing me $40. If not for the fact that I have no choice (I had 30 minutes to reach Cheung Sha Wan) I wouldn’t have spent those kind of crazy monty. I mean, a cab trip costing almost S$40? I could have travelled the length of the whole Singapore with that kind of money.

Then the worst thing of the day happened when I was returning home from school. Because of the rain (strange that, considering that the heat was sweltering in the day), I decided that I would take the train home. And while on the train, I took out my PSP to play. The train was kinda crowded, but I was in a good position so everything was fine. Suddenly some bugger behind me gave me a push while the door was closing, and the train door knocked onto my hand. The next thing I know, my PSP flew out of my hand and dropped between the train door and the platform screen door and onto the track…

Getting tired, and I think I would want to go sleep considering I’ve got to go back to work tomorrow. If you want to know what happened to my PSP, stay tuned.

Hea.

The word in the subject – hea – is how people in Hong Kong describes the state of doing nothing and lazing around, basically being unproductive to mankind. Despite being spelt “hea”, it’s actually pronounced as “hae”. I used to wonder why it was pronounced that way, until one fine day when I hear my students talk about the head, which in Hong Kong is often pronounced in a similar way as the word “hat” without the “t” sound. So that’s how the pronunciation of “hae” come about.

Nonetheless what I’m trying to say is that for the past couple of days I’ve been hea-ing quite a bit at work. I’ve already completed the preparation of all my classes, and now I just have one and a half lecture to deliver to my HD kids, and a couple of presentations to sit through for my FD kids. The project that was originally scheduled for me to do was kinda shelved, and the next one won’t come along that early. So I’m in a fairly free mode. That said, I think in the next couple of weeks I might see my workload increase a bit, especially when I have to start preparing for the supplementary examination papers soon.

Would be going to the Chai Wan campus tomorrow for a talk. Hope that would be interesting.

Pictures Day.

Time to show off some pictures – I’ve been using my new camera phone, the N95, for about 2 weeks and I think the camera is brilliant. At 5 megapixels, it’s much better than a lot of cameras out there, and even though I paid quite a bit for it (thank God for installments) I think it’s worth it. The only drawback was perhaps the drain on the battery – I have to charge the phone once every 2 days under infrequent usage, and 1 if I’ve been using it frequently. But for all the gadgets, I think it’s still OK.

John and Weiqiang were in town last weekend, so we had a pretty grand dinner at Yung Kee where the roast geese are quite renowned. The geese were great, but so were the price – a bill of $629.20 greeted us at the end of the meal! Thank God the food was good otherwise I’d have been very unhappy.

Unlike in Singapore, there’s a grand total of ONE Subway stores in Hong Kong. It’s in Wan Chai, and if you don’t look hard enough you really can’t find it. The sandwiches are just like those in Singapore, though it’s kinda weird to be ordering an Italian BMT in Cantonese.

The night before John and Weiqiang left for Singapore, we went to this restaurant in Kowloon City for dinner. The name is funny – literally meaning “Road Side Cock” – but the food was good. The restaurant served Teochew food, and it’s not too bad. The bill was not too steep either, so it’s all good.

This picture was taken at the Mayday concert. The view of all the lightsticks when the concert first started was really quite fascinating.

Then this picture was taken at the end of the concert – it was about 12 midnight, and despite repeated announcements that the concert had ended, nobody wanted to leave. I’m very sure that no Hong Kong artist can manage such a feat in his or her own concerts. After the Ayumi Hamasaki concert, I think I’m really lucky to see another wonderful concert.

This is the notebook and pen set which was supposedly on sale at Ayumi’s Hong Kong concert. But because of the fact that I went there late and the goods were really limited in supply, I couldn’t get them at the concert itself. In the end, some kind souls who have contacts in Japan pooled a big purchase together, and I got myself this notebook. Oh by the way, if you are interested in the merchandise of this Ayumi concert, you can order through me! Just drop me a message and I’ll furnish with further details.

I bought a new pair of shoes after talking about it for almost 9 months. And looking at this pair of white and gold shoes, it’s not hard to associate them with me, right? And mind you, the gold parts on the shoes are really shiny!

Oh, just one more thing – my boss has approved my leave so I’ll be back in Singapore for a week in July for Commencement. If everything is smooth, I’ll be back in town from 4th to 10th, and I’ll go for my Commencement on the 6th. Keep those few days free for me, ya?

Weekend.

Apparently Hong Kong people don’t recognize Sunday as a weekend, because I was absolutely hammered on one of the discussion forums for including Sunday for the weekend. It’s either they work so much that they don’t rest on Sunday, or their English is just plain bad.

Some of the hilarious things they comment about Sunday and the weekend:

“Sunday is not a weekend.” – that’s where it all started.

“Saturday is a weekend, but Sunday is not.” – hmm, so what’s Sunday?

“Sunday is the start of a week, how can it be a weekend?” – blimey, so it’s a weekday?

For God’s sake, freaking buck up your English before you try to put others down but in the end make yourself look like a complete idiot.

For those who are interested in the definition of the word “weekend”, you may visit the following link: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/weekend.

I’ll be taking a good break at home this weekend – and that includes Sunday, FFS.

One week.

It’s been a week since I last updated my little journal – I think it’s mainly down to laziness.

In actual fact I haven’t been doing much for the whole week, with the exception of hosting John and Weiqiang who dropped by from Singapore, and Neng Giin who flew in from Shanghai. Another highlight was perhaps the staff meeting on Saturday morning. To say that it was an eye-opener would be a blatant understatement.

I don’t have that much of a mood to work. I miss those long holidays. Argh.

Labour Day.

Before I start, if you happen to be a SOC freshman entering the world of unknowns this August, please visit the SOC FOP forum at http://compclub.nus.edu.sg/fop/forum/index.php – it will do you a world of good.

OK back to the main topic today. Yeap, I got my rest for Labour Day. Slept till about 9.30 and basically spent the whole morning playing on my NDS. It was a nice break.

Went to play football in the afternoon and spent most of my time between the sticks as a goalkeeper. I got some praises from the uncles who were playing together with me, that made me smile.

Came back home and spent more time playing on my NDS. Did some household chores as well, and I’m ready to go back to work tomorrow (not a damn bit).

Contemplating a short trip back to Singapore later this month. Or should I go somewhere else instead, considering that I’ll be back in Singapore for Commencement anyway…