joyeux anniversaire!

i turned 22 yesterday. first memorable thing is that it happened in France. second and most memorable thing is that my friends made it memorable. haha. at first i thought it would be a quiet celebration with Sinhui. we were halfway cooking seafood pasta when suddenly 13 of them stormed into my kitchen, fully armed with champagne, wine, snacks, birthday cake and of course, birthday wishes.

Personal Cadeau from Letch. And a soccer ball from the whole group.

Was sabo-ed to feed strawberries to Sin and Eugene from mouth to mouth. Of course we had our own strategies when it came to feeding Eugene. My lips are still virgin and untouched by another man's.

ALL of you guys rock my day!

Jeremy caught in Cheukfeng's room. He was frantically putting on his clothes when we opened the door. Look at the photo on the right. What a loving and sweet couple. France is indeed a very open society. Wish the two of them a happy future! HAHA.

And the party continues in my room.

what a surprise!! merci mes amis pour la bonne soirée!!

another slack week

everyone has started classes this week and i am the only who had no lessons at all. its scary to hear almost all my friends complain about how difficult it is to understand what the profs were saying. some of them had even gone to the extent of dropping and remapping their modules. hopefully everything is ok when my classes start on monday!

anw i have gd news and bad news. gd news first: i did not have to pay for the social security. that saved me 192 euros! bad news: my exams will only end on 25 jan. that will mean: 1) i will most prob miss ihg (if i can get back to hall). 2) i will miss 2 weeks of sem 2 in nus and 3) i will have to extend my swiss visa which expires on 20 jan. HAIZ. BIG HAIZ.

damn sian of the whole visa thing alr. before this SEP itself i already splurged close to 400SGD on 3 types of visa: French study visa, Schengen tourist visa and Swiss visa. Now, I have to extend the swiss one. And on top of that, I need to apply for UK visa if I wanna fulfill my Old Trafford dream. I will probably have to make a few trips to Paris just to settle all these visas (that's more moolah gone on trains!) damn i should convert my citizenship.

been trying to find the tickets for man utd's home match during xmas/new year period. apparently u'll have to sign up as a "ONE UNITED" member first and pay 28 POUNDS membership fee. this will allow u to BALLOT for the tickets. YES, it's no guarantee that u can get them. And the cheapest ticket starts at 40 pounds. Black markets sell them for hundreds of pounds. Should I be desperate and just get from them? Haha.

also been trying to plan a holiday trip to Spain/Portugal for my mid-term break. damn there are just too many beautiful cities in these 2 countries and I only have 7 days to kill.

aside from this, i have been leading a rather mundane life. found this german supermarket which sells very cheap stuff. bought an instant paella for 1.89 euros and it could feed 2 ppl. here i was cooking the famous spanish cuisine. the cheaper, the nicer it tastes. haha.

on thursday i went to FORUM DE SPORTS which was a kind of sports fair where all the different clubs are open for u to sign up as member. over here, u can actually take lessons and be graded for playing sports. they have different levels of mastery of the sports and u will be given marks upon 20. i obviously signed up for vball, but not the lessons. instead, i signed up for a permanent membership for games every thursday nite. so i just go to the court and play with whoever are there on that day. i had to pay 10 euros for this. the angmohs better be good. haha.

ok till the next update!!!!!!!!

semaine 2!

I cooked rendang for dinner on wednesday and let shaoki the algerian try and he liked it! The next day he cooked a traditional Algerian soup which I cant recall the name anymore. Damn I forgot to take pictures of all the food.

Other than that I usually eat my meals at the university cafetaria. Each meal costs 2.80 euros and I get a salad, a main course, a dessert and a bread. Not too bad. It's somewhat similar to what I ate in INSA Lyon last year.

i've often heard cheongchye complain abt the "effectiveness" of the french system. and i am "privileged" to experience it first hand now. i was told by my dept that each student enrolled in a french instution is obliged to pay for social security which is a sort of health insurance. It costs an extravagant 192 euros. however, all other universities allow foreign students who have international health insurance to be exempted for paying this amount. My dept told me that INPG thinks that the rest has made a mistake and will bring this up at the national level. BUT, another dept in INPG allows my friends this exemption, too! So now I have to wait for the final decision and it has been 5 days. Before this is settled, I will officially still be un-enrolled in the school.

Anw, summer is coming to an end! The leaves are turning brown and falling. Soon, it is AUTUMN! Occasionally I will tremble at night because it was just too damn cold. Well perhaps I am just not used to it.

Most shops are closed on weekends so I always have difficulty finding meals. So I had to resort to cooking instant noodles/soups and eat some plain bread. Next week onwards I will stock up on pasta and whatever which does not require storage in fridge.

Yesterday I climbed up Bastille for the second time with a group of new friends. Well obviously my motive was not to exercise, but to make more international friends. I must admit it is still hard to communicate with all of them, especially since their level of French is so much better than mine. At least I am proud to say that I am making the conscious effort to get to know more people from all over the world: Chile, Bresil, Tunisia, Poland, Rwanda, Algeria and of course France. Whether we can become better friends or not in the future, we shall wait and see.

Random Post

I have more or less settled down in my hostel now. Starting to get to know a few ppl in the hostel. 1 guy from Rwanda, another from Algeria. A few South Americans from Chili and Brazil. I even got used to the fact that there is no toilet seat in the cubicle. Each time I did my business in there, I had to wipe off the surface of the toilet bowl, put a few layers of tissue paper and then sat on them. Disgusting? Well, it is really nothing much. I have seen worse toilets in my school in Indonesia.

School has not started yet. Now re-doing module mapping as many of the modules I chose clash in terms of timetable. And for those ppl who are going to France in the future, this information is going to be very useful: NUS 3rd year is not equivalent to French Grande Ecole 3rd year. A grande ecole is apparently quite a prestigious institution. The French students must have a minimum grade of Bien (Good) in order to enrol in the preparatory classes. If you have a grade of Assez Bien (Quite Good), the chance of getting into the school in really small. You will spend 2 years in preparatory classes and then the next 3 years in grande ecole. So basically, their 3rd year module is equivalent to Masters in NUS.


The only good news is that I have gottten my internet account and password. Its not as bad as I thought it would be as there is wifi in most areas of the campus. Right now, I am in the "Central Library" of the campus to do laundry. And while waiting for it to finish, I am surfing the net. Quite cool right? =P

La Semaine Intensive

For the past one week, I have been busy with intensive french lessons from 9 am to 1 pm everyday. I was somehow posted to Group B2+ which was meant for "advanced" class. I was totally mind-raped throughout the 5 days. Most of my classmates have had french classes for at least 5 years. They spoke very fluently and confidently although their grammar may not be proper. I believe this is where the Singapore system has gone wrong by not emphasizing enough on conversational practices.

After school, there were usually activities organised by the Bureau International (BI). On the first evening, they brought us to a park and we had a little picnic eating pizza, just chatting away and getting to know new people from different countries. After that, we ended the evening with a beer session at a bar nearby.

Anyway, the world is really very small. I dunno how many of you remember this exchange student from Germany called Martin who stayed in D Block last year. His lab partner back in Germany is now in Grenoble and we are going to the same school although not the same department. Somehow everyone is connected in one way or another.

On the second evening, the BI organized a BBQ on top of a hill called La Bastille. We had to hike up and it was not very easy given the rough track and hot weather. But nice evening making new friends, although after 1-2 hrs, most of us switched by to speaking English as speaking French became too stressful.

By the third day, I was already suffering from internet withdrawal as my hostel has no internet and there were only 6 available computers in the school I had french lessons. So, my friends and I went to McDonalds for dinner and use the wifi. Alas, what a day it turned out to be. At 2230, it began to rain heavily, and soon after, there was hailstorm. As the rain did not seem to be subsiding anytime soon, we decided to walk back. Armed with a minimum of umbrella and windbreaker, I walked back at 7deg celsius through flooded streets. Freezing cold man.

The weather remained erratic for the next few days. It is still summer but it is freezing cold. Clear indication of effects of global warming. So start saving the trees and don't waste plastic bags. Haha.

Some ppl have been asking me how my hostel looks like and if it is as bad as depicted in the website I posted much earlier. Well, the toilet and kitchen definitely look cleaner, but then the school hasn't started and not many ppl have checked in yet. My room is still liveable and I am trying very hard to make it more cosy.

Pre-semester Trip (Part 3)

Vienna

Day 2

We started the day with a tram tour around the ring street (district). I hate taking trams or buses in Europe during summer simply because there was no air-con!! Poor ventilation inside the vehicle. Honestly, I do not find anything great about the ring district except for endless line of trees along the street.

Next stop: Stephansdom. Another cathedral, but this one had impressive exterior athough it had stood since the 10th century. Interior was normal. I’ve never really been able to appreciate cathedrals and churches so I was not particularly impressed here. At the open space outside the cathedral, we were persuaded by a concert promoter to purchase tickets for a classical performance at 8:30 pm in the evening. All of us except Shaowei agreed to give it a try and we paid an extravagant 23 euros.

At 12, we watched this special clock which had saints which paraded for 10 minutes every 12 noon.

I grabbed a quick lunch at a roadside stall. They really have very loooooooooooooonngg sausage. The way it was presented was a bit obscene though. One edge of the hotdog bun was cut off and the remaining long piece was inserted into a drill-like machine which made a hole in the bun. The sausage was then inserted into this bun. S-exciting stuff.

Vienna has always been famous for its special coffee called mélange. Basically, it is a mixture of cappucino and hot chocolate. We went to Café Hawelda which was supposedly very famous for this coffee. I thought it tasted normal, albeit a bit lighter than the usual cappuccino, and the 3.40 euros I forked out for it was a bit too steep.

We then went to the cemetery where the tombs of Mozart, the Strauss family and Beethoven were located. Each tomb in this cemetery had its own design and was very well-maintained.

Belvedere Palace was our next destination. After a few palaces and gardens, I was starting to get sick of having to visit another palace. Somehow, they all looked the same to me at this point. We took many stupid photos while resting on the grass patch outside the Austrian National Library which was in the same complex.

We ended the evening with a bang. Initially, I had this apprehension that we might have been cheated by that guy on the street. This was not helped when we stepped into the concert hall which had quite poor seats and poor lighting. The guy mentioned air-con in the concert hall, but there was only the natural one. Luckily, once the concert commenced, it totally proved me wrong. The pieces put up by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra never failed to mesmerize me throughout the night. They did not play the whole length of a piece as it would have put all of us to sleep. The music changed every now and then and occasionally, was accompanied by soprano or tenor solo/duet as well as ballet dancers. Good stuff. I had been waiting for something different other than museums/castles/palaces. Good way to end our trip to Vienna.

Prague

By the time I reached Prague I was really quite tired of travelling already. I was in no mood to explore museums/palaces/castles. I did not really enjoy myself as much in Prague, but to be fair, Prague is a beautiful city with plenty of romantic restaurants. I would probably have enjoyed it more if it was my first destination.

We did minimal sightseeing and the pace was pretty slow. The famous Charles Bridge was bustling with many street performers, artists, painters, etc. There were many restaurants on both side of the river bank.

Anyway, the food here is relatively cheap compared to those in the previous cities. For comparison sake, 1 plate of beef goulash here cost me about 3-4 euros while I would have paid double elsewhere. If you were to visit Prague, you must have dinner at Restaurant Olympia. It is dirt cheap and the portion is ridiculously big. I paid a total of 8 euros for a plate of roasted rabbit, an appetizer of pork crackling and 1 pine of Pilsner beer. Shiok.

We visited Prague castle on our second day, but the only thing worth noticing here was another cathedral called Saint Vita.

In the evening, I decided to split from the group and took a stroll with Sinhui. We had dinner at one of the restaurants by the riverbank. Nice ambience, quality food. Paid 26 euros in total, but once in a long while, at the right place with the right person, it is worth it.