First Week of School
Published Sunday, September 03, 2006 by Robin | E-mail this post
The first week of school did not turn out to be the jolt that I had expected from going back to school after nearly three years. There is quite a lot of homework and all of them count towards the final grade, but thankfully I have found a group of very conscientious friends to study with.
Wen is from Singapore and he lives two doors away. The other three are from Hong Kong. I wonder what my mum will think of me trying harder at Cantonese here in the States than I ever had attempting to speak to my grandmother. While studying with them, I also found out that ‘Hum-pah-lung’ and ‘Kan Cheong’ has Cantonese origins. News has traveled here that our Prime Minister said ‘mee siam mai hum’, that was what got me started on ‘Hum-pah-lung’.
I think I have unintentionally given my friends from Hong Kong a rather comedic impression of Singapore politics. It’s strange how many conversations start with small talk about politics, perhaps you just can’t help it when you are talking about Singapore. Ivy (a friend from Hong Kong) mentioned how they rarely talk about Tung Chee Hwa, and Kishore replied by explaining that in Singapore there is ‘a lot of government’. Perhaps it is the feeling that comes to everyone once they are out of a country that is as serious as Singapore, the need to laugh at the humor in the Four Million Smiles campaign, the bar-top dancing policy, PM Lee going to Zouk and MOS, National Day Parades and the GEMS (Go the Extra Mile for Service) campaign. You need space to realize the humor in all this and laugh it off (and what better way than to share the laugh with people from other countries).
Schoolwork is tough although a big part of the challenge lies in getting back to the studying mode after all that time in the army. I transferred out of my previous calculus course into a tougher one, and I had to go through all the calculus I had learnt in one night just to start on my homework; notes from JC came in very handy. I’ve cramped all my required humanities courses into this semester, so I’ve got quite a lot of readings; hope to get all the essays over and done with as soon as possible. My schedule is pretty okay, I’ve got lessons at 8.30am everyday but I don’t mind it since I prefer to start early and end early. Furthermore, I’ve got enough breaks in between to grab a bite or to do last minute work. Food here is horrible, it is either cold (uncooked) or too oily (cooked).
I’ll talk more about food in another post. Up to this point, everything is so far so good.
Everyone should check out Hossan Leong’s rendition of ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’.
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