I had weighted the cost of spending my summer taking classes in CMU vis-à-vis attending summer school somewhere else. Though it dawned on me that it is cheaper taking classes in CMU (since the lease to my apartment starts at the beginning of summer), it was finding out that the particular her will be staying behind for research that eventually finalized my plans. Unfortunately, “Summer lovin’” remained a distant daydream.
But spending summer in Pittsburgh had not been too terrible. Actually, I had enough fun to give coming back to Singapore a tinge of sadness. I bought a bicycle, explored Pittsburgh, made new friends, got to know friends from the Asian Christians Fellowship better, led a group at Vacation Bible School, and learnt to cook. Online recipes helped make the latter surprisingly smooth-sailing save for one incident where the bee hoon became so dry that that the entire slab of noodles laid like a spongy rubber tire on my wok. In contrast to that initial misadventure, my other experiments in the kitchen turned out to be relatively successful. Thus far, I have also attempted Kung pao beef, stir-fried calamari, mango with glutinous rice and goreng-pisang (given a fusion twist by wrapping the banana in wanton skin instead of dipping it in flour).
I took one class over the summer and it turned out to be pretty easy, despite it being taught by a very anal grad student who pronounces ‘soft drinks’ as ‘softer drinks’, ‘strategy’ as ‘stra-tage’ and ‘competition’ as ‘compeeteeshin’. The class involved plenty of group work and it helped that I had very effective people in my group, which meant that we often managed to leave our assignments till the last minute and finish them satisfactorily. It also helped that there were plenty of bonus points and that we were not up against very strong competition. All in all, there was plenty of time for long dinners, potlucks, movie screenings, and cycling trips to the supermarket.
Kitchen essentials
But spending summer in Pittsburgh had not been too terrible. Actually, I had enough fun to give coming back to Singapore a tinge of sadness. I bought a bicycle, explored Pittsburgh, made new friends, got to know friends from the Asian Christians Fellowship better, led a group at Vacation Bible School, and learnt to cook. Online recipes helped make the latter surprisingly smooth-sailing save for one incident where the bee hoon became so dry that that the entire slab of noodles laid like a spongy rubber tire on my wok. In contrast to that initial misadventure, my other experiments in the kitchen turned out to be relatively successful. Thus far, I have also attempted Kung pao beef, stir-fried calamari, mango with glutinous rice and goreng-pisang (given a fusion twist by wrapping the banana in wanton skin instead of dipping it in flour).
I took one class over the summer and it turned out to be pretty easy, despite it being taught by a very anal grad student who pronounces ‘soft drinks’ as ‘softer drinks’, ‘strategy’ as ‘stra-tage’ and ‘competition’ as ‘compeeteeshin’. The class involved plenty of group work and it helped that I had very effective people in my group, which meant that we often managed to leave our assignments till the last minute and finish them satisfactorily. It also helped that there were plenty of bonus points and that we were not up against very strong competition. All in all, there was plenty of time for long dinners, potlucks, movie screenings, and cycling trips to the supermarket.
Kitchen essentials
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