Well i am currently in a hotel in Beijing. It's BEIJING, not SHANGHAI. For some weird reason, everyone has been asking me "when are you heading to shanghai?" SERIOUSLY! At which point in the last 6 months did i mention Shanghai?

Anyway, I can't believe im still alive. For those who know me, you are probably wondering: What the hell is derrick doing in China?! Yes i know... China is probably the last place you will expect to find me. Ever since my secondary 3 trip to the Yunnan area of China, i have been traumatise so badly i remember telling myself i will never go back to China. Those were the days i was forced to eat rice with black stuff on them, steam bacon, weird black hair looking stuff in soup which my friend said and i quote "smells like death". The toilets were terrible and it was a pretty sucky 2 weeks if it wasn't for my classmates. Because of them, i got to experience food fights and other funny memories. Like when we were about to alight the coach to go up this famous snow-capped mountain at Lijiang, our tour guide came in and told us that there has been a accident recently so the mountain will be close for the day. Apparently a cable car fell. She then told us cheerfully that we can go up the next day. You should have seen our faces...

So i woke up early this morning to take a flight to Hongkong and transit to Beijing. The trip was rather interesting. I got to witness this aussie guy fight a china guy. Apparently the china guy was pissed that the aussie kept banging into him with his bag while they were waiting to leave the plane. The aussie denied it and they started quarreling. At one point, the aussie pushed the china guy away, shouting "Don't touch me!" I was chanting in my head "Fight Fight Fight". Was kinda hoping the aussie guy will punch the china man... airport drama... hehe

Anyway Thank God i reached the hotel safely. My sister was going on about how crappy the hotels are in china and how ill-informed the cab drivers are about hotels. Was kinda worried when the cab driver kept turning his head to the right to look at my direction. Then i realise he was looking at his side mirror to make amazing lane changes. He then spent the next half of the journey scolding me for choosing a hotel so far away from the city. How am i suppose to know?! I thought the hotel was near the university, which he claims isn't. And now im in my comfortable hotel room watching channel V. Shall head over to Tsing Hua University for my 2 weeks summer school tomorrow! Head back here for the Beta version of my New York Adventure, except this time its Beijing!
Signing out - 6/28/2008 11:47:00 PM

Haha so apparently i can't keep my promise about blogging regularly... oh man... i hope this doesn't happen for your sake and my sake when i get to new york. I don't want thousands of people asking me the same question every day when i get there, the question being "so... how are you doing there?". It's like you know that the answer that is going to return to you is "fine." or "great!" but you secretly wish that i would say "horrible..." because you still can't get over the fact that Im in the most happening city in the world and you are still stuck on the hot island of Singapore. HAH! Ok kidding...

Talking about happening. I just watched the M Night Shayamalam's THE HAPPENING. (Is that how its spelt? oh well don't care. thats how i call him) And seriously, because of that movie, i had such a happening day. Well you see, i was at NUS playing tennis with some friends. YES TENNIS. I can actually play some sports... may not be good in it but at least i can hit the ball to the other side of the court.

SO ANYWAY. After tennis, we had some spare time and i wanted to watch the happening desperately. I am a fan of M Night. I absolutely loved Sixth Sense and enjoyed his other productions such as Signs and the Village. I mean who didn't?! Who can ever forget the "I see dead people..." or the green looking alien thingy that walked pass the bush and the girl complaining "Im thirsty..." or the ugly brown spiky werewolf wearing little red riding hood's costume and the blind girl running for her life. I missed Lady in the Water which was apparently HORRIBLE so i pretended he was never part of that movie.

So we decided that we had to catch the 3pm show at Vivo in order for everything to work out right. However it was already 220pm and we were still at NUS. We knew we could make it but we had to rush. And when i say could make it, i mean travel to my friend's place near vivo to shower and change, rush back to the bus stop to bus down to vivo, rush to the box office to buy tickets and reach our seats just before the movie starts.

The bus finally came at 225pm. The bus reached my friend's place at 240pm. We rushed out and ran to his house. Once we got in, we immediately sprinted to the rooms we pre-assigned in the bus to shower in. In no more than 5 minutes, we were all done and gathered in the living room. We grabbed our things and dashed out of the house back to the bus stop. A girl friend of mine was still drying her hair with her towel and applying gel as we were brisk walking to the bus stop. Reached the bus stop and boarded the bus at 255. Arrived at the bus stop across vivo at 3pm. Again we dashed out, ran across the underpass passing by the NEL station, zoomed past the crowds and bought the tickets and got ourselves seated. 315pm. We made it. Trailers were showing and i was sweating profusely. Made me wonder why i even bothered to shower.

And then i suddenly thought... should we get a drink? I mean the movie haven't started. So i pitched the idea to my friend and we were like since the store is just outside the cinema, why not? So we ran out and realised the booth was closed! So we rushed down to the box office and queued behind a couple. Just our luck. The couple took FOREVER. "Honey, what should we get? Peanuts or popcorn? What drink do you want? Should we get all sweet? Buts sweet is too sweet! We should get a bit of salty to balance things out. But I hate salty! Salty is too salty!" Ok i am exaggerating but they seriously took a loooong time. I rolled my eyes at least 3 times.

When we finally got our drink, we dashed back into the cinema and was pretty sure the movie had started. But to our surprise, advertisements were still on. GV totally amazed me.

So anyway the movie started and lasted 1.5 hours. To me, it felt like a 4 hour movie... i was like.. could this get anymore boring. When i read the sypnosis on yahoo, it was:

"The Happening" is a paranoid thriller about a teacher, Elliott Moore (Mark Wahlberg), who takes his family on the run, in an attempt to survive a natural global environmental crisis that presents a large-scale threat to humanity. This film portrays the earth as being a victim of mankind's doings, which causes a global backlash. An invisible neurotoxin is admitted into the air that causes people to become suicidal.

M Night has always been famous for his ability to make twists in his plots and surprise his audience. Like i was totally stunned when Bruce Willis turned out to be a ghost in sixth sense. (Opps did i just spoil it for those who haven't watched sixth sense? Is there anyone that actually still fall in this category...) The Happening was totally what the sypnosis said. Nothing more. Nothing less. It was just a movie about people committing suicide. Nothing unexpected. Nothing surprising.

It was like watching "101 ways to kill yourself". You can jump down a building, hang yourself, ram your head against the wall, get run over by a lawn mower, cut your wrist with a glass piece, crash your car into a tree. I have watched enough teenage dramas to know all these techniques of committing suicide. Ok fine the getting run over by the lawn mower was new but besides that, NOTHING! And i have to say, The Happening was not happening for me at all. I was utterly disappointed and embarrassed for making my friends watch this crappy movie with me. M Night who was hailed as the next steven spielberg is probably not going to see another of his movie making to the big screens... Oh well... at least the process of getting to "The Happening" was happening...
Signing out - 6/26/2008 12:47:00 AM

Ok fine. An update is needed... i have been lazy. Hehe... But this just means that i will be posting more interesting stuff for the next few posts because soooo many things have happened since my last post which was like a million years ago for some of you who check here daily :P. I know... Im flattering myself to think i have many loyal fans.

Lets get started! As many of you know, i went to Kota Kinabalu about more than a week ago. It's part of malaysia. The borneo islands. In Sabah. Where is that geographically on the map, I have no idea. I have zero interesting in anything malaysian, especially their politics. Don't get me started on how stupid i think their politics are.

So anyway my friend, Jiehui, signed me up for the climb up Mount Kinabalu. Of course i was horrified when i found out. By the time i could say anything, the booking had been done. It was a climb! I had to like do something physical! I wanted to kill jiehui but thought i would give it a try. After all, how hard can it be right?

Well... I WAS SO WRONG! I had no idea that bloody mountain was the fourth tallest mountain in South East Asia. The tallest in Malaysia(who cares...). And from now on, it will be refered to as BA(short form for bloody mountain). The mention of the mountain's name gives me the chills. It was the 2nd worst experience of my life, just behind my 13 weeks on the God-forsaken island of Pulau Tekong where i experienced hell.

How bad was it? Well firstly, at 9am, we started our journey towards the peak. We walked for about 6 hours before reaching the supposedly 3/4 mark. That part wasnt so bad. Was just plenty of rocks and high stairs. Then we had our dinner and went to sleep. Or at least that's what we thought everyone was doing. I couldn't sleep at all and spent the whole night envying the person snoring away. It was only at 2am when we had to wake up to continue our climb(YES 2AM! It's not a typo) did we realise that everyone else couldn't sleep too.

We ate a little breakfast and started our night climb. It was pretty dark so we had to carry our torches. And this time, it was bad... Firstly it was a little cold. To me it was fine since im cold blooded but i know some people were freezing. Secondly, it was steeper this time. There wasn't stairs and we had to like use ropes to pull ourselves up the slope. It was horrible... Then the higher we got, the thinner the air became. I found myself stopping to take a deep breathe every 5 steps. Not to mention we can never see the peak...

Then suddenly our mountain guide made an announcement. "You have 45 minutes to make it to the peak to see the sunrise! Or not you will have no choice but to turn back immediately because we are running late on time." To many, it was "The sunrise! I can't miss it!" To me, it was "I PAID 300 over bucks for this! I better make it to the top. Who cares about the stupid sunrise!" Apparently i wasn't alone. I met someone along the way (some tourist) who i encouraged to reach the peak to see the sunrise and she replied and i quote "Sunrise can go kiss my ass!" I couldn't have put it in a better way.

So i started motivating myself. I found myself saying "I will not get defeated! I will not get defeated!" With that, I pulled myself together and climb up to the peak. And i tell you... i seriously made it to the peak. I have proof!



Yup thats me on the top with the sign that says so. 4 KM above sea level. And yes i know... i was having a bad hair day... whatever... what do you expect me to look like after climbing for 4 hours in the cold dark environment...

So at 6plus am, the sunrise started. The "sunrise you can kiss my ass" sunrise. This was it.


The ang mohs were screaming "It's coming! It's coming!" I was thinking "i woke up at 2am to see this?! psh... isn't this what you get at east coast park?!" As you can see, im not a nature person. Sheesh im going to NYU for a reason! I love the city! If there was an audi R8 parked on top of the mountain, i would be more fascinated by that than the sunrise!

And then someone shouted "OK we have to go down now!" It was then reality hit me... The ordeal wasn't over... it was far from over...
Signing out - 6/05/2008 12:00:00 AM

Well i am currently in a hotel in Beijing. It's BEIJING, not SHANGHAI. For some weird reason, everyone has been asking me "when are you heading to shanghai?" SERIOUSLY! At which point in the last 6 months did i mention Shanghai?

Anyway, I can't believe im still alive. For those who know me, you are probably wondering: What the hell is derrick doing in China?! Yes i know... China is probably the last place you will expect to find me. Ever since my secondary 3 trip to the Yunnan area of China, i have been traumatise so badly i remember telling myself i will never go back to China. Those were the days i was forced to eat rice with black stuff on them, steam bacon, weird black hair looking stuff in soup which my friend said and i quote "smells like death". The toilets were terrible and it was a pretty sucky 2 weeks if it wasn't for my classmates. Because of them, i got to experience food fights and other funny memories. Like when we were about to alight the coach to go up this famous snow-capped mountain at Lijiang, our tour guide came in and told us that there has been a accident recently so the mountain will be close for the day. Apparently a cable car fell. She then told us cheerfully that we can go up the next day. You should have seen our faces...

So i woke up early this morning to take a flight to Hongkong and transit to Beijing. The trip was rather interesting. I got to witness this aussie guy fight a china guy. Apparently the china guy was pissed that the aussie kept banging into him with his bag while they were waiting to leave the plane. The aussie denied it and they started quarreling. At one point, the aussie pushed the china guy away, shouting "Don't touch me!" I was chanting in my head "Fight Fight Fight". Was kinda hoping the aussie guy will punch the china man... airport drama... hehe

Anyway Thank God i reached the hotel safely. My sister was going on about how crappy the hotels are in china and how ill-informed the cab drivers are about hotels. Was kinda worried when the cab driver kept turning his head to the right to look at my direction. Then i realise he was looking at his side mirror to make amazing lane changes. He then spent the next half of the journey scolding me for choosing a hotel so far away from the city. How am i suppose to know?! I thought the hotel was near the university, which he claims isn't. And now im in my comfortable hotel room watching channel V. Shall head over to Tsing Hua University for my 2 weeks summer school tomorrow! Head back here for the Beta version of my New York Adventure, except this time its Beijing!

Haha so apparently i can't keep my promise about blogging regularly... oh man... i hope this doesn't happen for your sake and my sake when i get to new york. I don't want thousands of people asking me the same question every day when i get there, the question being "so... how are you doing there?". It's like you know that the answer that is going to return to you is "fine." or "great!" but you secretly wish that i would say "horrible..." because you still can't get over the fact that Im in the most happening city in the world and you are still stuck on the hot island of Singapore. HAH! Ok kidding...

Talking about happening. I just watched the M Night Shayamalam's THE HAPPENING. (Is that how its spelt? oh well don't care. thats how i call him) And seriously, because of that movie, i had such a happening day. Well you see, i was at NUS playing tennis with some friends. YES TENNIS. I can actually play some sports... may not be good in it but at least i can hit the ball to the other side of the court.

SO ANYWAY. After tennis, we had some spare time and i wanted to watch the happening desperately. I am a fan of M Night. I absolutely loved Sixth Sense and enjoyed his other productions such as Signs and the Village. I mean who didn't?! Who can ever forget the "I see dead people..." or the green looking alien thingy that walked pass the bush and the girl complaining "Im thirsty..." or the ugly brown spiky werewolf wearing little red riding hood's costume and the blind girl running for her life. I missed Lady in the Water which was apparently HORRIBLE so i pretended he was never part of that movie.

So we decided that we had to catch the 3pm show at Vivo in order for everything to work out right. However it was already 220pm and we were still at NUS. We knew we could make it but we had to rush. And when i say could make it, i mean travel to my friend's place near vivo to shower and change, rush back to the bus stop to bus down to vivo, rush to the box office to buy tickets and reach our seats just before the movie starts.

The bus finally came at 225pm. The bus reached my friend's place at 240pm. We rushed out and ran to his house. Once we got in, we immediately sprinted to the rooms we pre-assigned in the bus to shower in. In no more than 5 minutes, we were all done and gathered in the living room. We grabbed our things and dashed out of the house back to the bus stop. A girl friend of mine was still drying her hair with her towel and applying gel as we were brisk walking to the bus stop. Reached the bus stop and boarded the bus at 255. Arrived at the bus stop across vivo at 3pm. Again we dashed out, ran across the underpass passing by the NEL station, zoomed past the crowds and bought the tickets and got ourselves seated. 315pm. We made it. Trailers were showing and i was sweating profusely. Made me wonder why i even bothered to shower.

And then i suddenly thought... should we get a drink? I mean the movie haven't started. So i pitched the idea to my friend and we were like since the store is just outside the cinema, why not? So we ran out and realised the booth was closed! So we rushed down to the box office and queued behind a couple. Just our luck. The couple took FOREVER. "Honey, what should we get? Peanuts or popcorn? What drink do you want? Should we get all sweet? Buts sweet is too sweet! We should get a bit of salty to balance things out. But I hate salty! Salty is too salty!" Ok i am exaggerating but they seriously took a loooong time. I rolled my eyes at least 3 times.

When we finally got our drink, we dashed back into the cinema and was pretty sure the movie had started. But to our surprise, advertisements were still on. GV totally amazed me.

So anyway the movie started and lasted 1.5 hours. To me, it felt like a 4 hour movie... i was like.. could this get anymore boring. When i read the sypnosis on yahoo, it was:

"The Happening" is a paranoid thriller about a teacher, Elliott Moore (Mark Wahlberg), who takes his family on the run, in an attempt to survive a natural global environmental crisis that presents a large-scale threat to humanity. This film portrays the earth as being a victim of mankind's doings, which causes a global backlash. An invisible neurotoxin is admitted into the air that causes people to become suicidal.

M Night has always been famous for his ability to make twists in his plots and surprise his audience. Like i was totally stunned when Bruce Willis turned out to be a ghost in sixth sense. (Opps did i just spoil it for those who haven't watched sixth sense? Is there anyone that actually still fall in this category...) The Happening was totally what the sypnosis said. Nothing more. Nothing less. It was just a movie about people committing suicide. Nothing unexpected. Nothing surprising.

It was like watching "101 ways to kill yourself". You can jump down a building, hang yourself, ram your head against the wall, get run over by a lawn mower, cut your wrist with a glass piece, crash your car into a tree. I have watched enough teenage dramas to know all these techniques of committing suicide. Ok fine the getting run over by the lawn mower was new but besides that, NOTHING! And i have to say, The Happening was not happening for me at all. I was utterly disappointed and embarrassed for making my friends watch this crappy movie with me. M Night who was hailed as the next steven spielberg is probably not going to see another of his movie making to the big screens... Oh well... at least the process of getting to "The Happening" was happening...

Ok fine. An update is needed... i have been lazy. Hehe... But this just means that i will be posting more interesting stuff for the next few posts because soooo many things have happened since my last post which was like a million years ago for some of you who check here daily :P. I know... Im flattering myself to think i have many loyal fans.

Lets get started! As many of you know, i went to Kota Kinabalu about more than a week ago. It's part of malaysia. The borneo islands. In Sabah. Where is that geographically on the map, I have no idea. I have zero interesting in anything malaysian, especially their politics. Don't get me started on how stupid i think their politics are.

So anyway my friend, Jiehui, signed me up for the climb up Mount Kinabalu. Of course i was horrified when i found out. By the time i could say anything, the booking had been done. It was a climb! I had to like do something physical! I wanted to kill jiehui but thought i would give it a try. After all, how hard can it be right?

Well... I WAS SO WRONG! I had no idea that bloody mountain was the fourth tallest mountain in South East Asia. The tallest in Malaysia(who cares...). And from now on, it will be refered to as BA(short form for bloody mountain). The mention of the mountain's name gives me the chills. It was the 2nd worst experience of my life, just behind my 13 weeks on the God-forsaken island of Pulau Tekong where i experienced hell.

How bad was it? Well firstly, at 9am, we started our journey towards the peak. We walked for about 6 hours before reaching the supposedly 3/4 mark. That part wasnt so bad. Was just plenty of rocks and high stairs. Then we had our dinner and went to sleep. Or at least that's what we thought everyone was doing. I couldn't sleep at all and spent the whole night envying the person snoring away. It was only at 2am when we had to wake up to continue our climb(YES 2AM! It's not a typo) did we realise that everyone else couldn't sleep too.

We ate a little breakfast and started our night climb. It was pretty dark so we had to carry our torches. And this time, it was bad... Firstly it was a little cold. To me it was fine since im cold blooded but i know some people were freezing. Secondly, it was steeper this time. There wasn't stairs and we had to like use ropes to pull ourselves up the slope. It was horrible... Then the higher we got, the thinner the air became. I found myself stopping to take a deep breathe every 5 steps. Not to mention we can never see the peak...

Then suddenly our mountain guide made an announcement. "You have 45 minutes to make it to the peak to see the sunrise! Or not you will have no choice but to turn back immediately because we are running late on time." To many, it was "The sunrise! I can't miss it!" To me, it was "I PAID 300 over bucks for this! I better make it to the top. Who cares about the stupid sunrise!" Apparently i wasn't alone. I met someone along the way (some tourist) who i encouraged to reach the peak to see the sunrise and she replied and i quote "Sunrise can go kiss my ass!" I couldn't have put it in a better way.

So i started motivating myself. I found myself saying "I will not get defeated! I will not get defeated!" With that, I pulled myself together and climb up to the peak. And i tell you... i seriously made it to the peak. I have proof!



Yup thats me on the top with the sign that says so. 4 KM above sea level. And yes i know... i was having a bad hair day... whatever... what do you expect me to look like after climbing for 4 hours in the cold dark environment...

So at 6plus am, the sunrise started. The "sunrise you can kiss my ass" sunrise. This was it.


The ang mohs were screaming "It's coming! It's coming!" I was thinking "i woke up at 2am to see this?! psh... isn't this what you get at east coast park?!" As you can see, im not a nature person. Sheesh im going to NYU for a reason! I love the city! If there was an audi R8 parked on top of the mountain, i would be more fascinated by that than the sunrise!

And then someone shouted "OK we have to go down now!" It was then reality hit me... The ordeal wasn't over... it was far from over...