~May Your Light Shine :D~

Sunday, December 30, 2007

I just don't get it.

Why must we students do and do and do homework that the teacher will probably never go through properly or mark? It's just a stupid waste of time, and everyone knows that no one will take homework seriously in the holidays either, so the work won't be done well anyway, and adding on the fact that we're doing WORK on topics that we haven't even been TAUGHT yet.

Someone should tell that to the school.

About school, I've already started to worry NOT for my O Levels but for my NAPHA test and jogging sessions and PE lessons. Ironic eh? I don't just HATE those sessions, I DREAD them, but of course not as much as camp. After 3 years of jogging, my stamina doesn't seem to have improved and instead, my muscle aches last for 1 week instead of 2-3 days.

And I don't understand why we must cheer during jogging. I don't have to yell to show my class unity. In fact, if I WANTED to show class unity, I wouldn't cheer because then I can conserve energy to run and keep up wth the class. And yes, we all know that you have the stamina to talk after 2 rounds of jogging. Can you please be more considerate to those who get breathless after a few paces, LIKE ME FOR INSTANCE? Do you seriously think someone like that will be able to cheer along with you? **** you. (I'll leave the word to your imagination)

And WHY is passing a sports test compulsory? Do you know that some of us have to go through hell and BACK to pass that darned 2.4km? NAPHA isn't a physical fitness test. It's a test of physical COMPETENCY. It means that to pass it, not only do you have to be healthy(which is fitness), you have to be ace standard in sports. Don't think that you can expect that of everyone. It isn't possible.

I hate all of this crap. So what if its a sporty school? Doesn it mean that aesthetics don't count? It's just unfair that sporty people get the glory of doing well in sports but those talented in the arts barely get recognised and further pushed to pass a sports test they might never be able to. And that's to add on with the lousy system of counting the number of rounds you run in 2.4km(yes I almost had to retake my 2.4km because SOMEONE didn't count my rounds properly again).

Apparently, trying your best in PE isn't enough. But it you fail music, or art, no one even gives a second glance.

Just something I've always been angry adn puzzled about. It just isn't fair that everyone has a talent but only SOME have been born in the right time and place to actually be appreciated for it.

My Kitchen blogged at Sunday, December 30, 2007

May your light shine...
in the darkness...

Friday, December 28, 2007

I was on the phone with HG yesterday and our conversation suddenly lead to my China trip, which at that point, I began to complain about 2 old folk in our tour group. Now, we ARE Chinese, and we are very clear on how the chinese respects the old because of course they have the most life experience and hence deserve to be given authority over everyone else. But it doesn't give them the power to ABUSE their authority and think that since no one dares to rebuke them(I would, if no one was there to berate me afterwards), they can do whatever they want, act however they like and STILL be correct. Most people would say that, well, they're old, you can't blame them for being like that, but NO. They were 2 of the msot unreasonable, selfish, inconsiderate, impolite old folk I have EVER met. EVER.

What did they do?

Number 1
One of them, a 60+ woman, apparently has walking problems and even though she can walk, she needs to sit on this mini wheelchair(mini because she doesn't need it permanantly and the wheels are smaller than your average sized wheelchair) on long walks in parks or whereever.

Well, my grandmother has walking problems too. And I know, TOO WELL, that old folk with walking problems walk slowly and constantly need people to hold their arm and walk with them, not to mention that when they walk, they walk in the 'crippled' form, which looks VERY unstable and you can really tell that they aren't faking it. That old woman, however, didn't use her wheelchair when we were in some park even though we had to walk a lot. And she was even walking AHEAD of the tour group, in front with the children(including me), without the aid of another person and her walking was PERFECTLY FINE without any 'crippled' form.

THat night when were had to go for dinner and the restaurant was on the 3rd storey, we had no choice but to climb the stairs up because there wasn't an elevator. Even my grandmother whose walking problems seem a 100 times more severe than hers can climb those 3 storeys with the help of others but without trying, the old woman REFUSED to climb the stairs, and REFUSED to be carried, so we had to change our dinner venue to another restaurant even though everyone was starving hungry and tired as it was the 1st day.

On the 2nd day, when we had to view some scenic places, there were cobblestone stairs, maybe about 2 storeys, but this time in the open air. And the old woman couldn't escape this time. So she had to climb the stairs, and guess what? SHe climbed the stiars PERFECTLY NORMALLY. She did it without the aid of others, and even bounced along at some point. To top it off, she was keeping up with the tour group and wasn't even lagging behind. Well, I would like to ask her one question, why did she feign having walking problems if she didn't have any? These cobblestone stairs were with no doubt harder to climb than last night's indoor staircase, so if you could climb these why did you refuse to climb those last night?

Number 2
Whenever the tour guide is introducing a place, or a local product, or telling us some local customs in the tour bus and everyone is really keen on listening because it's so interesting, that old woman and her husband ALWAYS interrupt the guide when she is in mid-sentence, sometimes even in mid-phrase and they never wait for her to finish what she has to say, so most of the time, we're always waiting for the tour guide to finish answering their seemingly useless, unrelated, personal questions and then when she continues to talk to the tour group again, she jumps to a different topic and we all don't know what she had to say earlier.

And when they interrupt, it's not only once or twice, but CONSTANTLY. They seem to think that when the tour guide's talking it's only a conversation between them and the guide and after about 20 minutes of Q&A with the tour guide, and the guide starts talking to the tour group again, they cut in less than a few seconds later! Usually, the tour guide talks for about an hour and leaves the other 2 hours for us to sleep or rest but because of thet inconsiderate impolite couple who have no respect for others whatsoever, the tour guide had to drag her talk to 2 hours, of which 1 hour was used for just answering the couple's personal questions, and our parents couldn't get the sleep they wanted as they had to finish listening to the guide's talk to get vital information.

Even the adults were pretty pissed with that old couple, and my friend and I kept saying, "Shut up la!" from the back, where we obviously could not be heard. And guess what? When the tour guide had painstakingly finished her talk and asked, "Any questions?", that couple didn't even say a thing! Why couldn't they just ask they questions when the guide had finished talking? Why did they have to spoil the talk for everyone in the group except themselves? Don't they even have a tiny bit of consideration for others? And the sad thing was, their family did nothing to stop them...

Number 3
That old woman's husband, who seems like he's 70+, is a smoker. And I wouldn't mind if he went 10 metres away from the rest of the group and smoked in the open but he always smokes whenever he wants when we're outdoors, even though the tour group is all around him. It's like he deliberately WANTS us to sniff all that disgusting second hand smoke, not to mention that SMELL.

Well, bloke, if you want to give yourself lung cancer then that's fine with me because I can't change your mind, but don't think that others want to die so quickly, much less sniff what you are sniffing. If you want to go smoke, at least be considerate enough to go to a corner where you're away from the tour group and other people and finish your smoking, then come back and rejoin the tour.

He even smoked in an open air restaurant, can you believe it?

Number 4
Well, Yunnan is a place with a high altitude, it's no secret! So when we were in Lijiang, and we were going to go up this mountain where the altitude is about 3000+, the tour guide warned us about all those high-altitude symptoms you get(like headaches, nausea, fatigue-which i got, breathlessness-ditto, but then I 'm always breathless because I have low stamina, dizziness, fainting) because she wanted us to be prepared and told us that if we were weak, we should buy cans of oxygen to suck up there at the mountain just in case. THe guide also told us that some Taiwanese tourists fainted straightaway when they got up there. In addition, she mentioned that it's doesn't matter if you're young or old, because age isn't a factor when it comes to how weak you are at high altitudes.

Because of all this "scary" information about the high-altitude symptoms, that old couple decided not to go up there and wait at the cable car station while their family went up. When we were at the top, some people had a few puffs of oxygen(I didn't need to though) but luckily for our tour group, no one's symptoms were really severe to the point of fainting, including that old couple's family.

When we got down the the cable car station after coming down the mountain, the old couple heard from their family that they didn't encounter any major high-altitude symptoms. So the couple, being unreasonable, went to scold the tour guide for exaggerating the symptoms of high altitude, when their family didn't suffer from any, and hence "influencing" them to NOT go up the mountain, when their family did not get any severe problems.

Firstly, the tour guide was NOT exaggerating, she was telling the truth and preparing us for the worst, and also doing her job in warning us about it beforehand. Is that a crime?

Secondly, the couple refused to go up of their own, PERSONAL, choice. No one influenced them. The tour guide let everyone decide for themselves. While their family members decided to take the risk by going up, they were too cowardly to. They cam blame no one else but themselves.

If I wasn't with my family friends, I would have gone up to them, scolded them, and told the tour guide to ignore whatever they said.

See? Even though the older generation can scold us teenagers for being havoc-y and undisciplined and disobedient, I doubt they themselves are any better. Typical Singaporeans.

If you can't practise what you preach, then don't preach at all. No one will listen to you anyway. And I won't give you respect if you don't deserve any.

My Kitchen blogged at Friday, December 28, 2007

May your light shine...
in the darkness...

Friday, December 21, 2007

I guess you guys are expecting me to complain about my never ending pile of holiday homework(seriously, we don't even get so much homework in a TERM) but no, I shall ABSTAIN from doing so because well,

1. Complaints about homework are just boring and mundane and plain annoying to read, since its so common.

2. I'm so over complaining about my homework. I'm just waiting for a miracle to happen(a.k.a. for myself to actually be willing to do it and not force myself to write every single letter I need to write)

Skip the red bit if you don't want to read my complaints after I said I wouldn't because I always seem to contradict myself.

But still, ok, here's one teeny tiny complaint about my English Comprehension. It's about football, which I have no clue about and I do not watch. In fact I am so absolutely clueless about it that I don't even know how many players there are in a team or what a penalty kick even means.

And the comprehension is also FILLED WITH BRITISH SLANG, which is ok for me because I read Alex Rider and Sohpie Kinsella and a whole lot of other books by british authors but then what about those who don't? How inconsiderate can they be when they were setting this paper?

Either way, the only people who are going to benefit from this comprehension are people who

1. Love football and know every single thing about it including a whole lot of British teams

2. Are relatively fluent or have knowledge in British slang(which is SO COOL)

You do realise, those 2 qualitites rarely come together. You either possess one or the other.

I went to view my school's new location today. The school itself was ok. The bus route WAS NOT. I have 4 routes, 3 of which involve overhead bridges and I am not confident of climbing them in the mornings when I'm half-asleep with my minor fear of heights and stairs and also my clumsiness. I will, probably fall down at least once in the entire school semester. That's not a nice thought, AT ALL.

So now my only option is to change buses and I'm really worried because sometimes the buses that you're waiting for just DON'T COME even though you've woken up at the same time. And then of course, you're late and the school refuses to listen to your piddly excuses of "the bus was late, what could I do?", which is the most possible scenario and you get sent to the reflection centre. So now I'm all prepared to be late and be sent to the reflection centre for detention or whatever because I really do not trust SBS or SMRT to be punctual.

Ok, so as a summary, I'M NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO SCHOOL REOPENING, in fact I'm trying not to think about it.

Ps. XinLin is a REALLY good blogger! I just discovered. And I thought Victoria was good. Ok so I guess they use different styles, but XinLin's style really appeals more to me.

My Kitchen blogged at Friday, December 21, 2007

May your light shine...
in the darkness...

Monday, December 17, 2007

Yup I'm back and this post took me days of careful photo selecting and size decreasing(for the photo) and uploading and typing so this will be one of my most laborious posts yet. As like the Japan one, I'll change font colours to represent the different days we spent in China(A total of 8 days).

And the number of photos per day decreases for some weird reason, which I guess is due to more and more photos containing people making me unwilling to put them here. This time, I'm just going to copy most of the content from my journal(yes I still journal) and edit it a little so the posts are going to be in a 'daily journal' kind of format.

DAY 1:

7 Dec 2007, Friday

I'm in Yunnan now! It's winter, and freezing cold, though thank goodness I brought enough jackets and windbreakers in my hand lugguage. And I'm sooo grateful for my scarf! My poor feet had to suffer with just 1 layer in the penetrating cold till I got to the hotel and shoved on 2 socks, 1 thick cotton, another woolen. After putting them on, my toes were a little bunched up in my sneakers but at least they aren't cold! You have no idea how much I yearned for heat in the 7-17 degress Celcius temperature but after thinking about the sweltering heat in Singapore, I decided I'd rather stick with the winter.

We touchdowned at Kunming this morning after a 3h40min flight(where I only got 1/2 hour of sleep, MAX and breakfast was served at 3am for some weird reason). After collecting our lugguage, my friends and I(because we were travelling with another family from our ex-church) rushed up the tour bus to stake our claim on the back seats, cuz it's the most spacious.

The morning passed by rather slowly, we went for Breakfast round 2 at Macdonald's in Kunming, which is quite advanced I guess for China, but it still can't beat Singapore.

Then we went to view somegrand gate-door thing. I have no idea what it is because I was too tired to pay attention to the guide but this is what it looks like.

And the streets are filled with old folk dancing and practising taichi.

Just another photo of how the area looks like.

And anopther of those gate-door things. It's meant to be a different one.

We went to some local park place which would've been boring if not for the fun we got out of feeding the seagulls.

They sell loaves of bread ar RMB1 per loaf and you just pinch pieces off it and toss it in the air for the flying seagulls to catch of throw it in the water for those on it to snatch(gosh it rhymes).

Seagulls that are snatching for bread in the water.

They even sit on the top of boats.

Further down the area, we feed seagulls again.

Oh! And the gulls have a leader. The gull leader is a seagull, whcihi, at some point in time, makes some noise at a frequency at human ears can't register. Once all the seagulls hear that sound, they IMMEDIATELY flock to a certain place and fly a few rounds around the lake.

Gulls on a roof before the sound was emitted.

And none left on the roof after.

The air becomes swarmed with seagulls once they hear the sound.

We then went to sample tea after our lunch, which is not my cup of tea so I just sipped politely and gave those with caffeine to my mum. Everyone then bought some tea(understatement of the century. It seems that EVERYONE buys tea when they go to China). They didn't tell us that one tea in particular that I drank makes u twice as hungry as normal if you drink it on an empty stomach(so hungry that it makes you nauseous) and I thought I was actually having motion sickness(which I never get) untill much later when I found out.

DAY 2:

8 Dec 2007, Saturday

We coached to Jiuxiang this morning, and it took ages, although halfway throught the ride they took us to some crystal shop.

Sopme scenery we took ON the moving bus. You don't have time to focus your shot so you just snap all the way and hope it turns out ok.

And YES, we reached our destination FINALLY.

Because the area is one of the least developed, lunch wasn't as nice and the fish(the ONLY fish they have), apparently, contains about a gazillion bones tiny sharp bones and even a morsel a centimetre thick can contain as many as 3 bones. Once one gets lodged in your throat, it hurts like hell and you have to go to the hospital.

This is the map of the area we explored in the afternoon.

This is a gorge. We took a lift down to the bottom.

Where we take a 10 min boat ride through the gorge. It was so so fantastic because its so silent and you're surrounded by these huge rocks and green still water(which is DEEP) and of course, great weather.

When we got down from the boat, we went to view the running water further down the gorge and discovered that there'sd actually a dam there(unused) and the rest of the water was plunging down huge steep rocks with a great whooshing sound.

The start of the dam where the water goes down.

And suddenly plunges. You can never defeat the force of water...

Me at a platform above the plunging water. Don't ask me why I keep doing "V" signs.

We walked on a path built on the side of the gorge, which was incredibly scary because the fence was rickety looking and the view of the plunging water(even scarier than the photo I put) 10+m belowwas seriously unnerving. But I made it all the way through and the gorge actually leads into a cave!

One of the openings in the cave. I'ts huge. Really huge.

wI then found myself in a cave with rock structures formed through erosion by water some 6 million years ago when these caves were filled with water.

This is only one of the many structures. The colours are from coloured bulbs.

I walked, I panted, and I finally reached a huge platform where we could rest for awhile. I thought this was the end to the cave, but NO! We proceede by walking even more on stairs, most of which are wet with WATER. It was so freaky because I thoght I would slip while climbing down and the noise of the water below was louder than ever. And while I was painstakingly making my way through the steps, others skipped along merrily. HOW ON EARTH DO THEY DO THAT?!?!?!

A waterfall IN the cave.

This is called the fairy paddy fields. In the background you can jst make out a long train of stairs. Looking ever so fragile in the hgue cave.

And guess what? WE HAVE TO CLIMB EVEN MORE STAIRS. This time, UP. It was to view some bat caves, but I didn't see any bats or any form of life at all, other than the tourists shoving their way through.

To return to the carpark(which is the start of the gorge), we jstu had to take a cablecar(which is actually a ski lift). On it, my toes could actually skim the tops of some coniferous trees and I got a good full view of the vegetation below.

While we were driving to our next stop, Stoneforest, on the coach, an accident occured right in front of our vehicle! A van(tourist) and a lorry collided and there were glass shards all over the road. The tree that had fallen in the middle of the road had to be moved away and the tour guide from that van had her leg pinned under some metal from the van that was dented inwards. Poor girl, i hope she's OK. That has GOT to hurt real bad.

So anyway, Stoneforest is jsut lots and lots of grey limestone pillars that were eroded by rainwater into shapes that are so bizarre.

This is what the pillars look like up close.

And a huge FOREST of them, hence the name.

I thought that this 'Keep off the Grass' sign was so cute! I mean the English version is pretty normal, but READ THE CHINESE! Ahaha, creative.

And for dinner! Dinner was truly unforgettable!

All the dishes were ok... except the fried worms! Yes! WORMS. They were deep fried golden brown and 2cm long but they just creeped me out. It's not that I thought it would taste disgusting, I just couldn't get enough courage to put one into my mouth!

Since its considered a delicay, everyone tried one and loved it but I stared at my half worm(I picked half sicne it was smaller and I was too chicken to try the full worm) for 10mins before stuffing it into my mouth with rice and more rice. When I felt the crunch, I almost wanted to spit the whole thing out but I swallowed it. I mean, I eat animals. I don't mind trying dog, rabbit, frog, rat, but I DRAW THE LINE at insects and grubs.

The restaurant. Oh gosh I'm doing "V" signs again.

DAY 3:

9 Dec 2007, Sunday

We went to some Peacock Park today. They call it 'Seven Colours of Yunnan'(loosely translated since I'm hardly an ace linguist). The REAL Chinese title below.

There wasn't much to see. The Park just consisted of a bunch of peacocks and ducks and chickens roaming about in randomly placed enclosed cages. And for the msot part, the tour guide was intropducing us to some local trees.

This 'waterfall' thing was about the most interesting feature we saw.

Pink trees! So pretty!

We went for our medicinal foot bath next, and for those above 18, a foot massage as well.

Speaking of feet, my LEGS are hurting from the climbing yestreday(the caves remember?). Adults used to tell me that because I am young I should be more fit. This is SO not true. None of the adults had aching muscles like me! See what I mean when I say my fitness level is 0?

Ok, so anyway, the bath was kind of cool. They dump herbish powder into a wooden bucket and pour hot water in it to dissolve the powder. All I did was soak my feet in it(which felt great especially in this cold weather, not that hot weather is any better). After a few minutes, little jelly-like globules form in the water and it's really ticklish so I couldnt' stop laughing. I expect some grown ups were pertty annoyed at me not taking this seriously but let me just say that IF I COULD STOP MYSELF FROM LAUGHING I WOULD HAVE! You think I want to do this on purpose??? It's like asking a person who got stabbed in the stomach to not utter a single cry of pain.

During our foot bath(which lasted about 20 mins), some guy came in to advertise some ointment(which we'd already planned on buying because we got it once in Beijing at it was REALLY good). To prove the efectiveness of the ointment, he singes his palm on RED HOT METAL, then shows off his burn. Following that, his assistant spplies a generous amount of ointment on the burn and viola! It doesn't hurt anymore.

We then coached to Da Li, which took about 4h, excluding toilet stops and all.

And when we reached Da Li in the evening, all we did was go to view some big glass globe.

But it was worth it because at the square below the glass globe, they sold CANDIED HAW!!!!! It's called 'bing tang hu lu' in Chinese and you can only get it in winter. It just haw(the actual fruit) coated in hardened crystallised sugar. It is SO SO DELICIOUS.

Notice our happy faces.

Day 4:

10 Dec 2007, Monday

We went to Tian Long Ba Bu(some Chinese period drama or movie I'm guessing)movie studio, which is this authentic-LOOKINGold ancient city specially built for the movie set!

Notice the 2 words say 'Da Li'?

Some performance in the middle of the street.

And of course, there were random activities like archery which I tried out and believe me, even though I am a hunter in Maplestory, I absolutely SUCK at it in real life. My dexterity and accuracy is 0. I even shot one OVER THE FENCE. And mine was the lightest bow too! My brother took the heaviest bow and shot more arrows into teh target than I would ever have done in my entier life.

Then we spent the entire afternoon coaching to Lijiang and reached there by nightfall. We had dinner there and then we went into the supermarket opposite the restaurant to buy snacks. My mum made the fatal "error"(or not, depending on how you see it) of letting us take ALL THAT WE WANTED. So that's what we did. In fact the carrier bag was SO full that I had to hug it because carrying it on hand would be impossible.

AND I HAVE TO MENTION OUR HOTEL! It is SO awesome. IT's not the usual high rise building with rooms. The hotel is split into hundreds of villas(that are like 3 storeyed terraces) and there are 4 rooms in each villa. One family usually takes 1 villa with 4 rooms. The villa contains a living room, a dining room, a kitchen and also a HOUSEKEEPER! It's like staying in a chalet with your own maid, except better! There's even a computer but the internet sucks SO much that I couldn't even access my own blog.

DAY 5:

11Dec 2007, Tuesday

Our housekeeper cooked breakfast for us this morning! I felt really bad because I didn't eat much(or rather, didn't have the time to) and she's really nice to all of us.

Because the villas are all located really far from the entrance we have to take these 'car' things out to the carpark. That's how the villas look like, but I assure you the inside is ANYTHING but traditional.

Destination 1 was 'Mu Fu' which kind of eman the 'residence of Mu'. I'm not sure who the Mu family was because I was too cold to pay attention but I'm guessing that they were some rulers of the Lijiang province in the past.

Part of the huge residence. You do realise I'm wearing ear muffs.

There's a tree that grew upside down somewhere in the residence. See how the roots stick out? Or what I think are the roots anyway.

View from one of the platforms in the residence.

Then we went to 'Gu Cheng', which means Old City, or rather, ANCIENT CITY.

The shops are all in traditional olden Chinese architecture but the stuff they sell is pretty modern. Liekw aht you'd see in a normal store.

On one of the many paths in 'Gu Cheng'.

See the flags lining the path below? They lead the way to a village dominated by the Naxi Tribe(which are related to the Japanese race).

There waqs some performance in the village about this guy climbing a ladder made of knives(which means he's actually going to stand on the knife blade) but because I was tired and hungry, I accidentally tripped and my poor, poor ankle was in sheer agony so I couldn't care less about my surroundings. There was also another performance inside some hut but the incense was so strong and mixed with the thin air, I couldn't breathe at all.

Lunch was disgusting. The rice felt like plasticine but I guess that's because water boils at 70 degrees at such a high altitude.

We proceeded by going to a cable car station to take a cablecar up to a mountain(and in Chinese they call it 'something' snow mountain, so I was actually expecting snow).

Wild goats I saw at the station. SO CUTE!

This is the cable car we sat when we went UP.

There aren't any windows. So it's open air.

And this is all we saw at the top. ALL WE SAW. There isn't even an ounce of snow worth mentioning about. It's all green pastures and blue skies. What a waste of all that oxygen spent going up.

When we were on our way down by cablecar, I fell asleep and my mum woke me up when we were about 5 cablecars from the bottom(which is also the station). Just as I was about to FULLY wake up, the cablecars stopped wuith an abrupt jolt. It shook forwards and backwards for a few seconds before settling down and that was when we realised that grey smoke was ruising from the power house below.

It turned out that there was a power failure! They took 5-10 mins to start up the power and I had to bury my nose in my jacket because the wind was blowing all of the smoke into our faces(especially since we were so near the power house). All I can say is, I'm glad I wasn't stuck in the middle with no clue of what was going on.

we stopped halfway down the mountain to take scenery photos. Like this.

And this.

I mean, yeah they are beautiful. But after looking at stuff like this for days, you start to take its majesty and beauty for granted and it becomes kind of... boring.

DAY 6:

12 Dec 2007, Wednesday

Breakfast today was awesome. Our housekeeper singlehandedly cooked 9 dishes for 7 of us, again. That's what I call PRO.

We set off really early to coach to Shangrila and on the way we stopped to view the bend of some river(which name I have long forgotten).

Here it is, I don't know which bend it is. I jsut see lots and lots of meanders.

Well, this is what it's called, I guess.

For the entire coach ride, I was SO tired and wanted to sleep, but NO, I waqsn't allowed to because when you do, your breathing rate decreases and you suffer from high-altitude symptoms more easily. Ugh.

We proceeded to Pudacuo National Park after lunch. The bus we took(Which isn't our coach. It's some other bus by the National Park) stopped at special 'scenery stops' for you to take pictures but for some reason, all the stops were sunny. Sunny=warmer=NO SNOW. All the other shady places which they passed were covered in a blanket of snow so we were pretty pissed that we didn't get to play with the snow.

Scenery stop.

At the last stop, our nice, nice tour guide brought us to a place where we could play with snow, because I requested for it. Hey if you don't ask you don't get right?

JSUT LOOK AT OUR HAPPY FACES. I made a snowball and was showing it off in the camera but Amos and his friend threw snow in the cameria to make it look like it was snowing, thus ruining the pic. See the blur?

This time all of us wanted to try to make it look like it was snowing. So we got our handful of powdery snow ready...

And THROWWW!!!!!! Perhaps our timing wasn't right. Only certain parts look snowy.

Yeah and i finally got to take a photo with my SNOWBALL.

The "V" sign here stands for VICTORY. My friends there because she helped me with it.

And more sunny scenery stops.

We were supposed to go to the Prayer Wheel that night but it's 500 stairs to climb and I'm not that interested in it anyway so we didn't go up. Instead, we just hung around at some warm, cosy cafe below.

DAY 7:

13 Dec 2007, Thursday

I don't know why but there weren't many photos of Day 7 and those taken weren't that nice either.

Anyway, we took a flight back from Shangrila to Kunming(again) and just walked around.

The only really interesting thing that we did was to go shopping in Luosiwan bazaar which is a hge shopping district. Yes there were many clothes and jeans and items, but they're all winterwear and much as I dig winterwear, you aren't even going to be able to wear it in Singapore.

DINNER WAS YUMMY. It was mushroom hotpot, and we had to pay for that meal ourselves, but I gather it was worth it.

My feet were sore from all that walking and I actually thought that I would develop bruises on my soles(but no I didn't). Now when I walk, I can feel pain on my soles are the area below my toes. Yowch.

Day 8:

14 Dec 2007, Friday

We went to a flower farm(AHEM, Horticulture) where you pay a certain fee per person to go in and cut stalks of flowers(maximum 6 stalks per person). One stalk isn't just one flower, as I initially thought so.

1 stalk=10 over sub-stalks=50++ flowers(tiny ones)

The flowers and scissors.

This is what it looks like close up. Took me ages to get this shot.

And I also got mud all over my shoes and tried to scrape it off but failed miserably so I decided that I'd wait for it to dry up then fall off on its own.

We went to a strawberry farm next, which is like the flower farm. Except this time you pick strawberries that you want(small bite-sized berries are actually sweet unlike the usual sour) until you fill up your red bucket.

We went to a silk shop next and since we've already got silk sheets from Beijing I just walked around the store and I saw this BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUL bag that cost *gulp* RMB300. That's so expensive! I really wanted it but didn't buy it.

Later on we went to another shopping area and bought a lot more stuff because that area seems to stock more items that tourists want to buy.

Guess what I saw there!!!!!

My RMB300 bag that was only selling for RMB119!!!!!! You bet I snapped it up!

After dinner when I stepped out of the restaurant, I saw what seemed to be a dead cockroach on the red carpeted floor. Then, my bro appeared and knowing what he'd do(which is kick the cockroach at me) I ran down the stairs. When I finally reached the compound below, he flung the dead cockroach at me(HE ACTUALLY TOUCHED IT :0 :0 :0). Thank oodness it didn't hit me, but when I got a good look at it on the ground, it was actually... a bundle of thread.

And I got another 3 bags at the Airport's Duty Free. Theyr'e cloth because I don't like leather or plasticky bags. And certainly NOT emo looking. Best of all they only cost like RMB 24 each.

These are the items we got in China. We didn't think that we'd gotten a lot, but actually, IT IS A LOT.

And I arranged them on the table.

Notice the blue bag? That's tie dyed and the stack of bags there are mine. The stack beside it isn't.

Yes and you DO realise I'm weing a cap in almost every photo? It's not to act cool. IT's really really sunny there, probably even sunnier than Singapore because Yunnan's altitude is really high.

Oh, and like HALF the female population was wearing boots, just on a rough estimate.

I hope this post wasn't to long-winded but hey, it's to make up for 8 days.

My Kitchen blogged at Monday, December 17, 2007

May your light shine...
in the darkness...