Merry Belated Christmas and a Happy New Year! I have not been updating my blog due to the fact that there has not been much to write about. So, what have I been doing for the past month and a half? Well, frankly speaking I don't know where the time has gone. It seems that time has flown by in a blink of an eye while still moving at a snails' pace. Classes seem slower than usual now and half of my classmates don't even bother attending class. There is an avera...

Sorry for the lack of updates. For starters, I was in Hong Kong 2 weeks ago and had a most hospitable host who organised everything for me while I was there. Thank you Karen! It was a nice time of catching up with friends who I have not met in ages. Funny though that although I haven't seen some of them in 5 years, it does not seem that long. What with social networking sites like Facebook and our much-loved MSN, the time gap that used to exist is slowly narrowin...

Winter has finally arrived. Upon drawing my curtain blinds in the morning, I woke up to find snow falling outside. No matter how many times I have experienced snow in my life, I never tire of seeing it snow. Everything seems so peaceful, so serene and so beautiful when it snows. It is as if time stands still for just that period of time. That is of course before everything becomes slush and dirty and slippery. Doreen and I were walking on the boardwalk and we saw...

Yesterday I went to WangFuJing with Morna. WangFuJing is a busy shopping district with many high-end shopping malls that sell luxury items. However, they do sell more affordable items and it is worth a trip to walk along 王府井大街 to explore the many sights. There are food streets in this area which sell exotic delights like scorpions, starfish, pupae, grasshoppers etc. The scorpions were on a stick ala scorpion sate without the meat and certainly without p...

Before and since coming to China for my Mandarin language studies, a single (or two) persistent questions have cropped up time and again. I feel that this is the time to answer them. Here goes: 1) Why can you not study Mandarin in Malaysia? Why go all the way to China? Studying Mandarin in China means an immersion in the Chinese culture and the language itself. I would certainly not have such an opportunity in Malaysia as most of my friends speak English and th...