ruler’s end

i’m more or less settled in at berkeley, still feel kind of like a small kid around all the other students. which is really strange cause i am one year older than most of the freshmen, but i guess maturity cannot be measured by years though. or independence.

pop and mum are flying back home today, so it is really going to be the start of my 4 years of independence at berkeley. never really been so far from home and never really been by myself, but it is a start of a new experience, and i am always up to new experiences. yay.

have been staying at the motel all week with my parents, so can’t say that i have “shifted in” to dorm yet. all my things are there and stuff, but i am not there. the worst thing was that my bedsheets have not even arrived, and haha pop went to borrow bedsheets from the motel and then i will return them when my bedsheets arrive.

on that note, i want to say that the motel that i am staying at is the BEST lodging i have EVER had! (besides home of course) it is nothing like the motels you see on television with all the sleazy i-don’t-know-what and like dirty beds and communal toilets. it is even better than a high class hotel! and the service is like really good. it is called RODEWAY INN so if anyone is coming to visit me, please come and stay here! (and i am totally not saying this just cause they lent me bedsheets! it is really really good.)

met some people here and there along the way, at the lectures, discussions and at the bus stops. people are kind of nice, but i feel awkward cause of the american accent. it is like berkeley has tons of chinese, but they are mostly american born chinese, so they have that american accent when they speak, which i feel immediately distinguishes me as “non-american”. it makes me feel a little uncomfortable, but oh wells, it may just be my own imagination cause some of them are really surprised to find out that i am from singapore.

anyway most of the places are berkeley have pretty good food! i have had (in chronological order) japanese food, pizza, fish and chips, korean, hot dogs, chinese, hawaiian, mcdonald’s. the pizza was really good. but they do not have hawaiian pizza, so i had to do like the 2 toppings things, meaning pineapple and ham. but it turned out really good all the same. and the pizza’s like just next to school!

the worst food? mcdonald’s.

i was totally wth with the mcdonald’s. we should have noticed something was wrong when there were hardly anybody in mcdonald’s. the only people inside were like the.. homeless people who like ask for change on the streets. i am just really sad cause the mcdonald’s culture seems totally lost in america. i mean, yeah, there are mcdonald’s in singapore that have really bad service, but the one i was at just dominates the board of bad service. but it was not just the server or something, it was like the whole mcdonald’s experience. in singapore, the mcdonald’s experience (at least my experience) is like very clean, very professional and very safe. i don’t know why, but it is just the feeling i get. the mcdonald’s that i went to just fails in very aspect. the environment made me feel icky, the manager gave bad service and walked around drinking from a mcdonald’s cup and there was a fight breaking out. oh – the food and drinks sucked too. my parents and i quickly made our escape as soom as we finished our burgers, threw the drinks away and took the fries back to the motel.

sad.

oh, seeing the many homeless people on the streets here, i really wonder what singapore does to make sure they hardly appear. we know there are aunties and uncles selling tissue papers, but that is different cause they are not begging. and they like bathe and keep clean. the homeless people here are able-bodied and young/middle-aged, so i don’t know – i really wonder what happened to them. it is not really really expensive to live at berkeley, there are many 1 buck or 99cents shops around here that my parents and i have been visiting (haha) so yeah i guess it just makes me wonder. anyway you will be amazed how many things can be bought with 99c or less.

oh but one thing i like here is the vibrant street culture. you can see buskers almost everywhere, and they are there for the love of the art – they are not asking for sympathy or donations, but they are asking for tips. that is kind of different from singapore.

blue sky in the morning

here’s an update -

zi lin has gone fishing is leaving singapore for america in about 5 hours time.

i will miss you guys.

driver head

a mangosteen is a kind-hearted fruit.

most fruits turn soft when they are spoilt, but the mangosteen becomes as hard as a rock. it becomes impossible to open, so animals probably will never get a chance to bite into spoilt mangosteen flesh.

that’s why i think a mangosteen is kind-hearted.

then again, a banana turns black when it is spoilt.

but i don’t think that it is as kind-hearted as the mangosteen because the banana leaves the animal with the choice of whether to eat it or not. for an animal who has never seen a ripe banana, perhaps a black banana would still look appetizing. for the mangosteen, the animal has no choice but to abandon the rock hard spoilt mangosteen.