Thursday, January 13, 2005
so many things to share, i don't know where to start. heh. welly well, to make some sense of the nonsense (bundle of stuff in my head), i think it's best to "begin at the beginning!" by right royal decree!
changi airport: fish, xiaoen, gill, grandpa, grandma, gu gu and parents sent me off. felt very blessed to have so many people waving goodbye to me at the departure gates. thought i would be sad but strangely, i felt a sense of calm assurance that id see them soon and that everything would go well. i knew that God was going to be with me all the way and that knowledge helped banish the sense of loneliness that had haunted me for a number of nights prior to my flight.
on the plane: the seats were wider than normal, there was more than ample legroom and the cabin was, in general, more spacious than normal. the row i was seated at had a seating arrangement of 2-2-2 (that is, two seats on the left, two in the middle and two on the right) so the aisle space was extremely comfortable. the food was ok, not fantastic but the inflight entertainment was phenomenal! i watched in total about six movies, though not back-to-back. lemme see.. there was de-lovely, wimbledon, love actually, i (heart) hucklebees, the village, dodgeball.. the hucklebees show was sooo funny! it was a comedy-satire of two extreme schools of philosophical thought: nilhism and existentialism. the entire movie revolved around a pro-green, pro-environment idealist who got really screwed up by the two existential detectives he hired (a married couple who go around solving other people's life questions). such a pity it didnt play in singapore.
new york city! after a night of intermittent rest, i was up and out of the house and shown around downtown manhatten by my uncle. took a train from shorthills new jersey to hoboken station downtown and then transferred to a subway-like train called the "PATH". the acronyms stand for something but nobody knows what. walked from the station at 9th street to washington square garden, the literal epicentre of new york university. we wandered around the park border trying to find my class locations but ended up getting nowhere so in the end my uncle had to call his brother in-law to ask for directions. uncle jon (or jon as he would have me call him) was friendlier and nicer than i expected. he personally brought us around campus and sneaked us into the 'student and faculty only' buildings. visited the college bookstore and saw (gape!) almost an entire level dedicated to selling nyu merchandise. sweater anyone?
tucked in to a hearty lunch of cheese-coated hamburger at your typical ny diner. ended up eating two-thirds of the beef patty, a handful of fries and some of the salad but left the buns and the coleslaw untouched. my uncle insisted that it was 'perfectly normal' not to finish everything on the plate. no kidding! neither one of the two (uncle neal and jon) managed to finish their lunch.
waited for a good half-hour at starbucks for my uncle to settle some personal matters, during which i flipped through a copy of "USA Today", a very general newspaper for the US's very general public. was horrified to learn that americans across the country were fed a mere half-page of international news everyday. the rest of the paper read domestic news, with extensive coverage on the recent California Deluge (domestic tragedy of the year) and on US politics (didnt care to read too much into detail on that. some annoying mr. smartypants from harvard business school wrote a long article citing all the buiness lessons mr. bush should re-learn in order to run his administration better... not an uncommon observation actually... some people are fast when it comes to pointing fingers, but invisible when it comes down to actually effecting their proposed idealisms.
the sole article covering (i shouldnt even be using that word) the tsunami disaster revolved around the heroics of the US troops in Banda Acheh delivering aid to the indonesian people from the sky. bah humbug.
planted @
10:44 AM
