end of first semester in montreal
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
merry xmas to everyone, especially those who may have to work! hahalooks like this blog was abandoned again, haha. i have to wake up at 4.30am tomorrow for my trip to Miami, and now i'm finally blogging at 1143pm. i thought i had a lot of things to write, but now that i started writing, i really don't know what to write about.
i finished my examinations last thursday. life is usually quite busy, with research and coursework and all the miscellaneous stuff. 2.5years of army never really taught anyone in singapore to be independent. come on, everybody brought back clothes to wash during the weekends. now, i even have to sew buttons by myself, damn challenging, LOL. during the exams period, i was too lazy to cook, and my friends and i often dined outside which cost us like 6 to 7 CAD per meal. ouch! frankly, the biggest plus point about living in canada is chinese food can be found really easily as compared to europe. you make a trip to chinatown and u have quite a number of hk restaurants to choose from, and it isn't that expensive too.
i thought about my future plans for quite sometimes, and i more or less decided that i'm not aiming for a phd after my master's course. hopefully, having a master's degree here will give me some mobility in choosing my future job. one bad thing about having a doctorate degree is that the limited options for jobs mean that one probably has to relocate to a new and probably ulu place to work in after graduation. i don't think i have the mental capability to shift to a new university after 2 years, and move to a new location after 6 years, and possibly still have to move after doing a post-doc and other nonsense. besides, i kind of wish to have more money in my bank account now. sure, i am a lot more well fed than other students, but stipend for another 6more years? f off.
admittedly, knowing more rich people here must have screwed up my preception of the world a bit. the world is not fair, and it will never be. a friend told me that her mum gave her a surprise xmas gift by inviting her friend from her homeland all the way to canada to join them for a xmas holiday here. haha, elites and poor peasants like me live in totally different dimensions. i also just realised that my asian friends are also of higher social status than me. a prc friend's mum is a doctor and her dad is a professor, while a taiwanese friend's entire family are all phds holders.
when i was young, i was brought up thinking that hard work matters more than background and anyone can succeed despite being from a poorer family. actually i think it was at least partially true during my times in secondary school, but i seriously doubt it's the same case in singapore now. with all the intense competition in primary school and private tuition, i doubt i can enter a good high school if i am a pri 6 student now.
one thing i didn't understand is why aren't the h1n1 vaccinations free in sg? is it because they don't want us to have a clutch mentality? getting vaccinated helps the society from having an outbreak too, and i really don't see why they have to charge pple 30 dollars for it. sure, it isn't a big amount, but people who belong to the lower 10% of the sg's population will not be able to afford it. that's why i like canada. here, the vaccinations are free, paid for by the taxes. the poor pays lesser taxes but gets the same benefits as the rich.
it's late and i shall end with a few quotes i read and some photos:
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=15108690
Foreignness was a means of escape—physical, psychological and moral. In another country you could flee easy categorisation by your education, your work, your class, your family, your accent, your politics. You could reinvent yourself, if only in your own mind. You were not caught up in the mundanities of the place you inhabited, any more than you wanted to be. You did not vote for the government, its problems were not your problems. You were irresponsible. Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition for an adult, but in practice it can be a huge relief.
An American child psychologist, Alison Gopnik, when reaching for an analogy to illuminate the world as experienced by a baby, compared it to Paris as experienced for the first time by an adult American: a pageant of novelty, colour, excitement. Reverse the analogy and you see that living in a foreign country can evoke many of the emotions of childhood: novelty, surprise, anxiety, relief, powerlessness, frustration, irresponsibility.
The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The homeland which they left behind changes. The culture, the politics and their old friends all change, die, forget them. They come to feel that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”
my first snow storm!
snow was beautiful the first day. an interesting fact is that it's not slippery when you stepped on fresh snow, it only became slippery the next day where everyone has stepped onto it and the snow became dirty and disgusting. haha
My sister actually did a cute collage of me and butter. haha, but this was actually taken 2 years ago before my sep. We didn't bring her to the airport before i left for montreal.
and an old xmas song
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