someone please remind me again WHY THE HELL DID I DO PHILO AGAIN? now i am looking at my notes and i dont freeking understand a single point. i think i will never understand it for the rest of my life no matter how hard i try. i am so prepared to take 6 modules when i get back alr. if i am going to be taking 6 modules next sem i'll need to use up all my SUs. i hope this goes well man. i saw the past year paper and i dont know what the hell to do because i dont know how to do everything.

shit.

why did i take philo? interesting as it sounds it is not easy to understand.
why
why
why
shot me, hang me, stab me, poison me, burn me alive.

i was really almost sure that i could not wake up this morning considering that i went to bed at 1 but din not fall asleep until 4 am in the morning. then i kept waking up in the middle of my "sleep" for god knows why to toss and turn around. i was trying my best to get to bed if not i will not be able to keep my eyes open for my paper. i had horrible sleep last night.

but anyway. dint expect the urban paper to be so easy. i thought i would need to struggle through my only level 3 paper here and all i have have been pretty good. ended up using singapore as a case study. they did teach singapore as a urban regeneration case study. what a waste of study time the day before to study other topics. could have used that time to watch more anime or drama. this module have been pretty decent. i already have 48% without sitting for the exams. got a A+ for the reading log and full marks on my presentation and presentation report and a B for the essay. internals are already 60%. so all i had to do to pass is to turn up and write a paragraph for each question.

anyway, the highlight for the day was the weather. it was a nice cloudless sky with plenty of sun and little wind. rare to have such nice weather here in dunedin. so since i wanted to embrace the western university culture, i decided to go take a bask under the sun in front of the clock tower by the river. and mayb at the same time attempt to study philo.

i have never worn so little clothing in nz before. i had my shortest shorts and a small tee. and i thought i had on little. never did i know that there were people sun-tanning there in their bikini in the middle of school on the grass by the clock tower. they were just lying there without their shirt on and just basking in the sun like a hibernating reptile.

wow.

imagine you sitting in front of the arts canteen or behind LT11 in your bikini. i think NUS campus security will just come and drag you away to the psychology department to get you tested for abnormality. you will be running like a lab rat. singapore will not be able to accept that you are tanning on sch grounds. but instead might charge you for flashing or indecent sexual behavior. but here in places NOT IN SINGAPORE. there is simply no sin and no offense for taking off your shirt. and you might be able to take of your shorts without anyone caring a shit about what you are doing.

if you look closely in this picture you can see someone tanning in their bikini at the bottom right hand corner.



the sun was so nice though so i did my fair share of tanning. i hope the sun in NZ does make people tanner. i was sitting there in the sun for a good 2 hours. attempting to read my notes and to be honest i really dint care much for the reading. it was so different to be able to sit out in the sun in nothing but shorts and a shirt and feeling the light breeze on your face. the grass feels so cool under your thighs and on your stomach. the thing i like about this is that you can sit there with your back or tummy in full view of the sun and tan and no one will care and give you a second look.

now i can understand how that description in your story books feel like.

it is nice to be out once in awhile. well. one of my goals for this exchange is to do just that. i have to admit that that clock tower was one of the driving force for me choosing otago. all i wanted to do it to sit on the grass in front of the clock tower and i accomplished that today at 2.30pm. well done shanny.

i am so doing this the next time the weather is so fine. mayb the next time ill wear spec top to make sure i get more sun.



i swear the grass feels really great. that is the difference between the grass in singapore and the grass here. singapore you can feel ants crawling all over you, but here everything is just so perfect, just like smooth carpet grass. you can just sit there and read your book and you get seagulls and ducks walking all around you like you dont exist. plus the sound of the river just makes everything so serene. and the occasional chime of the clock tower every 15 mins.

i could do this the whole day.

i never thought that the simple act of sitting on the grass can take up so many paragraphs. the kiwis seem to do it all the time once the sun is up, and it makes me wonder if they actually take it for granted. to be able to sit on grass everyday for 4 months of the year, this simple routine is a whole new experience for this equatorial babe.

our dear katie turned 20 today.for the whole week she kept complaining how old being 20 is in front of me. and everyone was making granny jokes. like hello? no matter how old you are, this friend of yours called shanny is older and one year nearer retirement compared to you.

katie has many faces. every meal time she displays part of her collection of faces and today i got her to do some of her thousands of faces. you must know that our dear katie doesnt like being in front of the camera. and since it is her birthday we all should do something different. she promised to give me 16 shots of her face before i leave so when is it a better place then to do it on her birthday?


the double daters :
evan and claire (left)
jon and emelia (right)

these four people are always together. and since they are tow couples we have decided to call them the double daters. they are real fun company esp when you put the two guys together. evan talks almost non stop and very animatedly. and jon is there always to throw random insults all over the table. claire was telling us her own boyfriend reminds her of an animated insect. like an ant out of ants of something. and emelia is like the sweatest thing ever.


the gang :
zaid and sam (upper left)
sam and jennifer (upper right)
nadie and adi (bottom left)

the where making a whole hell of noise the whole dinner with the random laughter.


and this is my dearmichelle. good friend of mine who feeds me weekly episodes of house, greys and private practice. michelle and katie and khanatha is my three bestest of the best friends here at unicol. meal times will be really boring without them. not that the term is really at an end i dont know what they will do without me.

me and michelle were all over town the whole week trying to get katie a birthday present. we got her a singlet that says "its coz im british" and it is actually custom made for not cheap. im looking forward to bunking in at michelle's place after the exams. i promise myself to take photos of us all. katie is staying over too so we are going to be having a nice dinner the night before i leave.

when nadie took this photo she was going on and on on how michelle looked so white like a ghost.


here is katie, khan and me!

these are all the photos i have in my camera. we did take other shots but they were all in khans and katies camera. i look like shit here man. my hair and that smile is so creepy.

oh yeah. this place where we are at is a pizza place at north dunedine had to walk 15 mins past the botanical gardens in the cold wet rain. and the weather so cold i think it was only about 5 degC last night.

remember the dramatic play by eugene o'neil that we did for A levels. the play that was considered mr o'neil's masterpiece of literature that we had to study under my dearest mr john smith. well. i have to say that i have experiencing this long day's journey into night. literally. since the earth decides to spin in this particular manner. and the sunset timing is getting later and later i think when i get back to singapore i will be thinking to myself why the hell is the day SO DAMN short. at 8pm i look out of the window and it feels like 6pm in singapore. al bright and sunny.

and the title of the play actually thematically matches my current situation. a slow degradation as the day wears on.

but the problem about all this is that no matter now long the day drags on until. this idiot sitting on this end of the computer is not efficiently studying. in fact she is not even studying in the first place. all she does is spend money shopping on trademe buying stuff people will never get to see, and streaming to watch hustle online. i have turned into a shireen. that is bad... very bad... now that she have finished watching all the episodes of 24 here i am catching up on 4 seasons of hustle. i still have 8 episodes more to go. lucky for me that each season only has 6 episodes.

i really love this show. i remember it was yijia that recommended me this last year and i never got to find it anywhere online. it was only until recently that i found this. well... if you loved oceans 11 you will love hustle. the characters are so cute when they do their little eye contact to the camera thingy. plus their little bollywook and chaplin scenes. SO CUTE. i like the way the make comic humor into a serious con. like as it it was some black and white comedy. and with that tiny little british accent it reminds me alot of katie.

that is one of the reasons why i cant continue to study in my room. the stupid computer is very distracting and i keep spending more time on it than i should really have. from tmr onwards i am going to spend most of the sunny filled time in the study rooms or somewhere that doesnt have a computer. somewhere far far away from a working computer.

mid exams trip 2... catlins. even if you dont have the time. you have to make the time to have time for yourself and a short holiday as a reward for studying. nothing gets as good as rewarding yourself with a full day trip to the catlins. the catlins is only a 2 hour drive from dunedin to the southern most coastline of new zealand. the catlins has a very beautiful and VERY windswept rugged landscape.

our trip started off with a short visit to purakanaunui falls. bavani somehow makes it sound like a hokkien vulgarity when she says it and it is so funny. the catlins is basically a steep enscarpment landscape and that is why even small rivers become nice waterfalls as it runs over the edge of the enscarpment over into the sea.

i think i have seen too many waterfalls since i have arrived and all the waterfalls are so different and yet so nice in its own way. there was the huka falls then followed by the million and one waterfalls at milford and now there is this waterfall with a name i cant even make myself say coz i simply cant string it up.

anyway. this is us girls doing another shot of our charlies angles. we did it in north island, and thus it is only right that we do it in the south too.

shireen drove us through the gravel road and it is about 13km of gravel road to this place to see the spouting caves but the road was closed. all this way to the end of the road and we had to find it closed. i had to travel 13km of gravel road for nothing. not to mention the other 13km back to the main road. that is the thing about new zealand, tourist attractions are weather based. and rural places dont even have roads.

i dont consider gravel roads a road.

after our little ride to lake clearwater 3 months ago, eugene, shireen, i and probably ron have a phobia for gravel roads. everytime i see gravel road my head make my eyes stare onto the road in anticipation of even the sightest skid. i even put on my safetly belt on sight of a gravel road. johnson took the wheel for a short time before shireen came back and in that short time he manage two tiny little mini skids while running the wheels on the road. and it was scary man. i can hear myself telling myself (even though i was not the one driving) "slow down"

but anyway. catlins being the southest point coastline to new zealand, has really nice coastal winds coming in from the pacific ocean. just coincidentally this part of newzealand happen to lie right spack on the 46*S and this part of the globe actually gets polar winds generated by the polar cell. and thus generating enough wind over the ocean to give you more wind then you need and you want.

the moment you open your doors you can feel the wind pushing and blowing you in every directions. according to the radio and the weather forecast, the temperature has hit double digits, but the wind makes it drop back 5 degrees back into the single digit range. the wind always feels cold at the start, but after enough blowing your body temperature will be chilled. but that is actually before a really long period of complaints and random valgurities coming out from my mouth to tackle my mental disagreement with the wind.

and the wind was so strong and constantly running over the landscape you can see the tree along the coastline growing in one direction alomost 45deg in the direction of the wind. there you have rows and rows of trees that dont stand straight. shireen even suggested that if me and bav stood outside long enough we would have a nice 45deg hairdo. thanks for the suggestion but no thanks.

our second stop was the petrified forest. when i read the board outside the trek down i was thinking to myself that is sounds like something out of a harry potter book. imagine yourself in a forest where everything looked dead and petrified. but to my little amazement, the petrified forest is nowhere near any form of vegetation but a bulk of rotting kelp and seaweed habitat and a spread of rocks.

they even had things floating in heaps in the water i told the rest that they were seaweed eggs. hahah, then i got scoulded by johnson coz seaweeds dont lay eggs. it really was funny. with the wind blowing so coldly and strongly at you in all directions you still have the time to make random jokes and be scoulded at the same time.

we had "lunch" at a small camp site office. or so it seems to be. the weather the whole morning had been crazy. and when i mean crazy i mean it rains and then shines so hard then it pours equally hard and then cycle repeats the whole damn day. during lunch it was pouring like the heavens were weeping and then the moment i finished my chilli beek and cheese pie, it shone like there was not a single cloud in the sky.

then me and shireen went on our own little expedition to the edge of the coast/beach and we found this really beautiful spread of coastal rocks after climbing over one whole stack of rock debri and another whole spread of large boulders followed by more small boulders before we came to the side where we could see over the large log that sat there. (we climbed over 30m of rocks and boulders)

it was where the waves came crashing on the rock and it sent large sprays behind us. we were posing for photos and waiting for the waves to come crashing in so that we can get a decent photo with the sprays behind us. the view was so beautiful from behind the rocks i wonder how many people actually bothered and dared to climb over those rocks to get there to witness nature's strength.

after lunch was the short coastline at the other end of curio bay. with a single lighthouse sitting there. there might have plently of shipwrecks in the past for them to build a lighthouse here, but for the record, the people who built this lighthouse here must have been really good. coz the wind here is so damn strong you cant walk straight. and all these time i though the wind funnel over the leith river bridge here is bad. i will stop complaining when i have to cross the bridge to get to sch now.

the wind is so strong you feel like you are the cow in the twister movie. it actualy feels like skydiving without leaving the ground. thank god i am heavy or ill be taken away along with the wind to the ends of the earth. you want to take photos just the wind blows so hard you cant hold your camera steady. you want to pose for photos but every second the wind blows you to another pose you cant take a decent shot. and you just stand there innocently for 2 seconds and in the next second the wind changes direction and blows you off your feet.

i was windslapped or rather hair slapped so many times. i try to take a photo with shireen and bav and shireen's hair was slapping my face. i try taking a self portrait and you cant see my eyes coz the wind is slapping the hair all over this pretty face of mine. and when i walk, the wind slaps all the damn hair on my head in my face. i really need to get a hair cut. and the slapping really hurts. i think mother nature hates me.

i think i spent a lot of time shreeking coz i either lose my footing on the rock coz i cant see due to hair in my face. or ill loose my balance because the wind simply decided to change direction. but we had hell lots of fun trying to walk against the wind and trying to stay balanced and not blown away by the wind to timbatu.

it was my turn to drive when we spotted this really magnificant rainbow right ahead of us. we stopped the car. got out. and started snaping like we have never seen a rainbow in our entire lives. in my time here in new zealand i have seen so many rainbows i have lost count. after a tiny shower you just have to turn in the right direction to find one.

and when i say this rainbow i was thinking if there really was a pot of gold at the end of it. even johnson was thinking the same thing. too bad the rainbow kinda dissappeared at the almost end for me to see the pot of gold at the end of it.

you can actually see all the colors of the rainbow in this picture. i never thought ill manage to capture one in a photo. everytime i am driving we will always happen to see a rainbow and since i have two hands (or rather one hand) on the wheel i cant rip out my camera from my pocket and start snapping away can i?

anyway. we were ment to head on for Cathedral Caves during low tide coz you can only get into the caves at low tide but apparently there was not much sand to walk on so even in low tide we could not even get near it. the caves were closed.... boohoo.. what a waste of my drivin at 30km/h on 4 km of gravel road.

i drove all the way through 12km of gravel road to nugget point. 12km of gravel road so bad there were so many potholes twice the size of my head. driving through them was like an arcade game where you have to drive past the obsticles. there were potholes at both sides of the road and at a stretch of 5 meters there are like 15 of them splattered all over the width of the road waiting for you to get a tire stuck in it.

anyway nuggest point is called nugget point because of the sea stack that are sprawn all over the headland area. for the slightest moment it felt like the great ocean road (remember that sweaty palms?) and the 12 apostels. i would just stand there and look into the distance if i had all the time in the world. a pity we were rushing for time if not ill be just sitting there and pretending im a part of nature too.

there were a whole family of fur seals at the botton of the coastline (200m down?) there were all swimming around and sittin in their own little swimming pool.

the car ride back was a racqet. bav was playing my ipod and the whole car was singing along to aladdin and greece. it is so funny when you put johnson and shireen together, the two of them were at the back seat screeching away at the greece song. and then johnson was trying to make a rusty voice for his rendition of louis armstrong's "what a wonderful world" it was so funny i tell you. it is so good to have cheap entertainment when you are driving.

are we really having exams? a question i constantly seem to be asking myself recently. between all the studying we can still constantly having to find time for ourselves and a random moment of enjoyment. enjoying yourself here will make failing your exams more bareable. so i have decided that if i have managed to get an "unsatisfactory" for any of my papers i am not going to complain and i am going to look on the side that i did enjoy myself when i was here.

Action for the day was a ride on the taieri gorge railway train and this was planned a long time ago. since we are in dunedin. it is best that we fully enjoy what dunedin have to offer us. and one of the more touristy attractions here is the award winning train service from dunedin to middlemarch and back. and surprise to us we managed to squeeze this between our exams coz it only runs on fridays and sundays from october to april. so if we are not going now then we will never get to sit this train every again for the rest of our lives.


i had to wake up at 8.15 in the morning and it was one really hard job coz i had little sleep due to me watching groundhog day last night. but anyway... i still managed to get to the train station pretty much on time. and when i was there shireen and dias already got the tickets. i was actually thinking to myself who the hell will bother to take a train ride, and it turns out that there are many MANY other people who come all the way here to take the train.

i think everyone lacked sleep last night as you could just see it from everyone's face. and shireen was compaining of a sleep debt. i think we are in the same boat man. with the idiot neighbour and his music the morning before and my 5 hour sleep last night i have a sleep debt of my own to satisfy. but i was telling myself not to sleep on this train ride no matter how tired i was because i dint want to miss the views.

i love it how trains are painted in the brightest colors, i remember in swiss, the train was a really rich red and it looked fab in photos. and our dear taieri gorge train is of bright daffodil yellow. it looked so good in the photos with the nice green background of the rolling hills and rich pastures.

the moment we we settled in the train in our tiny little booth where leg space was so rare that you have to fight with someone elses knee to get some room. and eugene took out his little 7 dollar foldable rubber bowl and started eating cookie time, shireen was mentioning that she liked to watch people falling alseep on each other on the MRT and there was dias trying to put everything shireen said into action.

and as the train picked up speed and left the urban areas, our dear eugene took out his PSP and played on it the whole journey to and fro dunedin to middlemarch. i wonder if he actually did look out of the window actually. i swear he was on his PSP like 85 percent of the time when he was in the train. and shireen was fighting to get the window seat so that she could "see out".

we even had really random conversations. shireen was just telling us her story of india where when she took the train she say a row of people shitting on the fields or something and then we came up with occupational hazards. after seeing a scene like this, the business man will try to think of how to build toilets there and charge people money for using it. the geographer (aka me) will think of the Nitrogen and Carbon cycle and how human waste will change the pH and nutrients resource in the soil. the biologist (aka dias) will think of the gastoral chemical reactions and our little historian (on his PSP) will be writing a kung bush man story of how cave man do it.

the train stopped at this place called the deep stream and due to the VERY nice weather today we are allowed to do a bridge walk accross the largest structure on this railway line. everyone can get a chance to walk on the rail way line over a deep gorge walls to the other end.

the last time i did something like this was when we went to thailand 3 years ago where we get to walk accross the old river kwai bridge which was abandoned and not in use anymore. but this time round railway bridge crossing was nice because there is plently of really nice rocks for you to feast your eyes upon.

the bridge pillars look so nice in that brick structures. i love how rocks make things look so old and traditional. and when we reached the other side, i noticed that the big "males" with really complicated cameras are trying to climb down slopes to get a photo of accross the bridge. funny how those people with the larger shuttle cameras are always trying to risk their lives to get photos. sounds like the paparizzi or those natural geographic people who climb up to the volcanos in attempt of a perfect eruption picture.

did i tell you how much i love rocks? with miles and miles of central otago sedimentary rock those landforms are really the best things to look at. everytime i look out of the window to take a look i see fault lines and joints and the magnificant mass movement processes and rock structure informations. i love rocks, they are my most favourite topic in geography.

and then dias said that the love rocks too and the only things he sees in the rock structures are places where he can put his foot or his fingers. spoken like a ture seasoned rock climber.

see? we all suffer from occupational hazard in the slightest little ways you never know you will. but all this talk just make me realised once again how i love geography. it is one of those subjects were you can physically see the subject. and i really have to say that in the last 3 months i was here i really did learn alot about soils and rocks and geography in general.


we reach middlemarch at 12 and we had one hour to go explore the non existent town. at least we managed to find a grocery store where we got lunch. i had toasted sandwiches and nuggets. and man i love those toasted cheese sandwiches. and we had a "picnic" at the station while listening to this lady playing a harp. and i am not kidding it was an actual harp like those you imgaine angels playing in the heavens. and man are those things pleasing to the ear man. it is really beautiful to just hear those strings being plucked.

i wonder if singapore sells harps. i really wouldnt mind buying one just to randomly pluck a few strings. i really regret not learning how to play an instrument. it would really be nice to be able to make music anytime you want.


spent the whole time on the way back sitting outside with earphones to mask out the noise of the train wheels damaging my ear drums. with the wind blowing on my face and the smell of sheep poo in my nose and the sun on my back. i love the feeling of just being able to sit there without a glass pannel between you and the majestic-ness of the scenery.

it was so beautiful to just sit there and let nature pass you little by little. it moves past at a speed to fast that everytime you want to take a photo, the moment just skips aways before you can take your camera out. it is just like you have to keep all this moments in your mind, in a part of your memory. it is a good thing because the beauty cannot be picked up by the camera coz the rolling hills and interlocking spurs are forced to be 2D in photos when there are more dimensions to them

then i noticed the stream types where vegetation grows on the depositional islands, and i actually did notice rapids and even rock and debri fall and how they caused the river volume and shape to change. i tell you just observing nature like that is educational. everyone should study geog and go on a holiday.

we stopped again midway on the way back and this time it was at hindon. and this picture that i took here is probably the best picture i took the whole trip. the colors were just so good on camera it looked so good without the need of photoshopping. i could sell this photo to national geographic or somet travel magazine man.

the blue, the red and the yellow.

i really really love this photo. might make a big poster of it and hang it in my room when i get back. shall attempt to sleep early tonight because i have to wake up early tmr for the last trip before my exams. hai. i wished there was more time to go more places. i dint take a nap in the afternoon or in the evening i came back so lets hope i can get tired early and doze off to a good sleep for a new trip tmr.

QUESTION 3 > all nutrient cycles are affected by soil conditions. use examples form different sysles to show how soil pH, and variations in aeration, can affect the nutrient status of the soil.

prob 1: i only studied ONE nutrient cycle.
prob 2: pH is complicated and hard to explain.
prob 3: aeration explains nothing in the nutrient cycle i studied.

QUESTION 6 > Use examples from the course to discuss the various strategies plants have evolved to cope with extreme soil nutrient resources.

prob 1: i dint go for lectures to know anything "from the course"
prob 2: i only studied salinity and serpetine extremes

and...

i dont care what i wrote. in fact i have never written so little in an exam before. only 2 pages for each question. wow. i hope i pass man. i should have written on the cover "i am an exchange student, pass me for diplomatic reasons" too bad i dint have the guts to write that. i really hope i do pass this man. my average grade for the sem is b- i think. all i need to get a C+. that is all i ask for in fact. just give me the credits so i can go back to singapore and celebrate. PLEASE LET ME PASS. I DONT EVEN WANT AN A. JUST A C+ WILL DO JUST FINE.

and one more thing that i have to get off my chest. i want to kill my neighbour he might be a nice and quiet guy but hell he plays really LOUD music at 8.30 in the morning. like who the hell blasts music that loud that early in the morning? i could hear the bass thumping through the very thin cardboard walls. and it continued to thump till 10.30am. and god for heavens sake i wanted to sleep becasue i was going to have a paper at 2.30. the only reason why i dint get up and scream at him was because i was to tired all i wanted to do was to go back to sleep. but NO! all the thumping was getting on my nerves for 2 whole hours. every girls needs her beauty sleep. paper or no paper

there is so much to study and there is yet and forever so little time. even when you are far away in a place NOT called singapore this problem still persists so evidently you can feel yourself being sucked back into the horrible reality of the education system. i have been spending between my neopets, facebook and online shopping to stop and study for a while for bits at a time. i see the way shireen is studying and it makes me feel inadequate and i feel like i am going to fail my exams here and end up having to do extra modules next semester.

speaking on online shopping. i have just got addicted to tradeMe. it is the NZ version of ebay and so far i have already spent a decent amount of money from my debit card on things like a corset. i bought a corset for 2 NZD! and it is really pretty. if you guys want to order any nice CHEAP lingerie from the trademe.com website you can just send it to my place and ill carry it back for you.

but i still managed to find time to pop here and there for ocassional birthday parties and get togethers. and on sunday even i manage to drag my butt into the rain and over to khanitha's surprise birthday party at toroa. just that i arrived so late i totally missed the surprised part of the surprise party. i arrived so late i was just in time to see gen and nadia leave back for unicol. lucky i managed to take a photo with them. if not i think it will be hard to find another opportunity to get photos with them at dinner. since no one takes photos at dinner.

jianing is one of the organiser for the surprise party. and we got khanitha a dress. and i paid for the zipper on her dress. i told her that everytime she zips her dress on or off she is going to be thinking of me.

and on sunday night had a little pot luck party at shireen to wish everyone that i have been traveling with good luck for their exams. and as usual i cooked my mustard chicken. and without my very own kitchen i had to use bavani's flat kitchen to cook my part of the dinner. and to my "surprise" i saw eugene there in toroa again. everytime i pop by to bav's place, that eugene is already there before me. lucky i dont stay in a flat or ill get wierdos popping at my door at random times.

eugene was cooking shepards pie, and bav came back late from her flatshopping to cook fried rice. by the time i went over to shireen's with my little bowl of mustard chicken, pizza (johnson), mince stew (dias), spinach and cream (gavin) and pork ribs (leonard) was already nicely spreaded out on the table. then in came shireen's burnt cake witch had tim tams in it. i never knew you could use tim tams to bake cake.

half way through dinner shireen got a call from singapore radio channel 93.8FM. she was getting her first onair interview which people like me have never gone up the radio waves. well. i couldnt stay long because i needed to get back to my room to finish up the 5 lectures i have left for soils.

after looking at all these pictures i really think that i need a hair cut desperatly. all i see in my recent photos is that great mass of hair on my head. i cant study without clipping it up coz it is so weighed down it keeps falling all over my eyes.


the best thing for the night was the earthquake. the was a pretty big earthquake of about 6.7 at milford sound at 1.30 am in the morning. i still remembering myself sitting at my desk studying (or rather attempting to study) when i say my overhead light sway. and i was thinking to myself why is the light swaying when my door was closed and my curtains where also closed. i thought that mayb there could be a slight draft of wind in my room as i did leave my windows open.

it did not occur to me that THAT was an earthquake until johnson told me. wow. my very first earthquake experience and i did not even FEEL it. i only manage to see it. so i guess i wasnt exactly an earthquake experience. while on the other hand our dear shireen and johnson were happily msging each other about their houses collasping down. too bad for me i cant feel any strong vibrations in my little basement.

funny how we were at milford 10 days ago prior to this. why are we always missing the big events when we are on holiday. i was imagining to myself the hugeness of the avalanche that is going to be generated by this earthquake. i think the fjords had unloaded all their snow caps. apparently there were 5 more aftershocks that night. and i dint even feel it. what the hell

even katie got woken up at 10am the next morning because her room was vibrating. im jealous. I NEED TO FEEL AN EARTHQUAKE. for all you know since we are always missing such important natural events, i predict that when i leave dunedin there is going to be a huge tsunami and when i leave NZ, the whole country is going to sink underwater to become the new atlantis.

okok. shanny you need to study more tonight. you have an exam tmr afternoon. you need all the luck you can get for this paper since it is the most stupid paper you have ever choosen to take.

P.S if i am not blogging as much as i have forgive me. i am attempting to study for my exams. i have a very tight study timetable.

i hate facebook. the creator of facebook sucks. i am trying to attempt to study and i spend one and a half hour on facebook doing stupid work unrelated thing. okok shanny. focus. if not you are just going to fail everything and repeat your semester. you cant do this to yourself. you have to finish soils today or you are screwed.

not only that but i also am playing neopets. NEOPETS for heaven's sake. i feel like i have not grown up since sec 4 when i played neopets. donno how to explain the sudden relaspe. i think there should be rehab for neopets and facebook addicts

no more neopets
no more facebook

not until you finish soils tonight.

just random surfing instead of studying. one of my fav cartoons of all time.

it is officially one more month before i reach back in VERY HOT AND SUNNY SINGAPORE.

i am apparently going back on the same day as shireen and bav.
and i happen to be taking the same flight as bav too.

i cant believe it is so soon.
was i here for 3.5 mths alr?

we have the little time to get rid of the notes and lecture slides to head down to unipol and join their little horse riding session. and all this time i was supposed to be studying my organic chemistry and soil structure. and i end up studying the sadle structure and horse social behaviors. funny eh. in fact i think i shouldnt even be blogging but i cant help it.

we signed up for this a good three weeks ago where we thought we had more then enough time to enjoy ourselfs and today were are back on the fields trying out a new skill we have aquired in that little 15 mins of explanation at horse treks at hare hill. this place have about 20 horses i think counting the number of sadles hanging from the wall. and those horses there are apparently award winning horses. one horse ginger won his owner a 30,000 NZD prize recently. they even have a whole wall of ribbons collections and certs. you know when you watch dog shows on discovery channel and the winners get ribbons? apparently horses get that too.



as usual we are in another fashion disaster. we had to trade our hiking boots for riding boots (because we need a heel) and above that we are needed to strap ourselves into a helmet. which i can swear gave me a really bad hair day for the rest of the afternoon. i already had to drag myself out of bed at 8.30 with an already bad hair day and that helmet made it so damn worse i wished i would never be seen in public in it.

we learnt that horses can tell how their riders are feeling. and if you are clam your horse will be nice and calm and if you are screaming and nervous your poor horse will get the gitters too. i was tellling gavin what if you want a cute horse, you have to act cute too. but i think nature dont work that way.



this is sky, my horse for 2 hours. the last time i rode a horse it was in perth and it was called fatso. well... i did get the brown horse i was asking for though. sky here is 17 years old and a very calm and patient horse who is well ridden. and currently she added plenty of horse hair to my jeans and jacket bacause she was currently shedding her winter coat. and i tell you that is a lot of hair on that old winter coat of hers. and because they din not brush her before i got up on her i had her winter coat as my winter coat.

a horse is worth the amount she is trained and if your horse wins you races and ribbons it is automatically worth more.

sky here is a long distance trekking horse who can do a fair bit of running. according to her rider sarah who was kinda our guide and the daughter of the couple who owned the farm/trek/idonnowhat. and sky is apparently a favourite with the other boy horses.



when a horse stops for what ever reason. it will head head on to the nearest patch of grass for a chomp. dias's horse is very good at chomping grass even when he is walking. he chomps so much he even dissappeared into the owners garden, chomped down on something and came down to meet the rest via a surprise and hidden "human used" walkway (aka the stairs) that is one greedy horse.

bav had the small horse called summer (coz she was born in summer). small horse for small girl like bav (equally stunted). shireen got anne who is the kid of shannon who was gavin's horse. and then there is the beautiful and graceful horse ginger who was the one who won 30,000 for the farm. and then there was robert who was a big he-horse with a really big thingy and there was barney who din like his head petted or something like that.

i am totally appreciate why ginger is an award winning horse. there she is ridden by the swiss ski instructor in the red jacket. that is one really nice mane and one really good color for a horse.



did you know that horses are lazy too? they can stand on on hind leg when having nothing to do. and that looked so cute. and they have really soft "nose fur" or what ever you call that. like amber where the fur right on her nose is the softest fur on the whole body. and it really was really nice to touch. and horses can walk while chewing grass.



i took some photos with sky while we were having our little tea break at the field. it was hard trying to get a self portrait of a horse who only wanted to eat. she doesnt even want to lift her head to look at the camera. i assure you i did try a few times before i got decent shot of her head.





this is snow. dias's nice white horse who automatically made dias the only "bai ma wang zi". but that was one horse who had his mouth on too much grass. and even adventurous like his rider. according to the owner, thye had to bar up the roof because snow was alway finding his way up to the top once in a while.

that must have really been one stupid horse, or one horse that thought he could fly from the roof or something. maybe he watched too much super man. and with that new movie "superdog" coming out in cinemas soon it is not helping its' already very warped brain.



i even pretended on the way back that i was riding a horse through a park in my little madeup victorian riding habit. and that as a really random thought for me. too much trashy novels. i blame them for many things

i spent the whole afternoon sleeping away my cramps. now i have to start doing some work. i am hoping that i can finish 6 lectures be tonight so that i will be back on track on my little study plan.

time to suffer a horrible death and die and then die again

all i have left is one week and a very packed study timetable leading all the way up to the 5th. to think that i actually came up with a study timetable this sem. that is about 6 lectures a day to study until thursday and then about 8 lectures a day till the 5th while still having exams in between. i can foresee myself dying while studying and then not being able to finish everything i started out to plan. usually i start one month before my first paper but this time around it is such an amazement even to me that i am squeezing everything in a couple of days. i wonder if my piorities are right.

and in the midst of all this study i still am planning a day for horse riding, a day for taieri gorge train ride and two days for catlins.

an i good or what?

it still feels like i am on holiday. but i really think that i ought to study or else i will end up having to do another module or two when i get back to singapore next sem and having more to do on your final sem is not really the best thing on earth. besides i cant SU anything when i get back.

have to stop procrastinating and actually START studying

and after everything i need to pack everything into my little red suitcase, go on another last tiny little road trip and return home. why do i have this feeling now that i dont exactly want to leave this long holiday. but yet at the same time i do want to go home to hot sunny singapore. i actually love the weather now. comfortable 13 degC where you can just walk out in a teeshirt and a thin cardigan. it is like a perpetual aircon globe overhead. i do wish singapore is like that.

and why do i feel like i have not taken enough photos? i have not taken photos with my unicol friends yet. i have a bunch of pretty good friends here and i have not taken a single photo with them yet. that is the problem with hall without activities bacause you only see them every meal time and come on... NO one takes photos as daily dinner or lunch. but i really think that i should go around taking photos now. if not i will regret never taking photos of them.

now i know when melissa or jessie says that they dont really want to leave and will miss the place when they get back

7th October

we woke up early to our dear dias's autmatic day light saving hp timing. him, thinking it was 9.30am and late for check out had to wake poor me and bav up at actually 8.30am. man i could have sworn i wanted to kill someone. gavin came in early in the bloody morning and open the curtains to let the very nice sun in. poor bav had all the morning sun in her eyes. i had a horribly disturbed morning although this is the first night i have a decent sleep because i was too tired from sledging and i also had two pillows.

wanaka was a very beautiful place, but too bad we dint have anything planned out for the day. in this great nice and sunny weather which is a whold tad better than rainy milford weather. we had nothing planned to do. no one wanted to get wet again. and that ruled out lake activities. and fishing was too expensive to do. off to the lake side we went to enquire at the iSite what there was to do here.

this is lake wananka

and i feel that wanaka is so much prettier than queenstown. there is still the lake and the mountain range but less commercialised and touristy. and it was simply too beautiful dispite the very strong winds that were totally freezing the hell out of my little grey hoodie.



first stop. puzzling world.

funny place this is actually. outside the main area is this leaning tower of wanaka or something like that where you can take photos with it. and it makes a really good photo opp. i would have loved to spend more time outside taking photos of the different structures but dias where rushing us in. and then before i could take any decent photos inside we had to go for lunch.

sad aye.



first stop. the great maze. you are supposed to walk through the maze and find the little towers at the sides. and this is one hell of a maze with double story pathways and really confusing layout. i think if you put eugene in here he cant GPRS his way through it in 20 mins. his GPRS system will not even work in there i tell you.

do you think the staff can get through the maze easily? do you think that it is a job requirement to know how to do the maze in 30 mins?

reading the sign. an average person walks 3 to 5 km in the maze. like what the hell. more calories burned.



proud to say that i did find all four corners and my way out of it all by myself without cheating like certain other people. i even have photos to prove i did it man. and i had to say that it really was a huge challange. it is not easy being in a maze. and the most frustrating part was find my way out. i keep bumping into dias finding his way out when i was trying to find my way out. and i think we did bump into each other a few times. i learnt that you have to trust your instincts sometimes and proud to say that i was the first one to complete the whole damn maze without cheating.

i rock or what?



there are a few illusions in there and this roman toilet is part of it. i happed to pop into the toilet and i was so surprised to see this on the wall in the toilets.



i found this on one of the puzzles in the shop and i thought it was really funny

click on the picture to enlarge it and read what is on the tag.



afternoon was a walk by the lake. i have to tell you that i really did have a lot of calories burned on this trip with all the climbing and walking. but this lake side walk is really casual and i was so plesantly surprised by where a simple walk like this had in store.

we found this little jetty where we could walk on and bask in the sun. and it was such a pretty little place where you can see the whole lake and the mountain range from the end of the jetty. we all got into a tiny photo taking session before stopping to lie there and relax. this part of the lake had no wind and everything was quiet and very peaceful.

i wish i could build a little treehouse on the tress and live there.

the water is so clear you could just drink it.



right at the end of the walk we reach the curve of the lake where we could see the whole mountain range. i love NZ for all the mountain ranges that they have to offer. esp the south island where the alps are so majestic and overwhelming for all of nature. nature overpowers the humans here.

there is a little portion of the lake coast where me and bav had a short lie on the gravel "beach". as hard as it sounds the ground was actually every comfortable.




me and shireen went back to dundin while the rest went onwards to the glaciers. im going to leave it to after exams when i have more time to get there.

and i drove 3 hours straight back to our little home without stopping for a break. and the first thing we had when we came back was to head to minami for dinner. how can you stop two girls from eating their favourite jap food after a long tiring trip?