Designer: Manikka
Resources: 1 2 3

2nd time at berkel berkel!! i love that place, cos it's about as close as you can get to authentic Korean fare in Berkeley. and as usual, their portions were huge cos we couldn't finish what we ordered! but the spicy beef hot soup and bibimbap were good :)

the first time i tried berkel2 was with yingying and hannah after class last friday. this time, it's with yingying, weiling, zhikuang (all from s'pore), david (taiwan/australia) and ivan hernandez (mexico/san diego). after friday's lessons too! fridays are just great...esp since i only haf 1 class from 9-10am..abit early no doubt, but my weekend starts right after that!



but, we figured that my spanish name sounded weird , so ivan came up with 2 new names:

went to Oakland's chinatown for dim sum lunch last sunday with my roommate (from china/hk), andy (china/s'pore), peter (taiwan/usa), 2 of their friends from hk and yingying. ying and i were so excited at the thought of having dimsum, we forgot to take any pics of our first yummilicious dimsum here in the US before eating. haha. however, we did manage a pic of these eggtarts which were absolutely heavenly :)

on bus 51 to Oakland. the buses here really ought to do something about their ventilation, it's so bad...there's practically no ventilation except for the brief moments when the bus doors open to allow passengers to board or alight. the air in there was so stale, our faces were green and our stomachs turned topsy-turvy when we finally got off that awful vehicle. both times, before and after eating! horrible.



Mee Goreng and Nasi Lemak and Lontong for dinner...omg it was so good! ok la...relatively good compared to the food in Ihouse..we're all kinda sick of the food here already although it's only been a coupla weeks.. the Jakarta restaurant even had sambal! (which strangely enough, wasn't spicy at all though it tasted great). the whole bunch of us met Leanne and her housemate Eldwin, both are Singaporeans: Leanne's a 3rd year psyc major from nus here on exchange too, she extended her sep stay to 1 year from last sem; Eldwin's an engin freshman at UCB. it's quite fun to meet people from your own country when u're overseas, it just feels as if suddenly there's common ground in these foreign lands :)

on the 2nd day, we hiked up a trail across the meadows and spring water creeks, through the forest and frozen puddles on the ground, to find Grandmother Oak!! she's a 500-year old oak tree and the sheer size of one of her branches is equivalent to the trunk of a regular tree!


Tanja from Netherlands. she taught me this:

it sounds like this:

just some random pics from the campus. havent been taking many photos because most of the time, my fingers are too frozen to operate the camera...will take more pics soon!


this is Sproul Plaza, the main area on campus, it's somewhat equivalent to our central forum back in nus. for the past 1.5 weeks, the various sororities and fraternities and other clubs and student associations have been setting up booths along this red-brick area, to recruit new members. it's interesting, i've seen the korean, hongkong, chinese, japanese, taiwanese student associations, but where is the singapore students association?! singaporeans are low-profile maybe..?

hannah and ying ying, 2 of the 7 of us who arrived here for the spring semester.

end of the first week of school....10 hour days on tues and thurs really is insane....and this is only week 1. bleah. oh well, at least i have almost-free mondays and fridays to look forward to...and there's wednesday in between tues and thurs to take a break :) i kinda like my timetable actually..although it's technically a 5 day week. haha.

earlier this evening, when the 5 girls were chit-chatting away in the great hall downstairs, yingying said something that put me in a daze for a while...that girls should never believe that guys will not lie to them. i say the same vice versa. so at the end of the day, it still boils down to that 5-letter word: trust. it's really not purely a matter of believing what he/she says, but more of a mindset and a belief in your heart towards the other party. it's not merely a way of thinking or speaking, but also that of feeling.

just thought of the mary ainsworth strange situation psychology experiments. are characteristics of avoidant/secure/insecure personality types really stable throughout our lifespan? i'm certainly not using it as an excuse for anything that happens now, but it's interesting to think of how, as infants, one's style of attachment to our caregivers is strongly related to our perspective on forming relationships with other people as we mature.

deliberated for quite a buit while i was waiting outside my history of psychology lecture room yesterday, while standing in the cold air and chilly winds, before typing and sending it. certainly i considered the possibility that there wouldn't be a reply, and that should there be one, it would definitely be short and curt and probably bored. in fact, i expected that sort of reply. instead, when the reply really came, and turned out to be the way i expected it to be, i cant ignore that tinge of disappointment that arose out of i-don't-know-what.

maybe he's really over it.

you let go of some...and you start something...

first post..have alot to say actually..cos it's been 7 days since i got to berkeley...but i'm feeling really lazy now. and cold not to mention because my long pants are in the dryer.

i miss home abit..not so much, just abit. mummy and chuan and pa. and i feel so bad for having to ask pa so many times about his account...argh.

i miss the girls..sha and bing and xuan and fe...just talked to bing. talking to her always makes me feel like crying...

i miss the band girls too...hx, wt, veron...

i find myself thinking about him at odd times. like when i was looking at the stars stickered onto the dark nightsky at walker creek ranch last night, while freezing away at the same time. like when i was sitting in the plane. like when i see the words "ripcurl" on bags, or when i see anything from burberry, or when i see my roomie's LV wallet and organiser. like when i see cheesecake in the windows of the bakery. like when i see oranges in the dining hall during meal times.

time will heal...