Calligraphy & Tea Appreciation

Hihi!

You must be wondering why I didn't post anything yesterday right? The thing is, there is nothing much to talk because we had lectures for the whole day.

However, one interesting thing about yesterday was when Jovin, Shan hui and I went to get our dinner. We decided to buy wraps from the wrap boy :) on impulse, I told the lady owner who is most probably the mum: "老板娘,我的朋友觉得你的儿子很可爱." (Auntie, my friend aka Jovin thinks that your son (wrap boy) is very cute)

Jovin immediately started blushing like mad and Shan hui and I were laughing like mad. At first the lady boss was shocked, but after that she said how honored and happy she is to know that we (or jovin for that matter) thinks wrap boy is cute. After that I asked if he could take a photo with Jovin and he agreed! Jovin was literally squealing and jumping for joy I tell you. He's really really cute. We found out a couple things about him: 1. He's the same age as us. 2. He's born in April. Shan hui and I are planning to go back and ask for his name haha! We're not crazy okay, we're just helping Jovin out :)

Okay back to the topic about today. We had calligraphy and tea appreciation lessons this morning. I learned abit of both when I was in Japan for my cultural exchange trip in secondary school. However, Japan's culture is different from China's culture. For example, China has a lot of different types of tea leaves from 绿茶 (green tea),黑茶(black tea),红茶(red tea) and 白茶 (white tea) whereas Japan mainly uses matcha (green tea) for their tea ceremonies. There are also different ways for making the different teas. The temperature of the water, the amount of times you wash the leaves and the different tea utensils you use all depends on what type of tea leaf you are using. It was really interesting and enriching because I get to appreciate the gracefulness of the tea-maker and learn to enjoy nice tea. The directors of Ngee Ann also came to visit us during this time and they were equally intrigued by the lady conducting the lesson.

We had calligraphy next. The way the teacher held the brush was different from the way the Japanese hold their brushes. It was a new discovery for me. Thereafter, the teacher explained the different strokes and how to use the brush to create the certain angle and thickness of the strokes. We went to our seats to try it out for ourselves. I should say I did a relatively okay job but Jovin was just playing around. We ended up playing tic tac toe on the newspaper haha! Ms Chuah tried to write our names and it was really really nice. She's really talented.. She can sing very well and she can do nice calligraphy.

I had lunch after that with my girls and Wen Kai. I tried 盖饭 which is like a sauce based dish on top of the rice. I had mushroom with pork slices. They even had cucumber in it and it tasted really good.

Went to the dance studio opposite our hostel with Jovin to dance. Feel so much better after sweating it out through dancing. As I didn't bring shorts with me, I wasn't too keen in running at the track field. Just nice Jovin didn't feel like running either, so we went to ask if we could use the dance studio. The person-in-charge at the gym said yes! We were super happy haha :) I should say we danced to our heart's content. And, we should be going back next week before we left.. If only we asked sooner.

I went out for street food with Jovin and Shan hui for dinner. I tried the 豆皮 sold here but it doesn't taste as yummy as the one I had during the one-day tour.

Tomorrow is my three gorges dam 3D2N trip!! Feeling kinda excited for it actually :) we'll be leaving in the afternoon and will take around 4 hours to get there. I won't be posting from Friday to Sunday so miss me till then! :)

Rest well and sweet dreams!

Xoxo
Zayneeer

Night class~

Hello!

My post for today is here! I actually wanted to publish yesterday's post earlier in the afternoon today. However, my VPN wouldn't load so I couldn't access to blogger to post. Now it's better, thank goodness. :)

Today I woke up relatively late compared to the other days because we didn't have a morning class. I slept at 11 plus last night and woke up at around 9am. So shiok hehe :) I went down to Kenneth's dorm to have a run through of the presentation that happened this afternoon. Kenneth and Brandon kept trying to make each other, Kang Ming and I laugh during the run through. Brandon also had trouble pronouncing "jie dong feng" meaning borrowing the east wind. He said it in such a funny way that made all 3 of us laugh like crazy. In case you were wondering why there is a "borrowing the east wind", our group presented on history, and focussed on the battle of red cliff. Kenneth read the Three Kingdoms "san guo yan yi" book, and I watched the movie "Red Cliff" so we have a rough idea on what happened. The presentation went well so I'm quite happy. :) Oh and during the presentation, we played JJ Lin's Cao Cao and we showed the official trailer for the movie "Red Cliff". We ended up influencing our tutorial class to sing the song and wanting to watch the movie. Haha! Our group is awesome that way :)

I experienced my first night class here in Wuhan. We had an IS class on Chinese customs & fengshui at 6pm.  The class was quite interesting overall. But the speaker had to show us food from different provinces and we all got quite disgusted by the internal organs and fried golden cicada. *shivers* He then touched on fengshui. The concept of fengshui is really profound and hard to understand. The way the house must be positioned by the river is so confusing and complicated as it all seems the same to me. He then touched on funeral customs for different ethnic groups on china. The most common type of burial for the deceased in Singapore is "huo zang" which means cremation. However, the different ethnic groups practice different types of burying the dead. Some examples are: "xuan zang" means hanging the tomb by the cliff, "tian zang" means leaving the corpse in the open area and allowing the vultures or birds from the sky to consume the corpse and "shui zang" which just means sinking the corpse into the water. We finished at around 8plus and it was near to pitch black outside. The streetlights and lamps didn't seem to help as there aren't many and are very dimly lit. It also suddenly turned really cold as my teeth were slightly chattering. I quickly went back to my dorm and warm up before going out to the streets with Jovin and Shan Hui to get some hot food and breakfast for tomorrow.

Tomorrow should be lecture day for me. The chapters and contents for this second half of the trip seems more heavy because we have Forensic DNA and Forensic Psychology etc. Will and must jiayou! Fighting!

Rest well and sweet dreams to everyone!

xoxo
Zayneeer

Paper Cutting~

Hello!

So sorry for not updating last night! I was super tired after my presentation discussion that I was half dozing off in front of my laptop.

I shall talk about what I did yesterday. We had forensic DNA lecture in the morning by Mr Lee again.

My lunch yesterday :) Mushroom and chicken fried rice.

In the afternoon we had paper cutting session!! It's so interesting! I did three paper cuts haha :) I didn't do the traditional patterns but I tried the different types of cuts the teacher introduced. Here are the three paper cuts I did. The cutting is abit rough but guess it'll do :)

Had dinner at the beef lamian stall but I had beef jajangmyeon there. Because they diced the capsicum and carrots, I didn't really pick all of them up with my chopsticks. So in the end I had most of them left on my plate. Jovin and Shan hui kept saying that my future husband will have so many pimples. :( sheesh..

That's about it for yesterday. Will post about today in awhile!

Xoxo
Zayneeer

Third Sunday~

Hello~

My post for Sunday, really sorry for the late post..

Yesterday was Clarissa Toh's birthday!! Happy 18th  birthday stone!! The girls, Mr Lee and I celebrated her birthday by surprising her when she came back from town. She was surprised and shocked haha :) The girls and I tried really hard not to say anything about her birthday celebration. We ordered her birthday cake on Saturday night, one day before her birthday. The bakery managed to have the cake ready for us on sunday night and even put the words "Happy birthday Clarissa" on it. I really admire their efficiency. In Singapore, we have to pre-order a customized cake almost three to five days before the collection date, which I think is kinda unnecessary and troublesome. It was a close celebration but a very hyper and noisy one because we were chatting and laughing away.

We went for strawberry picking this morning. Thank goodness I wore my sports shoes and I brought two pairs of shoes with me on this trip.

We had to walk on a relatively narrow and super muddy path for around 2 minutes before we reached the strawberry plantations. The strawberries did not look very tempting as many had already grown mould and fungi and many weren't ripe either. I only plucked a few small red ones that looked alright. But I doubt I would be eating them though. I don't want to risk myself and get diarrhea or food poisoning.
When we finished the picking, my shoes were super muddy. I had to wash my sports shoes when I got back to the hostel. They are currently drying outside at the balcony ledge.

The OIP students and teachers had a bonding party with some china students in the afternoon. It was really fun as we saw a roller skating performance, flute performance and some of us played games with them as well. I wasn't playing as I was busy having my fried noodles hahaha!
We had a karaoke session after that, singing along to english & Chinese oldies, and some Korean songs too :P

Guess I shall stop here and get some rest. Goodnight and sweet dreams!

Xoxo
Zayneeer

Wuhan One-day City Tour!

Hello~

Blogging again~ Sorry for not blogging on Saturday night as I was downstairs discussing my IS presentation with my group mates till quite late and sleepiness took over.

I went for a one-day city tour around Wuhan on Saturday. It was actually a very interesting trip as we went to the Hubei Provincial Museum, Donghu (East Lake), Shou Garden Snack Garden for lunch, Yellow Crane Tower and Chang Jiang. I was actually hoping we could visit their zoo but in the end we couldn't.

At the Hubei Provincial Museum, security was pretty strict as we could not bring any type of fluids with us and we had to go through a bag check at the entrance before entering. The whole building consists of 4 floors of exhibits. However, due to time constraints, I only managed to visit the different exhibits located on the first and second floor namely: Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, Exhibition of Qujialing, Panlongcheng, Art of Lacquered Articles in the Qin and Han Dynasties, Ancient Porcelain and Writing History.

The different artefacts and articles protected and preserved by the museum are so interesting and they go way back in time, holding and keeping all the stories of the olden people as they are passed down from generation to generation.

Our next destination was Donghu. Donghu is being split up into 6 different scenic areas. We only went to one of the six, Tingtao scenic area, to tour and stroll around the place. At the scenic area, there was a place to play chess and a wedding was taking place at a corner. A statue of Qu Yuan was mounted at the scenic area as well, with a temple behind it. There are actually more places to visit like the ocean world but we were too far from them and we didn't have enough time to see all of them at once. So sad!!

Lunch was next and IT WAS SO YUMMY AND AWESOME and I don't know how else to describe. I tried a variety of food with my group of girls: Tang bao (soup dumplings), Dou Pi (Bean skin- Egg and soya beans fried with glutinous rice), Re Gan mian (Hot dry noodle- noodles with a sesame oil paste), some white fried pancake and some wrap that tastes so much like the egg prata in Singapore.

Our next stop was the Yellow Crane Tower. There was a bit of a traffic jam there as it was probably after lunch hour. We were probably stuck in the bus for a good 10 to 15 minutes. Yellow Crane Tower had been rebuilt a number of times as it kept being burned down during war. The structure and layout of the tower changes with every dynasty. I actually thought it was only one huge tower with cranes on them but it is actually a few towers together which make up the Yellow Crane Tower. We climbed up stone steps to get to the main tower, and I got a very delicious mango ice cream along the way. ;)
I had to climb about six flights of steps to get to the top. It was a bit of a muscle ache but it was still manageable after all the climbing in my hostel and the previous weekend trips I took. The view up there was really nice as we got to see a relatively clear view of the city area. On our way back to the bus, the tour guide suddenly crossed the road without any warning. My group of girls and I who were walking behind here got a shock and momentarily stood rooted to the spot. We regained our consciousness and hurriedly crossed the road, with cars and buses narrowly passing us by. Some of my friends weren't so lucky as they literally almost got banged by a bus or a motorcycle. The tour guide was of no help either. Eventually, all of us got over to the other side of the road safely with displeased mutters towards the tour guide.

The last stop was walking along the banks of Chang Jiang. There was nothing much to see as the fog hit the city pretty badly by the time we went there so we could only just walk along the road, admiring the greenery. I saw a lot of wedding couples taking their wedding photos there too.

We reached Wuchang Polytechnic at around 6 plus where I had dinner before coming back to the hostel.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed the one-day trip because I like going to museums and looking at artefacts from the ancient times and I like looking at scenery.

This is about it for my one-day trip. Will post my Sunday trip in awhile~

xoxo
Zayneeer