Promise?


today is hot...again. :-(
i've mostly wasted it doing nothing too.


but! the point of this entry is:

tadaaa!


i did my calligraphy work, and (this part of it) actually looks ok, in my very amateur opinion! lol. i feel so cool, though my handwriting in the left bottom corner is quite awful! haha.

imagine if i was actually good at calligraphy! ... maybe one day... it seems quite a nice virtuous past time to me ^_^ one all good young ladies should be versed in. or maybe i just figure i cant cook so i need something up my sleeve. what a random turn this has taken. im going to stop! meanwhile you can all continue to admire my masterpiece!

Another week ...


yet another week has gone by since i updated. finally it seems like i will have no more timetable changes in my uni subjects, and i can settle into some sort of a routine! thank goodness.

hmm. what has happened this week. we'll start with Cathy and Vicki's party on last Friday night.

it was an awesome night, getting to catch up with a few high school people i wouldn't normally see, and meet a few new friends from uni/ work circles.

and of course Leila came down from Canberra too! aww, isnt she beautiful!

she and Cathy were very brave and charitable, they took part in the 'greatest shave' fund-raising for Leukemia. it was quite an event in the suave little Smith street bar, we all crowded round to have a hack at Cathy's amazingly pink hair, and 'ooh and ahh' at Leila braving the clippers...and those wielding them!


as awaited, the finished result, and doesnt it look good!!!

for more photos (taken by yours truly!) and a more detailed account of the night see Cathy's blog

this week has been slightly more eventful than others perhaps. after the party i stayed the night at cathy's parville residence and it was quite cool. leila, vicki and i made sure to keep talking all through the night, to the annoyance of cathy im sure!

saturday morning we had a rather late relaxed start to the day, and eventually made it out to Mordialloc (a suburb very far away from everywhere, which i'd never heard of and even took me a long time before i was able to pronounce it, sounded so foreign!) for a food and wine festival, which wasnt bad in itself, but the fact that vicki and i were very literally very broke (the $2 entry fee took the last of our money!) it was a little less enjoyable than it should have been.

but we enjoyed a cooking demonstration by Gabielle Gate (a challengingly hard nougat, just like loren's chocolates, haha!!) and some nice jazz music too. i bailed out on cathy's brother's birthday and crashed at home...very tired. i'd planned to do my calligraphy work, but alas it had to wait until sunday 'til i had the time and energy!


tuesday was the next eventful day, (it's my busiest day of each week, that's for sure!). i start class at 9am - which is lovely cos i get to wake up at 6:30am, a personal favourite - and then i have every one of my classes through until 5:15pm...it's longer than a high school day, how stupid! but yes, after classes FINALLY finished (2 hr japanese classes start to drag after the 1 + 1/2 hr mark!) i headed into the city and grabbed some sushi rolls for tea before going back to meet up with Caitlyn to try out the uni dance club.

it was a pretty good class! felt great to do some dancing stuff again...it's been almost 3 years now since i did jazz! but much to my embarrassment the class was too good for me! it was only upon arriving, and seeing that the 'beginners class' were doing much better than 'beginners' should that we realised that there's not actually an advanced class...hence the more advanced dancers are all in intermediate level. it's rather depressing to find that after 13 years of dancing, just a couple of years rest is enough to really make you struggle. timing and coordination of body limbs were the biggest issues. my mind knew what needed to be done and more or less how to do it (well, most of the time anyway), but getting the limbs to follow was a completely different task! flexibility needs some work but isnt too bad, considering.

ive decided i shall demote myself to the beginners' class and hopefully i'll fit in nicely there, get some fitness and flexibility back and overall enjoy the wonderful sport that is dancing once again! extra bonus is class will start and end an hour earlier, so i can get home about 8pm, and have some tea. ^_^ so yes, my busy tuesdays just got busier.. i now leave home at 6:30am and arrive back at 8pm. what an incredibly long time to spend at a school, when u dont live there!! oh the convenience of living at Liao Da, or at least in the uni's surrounds! i could even wear my slippers to class in Winter!

and now we come to today. (apologies for lack of photos at this point in the entry, boring i know! perhaps i shall add an extra topic later, so you can have some visual stimuli).

today started off rather nasty. a very disturbed, unrestful night of sleep (or lack of!) most likely due to the return to hot weather, was followed by another early 6:30am rise, to get to class by 9am. i was a bit tardy in my getting ready, so i left a bit later and consequently arrived in the city about 5mins before class. not so terrible, as chances are i would only end up 5mins late, however fate had other plans in store!!

i got on the nearest tram, which damned well took me 1 stop and then said 'this is the final stop, everyone get off!'. Grr,happens frequently these days. however, the stop it dropped me off at was of course Melb Central Station, so every man and his dog were trying to get on the trams. i gave up in the end and started walking.

walking soon grew tiresome..and feet were starting to get sore. i decided to screw it all, waited while several student-packed-in-like-sardines-in-a-can trams went by and eventually squished onto one, 10 mins later.

once again, 'twas not my lucky day. the tram went 1 stop and said 'this is the final stop, everyone get off!'. and then the friggin' tram continues on up the street with no one on it....why???

by this stage i was resigned. so i walked the remaining blocks to the uni and at last made it to the Asia Centre building, only to realise due to my final timetable change i wasnt able to find the classroom for my class which i was already 25mins late for. gave up and went and sat under a tree revising useful chinese words instead. i wanted so much to turn around get on a tram and bus and go back home to bed, but the prospect of a chinese class in the afternoon saved me and so i stayed on. chinese still remains my favourite subject ever, im so glad i managed to find a class which a) is really really good and b) suits my language level. go 'Film and Lit in Contempory China'! each lesson we watch half of a classic chinese movie from the 1980s, and sit around discussing it all in chinese and chingrish. better yet the teacher is really kind, and funny too.

i arrived home to the start of my weekly long weekend, with a small pile of homework/ assignments to get started on, but pushed it all aside and sat down to watch 'Curse of the Golden Flower', or 'the Whole City is Wearing Golden Armour' as i believe the chinese title is, on my surprisingly very good quality 'filmed in the cinema' dvd. the only way i knew it was filmed in the cinema was due to the movie phone tones i heard twice! haha. and one or two subtitles disappeared off the screen at one stage but other than that it was very very impressive filming!

i am quite naturally a fan of director Zhang Yi Mou, which is why watching all his earlier films in Film and Lit class is so good! and despite Leo not being too impressed with this new incredibly high budget film adapted from the story of a traditional chinese drama play, as most chinese people aren't,to me the stroyline is new and i love it.

Gong Li is very beautiful, and for those of you who dont know your chinese actresses you'll probably recognise her from 'Memoirs' as the beautiful yet evil Hatsumomo. wah~ just read that she was born in Shenyang, the same place i've been for the last year! so cool. i feel inspired. it's so funny to see her as a young girl in Zhang Yi Mou's early films in Film and Lit class! (thanks to Leo for pointing that out to me, apparently they were an item at some stage...Gong Li and Zhang Yi Mou that is, not her and my Leo!) ^_^.

and Jay Chou is pretty cool. for a singer/ songwriter who's just beginning to double as an actor, he's pretty decent.
and of course i love all his music, I would be extremely surprised if he isnt involved in the beijing opening ceremony. he's meant to be the best singer among all the young ones from the past 10 years or something. and lucky you, you should all be able to hear his end credits song for the movie, which is playing on the blog at the moment, if the link is working properly.

but back to the movie! the plot is of course one of my favourite genres 'royal intrigues'! plotting and assasinations, poisoning and seduction, masques of love and hate entwined. i love it!

i'm so very excited that soon others can share this breathtakingly beautiful cinematography of extravagant costumes and on screen colours soon. movie release date in Australia is April 19th! so i will of course be seeing it again! Zhang Yi Mou's movies are definitely designed for the big screen in order to get the full effect. The images are really so beautiful!

and, on a final humorous musing note... i hope school remembers to give us our free tickets sometime, for that lovely survey we did...haha!

Me.


first things first. another week has gone by and i've had seemingly less problems with uni - that's good. still got a few timetable issues with japanese class but should be ok. onto other stuff ... on tuesday i got home and was greeted by a wonderful surprise. my boxes!!

my stuff from china has arrived, and many months earlier than expected. it was meant to take 3-6months to ship, but it only took 1! wow! so now my mum is washing lots of clothes and air-ing the smoke-smell out of lots of boots. haha.


other stuff. for some reason i started looking through some photobooks the other day so i decided i should do a post about me! lol. well, it is my blog afterall! so yes without further ado i present......

ME!

yes i have shrunk a little, and no i am not a boy - i'm wearing a dress, can't u see?!

aww. cute? looking at this picture all i can think of is a doll. i look like a little kid's doll! how scary! ... perhaps im beginning to understand why the chinese people say i look like a wa-wa (doll).

think i blame the hair... looks too porcelain doll-ish. though the style is basically the same, the colouring of it now is a lot more barbie meets porcelain doll. i love the chinese mothers who liked to point at me and say to their little daughters 'oh look! it's barbie! just like your one at home!'. ... excuse me, but my chest is a reasonable size and no part of me is made from plastic! the hair may be the same colour but that is where all similarity ends.


onwards! i'm a school girl yay! and what a good student - im reading books...mr.men books haha!
ah the days of long hair, how pretty! its below my chest and down to my elbows!! wish i had long hair like that now! so pretty! hair grows too slowly!

lets skip say 10 years, and suddenly we're at the age of sweet sixteen, debutante time!

i'd forgotten how beautiful that dress was! and white gloves - so classy! haha

lets skip another 4 years and we're up to date.
this was my graduation day from Liao Ning uni, and yes i was crazily wearing a halter dress in -18*C weather!
think there was even some snow left on the ground that day too! and being me, i was of course late getting ready for the ceremony, so 9am saw me sprinting my arse off down the street to get to the uni on time! got a reasonable amount of extra stares that day!

A lazy long, yet not long weekend.


Strange title perhaps but it makes sense to me. for most of melbourne this weekend is a long weekend, i.e. monday is Labour Day, only problem is universities forgot to take note of that fact, so we still have to go to class. :-( But luckily for me, i have friday off, every week, so yay! i can have my own long weekend - every weekend!

i was a good girl on friday and wrote up my assignment for Chinese Calligraphy class,which is due on tuesday. see! i'm really ahead of schedule. the other little bits and pieces of study i should be doing are kind of being delayed though. i should do some hiragana writing practise for japanese, and i did a little bit of chinese reading last night, which i should go over again.


i haven't got much interesting news today, but seeing as i'm on the topic of uni i may as well introduce my subjects to everyone. first things first, i'm first-year student at Melb. uni, after spending the previous year at Liao Ning uni in China.

i'm doing the very highly demanding Bachelor of Arts course, (lol!) doing a major in Asian Studies. that's right, i just sit in class and stare at all the asian people i can see out the window. no! i'm doing 'Film and Literature in Contemporary China' which is really awesome, we watch bits of really good movies so far, 'Chinese Calligraphy' which is such a bludge subject, but actually if you take it seriously then it's actually really difficult to be good at (i spent my first lesson just writing horizontal lines repetitively...for an hour and a half!! and they still looked shit!) and i'm a beginner in 'Japanese' now too.

so yes, those are my subjects for the first half of the year. sounds easy? yeah, it's not too bad. it's pretty cool. but somehow 'japanese' manages to be a huge subject! we have 8 class hours per week just for that one subject...everything else only has about 3!

hmm, as always i need some new photos on the blog, so we'll try and do a little update. Haha, i've just been chatting to Lou about how great the 'self-timer' function is on cameras. and gotta love those really odd angles you get when you take 'self-photos'. i love it! so fun! her bf just bought her a digital camera! woo, jealous! lucky girl!!


one last thing i need to say today.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY VICKI!!!!! i'm looking forward to catching up with you again soon!

Friday.

today has been both a good day and a bad day for various reasons. We'll start with the good. Today was good because a) i didn't have to wake up early, b) i didnt have to go to uni, c) i got lots of SMSes to make me feel popular and c) every friday will be like this, more or less, cos i get a long weekend every weekend. yay!

and now for the bad. one, the weather has suddenly decided to be all difficult and turn hot again, just when i'd been able to enjoy a few cool but no-where-near-cold days. two, i've had a bad case of indecisiveness and 'i've-got-nothing-to-do-to-amuse-me syndrome', three im already putting off uni work and four, i've now already wasted an entire free-friday. boo!

but back to the good. i had a good convo with leo earlier on the phone and online, and i discovered lots of chocolate chips in the cupboard so i cooked chocolate muffins which are very gooey and melt in your mouth!
and now im considering watching a movie, some random highschool setting dancing movie about ballroom meets hip-hop or something stupid. no doubt will be quite gay and teeny but as all gay/ teeny things enjoyable none the less!

and now for a few cooking photos, just for the sake of having photos. lol. how silly!

but dont u just love licking the spoon? surprisingly i dont actually usually do that anymore. discipline or folly? you decide, haha

and into the oven they go! yumm! i'd like to take this moment to state how much i do love ovens. ovens are a wonderful invention, and their uses are varied. but almost always it leads to delicious or worthwhile food.


its quite sad that ovens are so few in number in china. but then again chinese cooking itself is delicious, and therefore i would probably trade having an oven for having chinese food on a regular basis anyway, as in i'd rather the chinese food (but disregard that fact if you please, as i am trying to give ovens a plug here!). however either way, an oven was sorely missed during my time away, and it's nice to be reacquainted with him again!

and i hereby vow that one day eventually i will have an oven in a house that belongs to me in china, (or at least one im renting for a long period of time, and dont worry i intend to have one in australia too), and there will be cookies and cakes of many wonderous kinds which all the chinese people will first gasp at, in shock at there inaugural appearance and then later probably wrinkle up their noses in distaste claiming 'uugh! it's too sweet!!' but, mwuahahaha, i shall enjoy it regardless. so yes, that's my little rant and rave about ovens ... and now ... its time to end this.