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!