Happening days

Today was our last day at RR, of course I have things to share on that, but I shall clear this backlog first.
 
A few weeks back my mum asked me if I'd ever seen an apple tree. I thought, yea I've been eating the fruit all my life - should have right? ... Actually, err... No. Epitome of a mark of a suaku. But I guess everyone is a suaku at some point, the world how big please. I didn't choose to be born on an island without apple trees, but then that leads to the best experience when I get to travel: so many things new and exciting! I'm not the only suaku around anyway, they don't even know what a mangosteen is. xD

Diary-mode is on for this post. Friends, it's gonna be irrelevant and long, but I think I'll appreciate writing this in the years to come.

September's been slow for blogging huh. Not that I've been doing nothing and hence have nothing to post on... Quite the opposite in fact. So much so that I'm still seemingly struggling to recover from lack of sleep (from last week) i.e. sleeping earlier and earlier these days but still waking up like a frightened zombie. I'm not complaining though. I wouldn't turn down a chance to hang out/do something new after work (even if I had a presentation the next day and my slides were 20% complete), simply coz: JUST GO ONLY.

We didn't have friends in Derby. Now (outside of work) I suppose we can count some supervisors/colleagues as awesome buddies. The happening times are all thanks to them too! You can have a lot of fun around a sleepy place like Derby as long as you bother to know people well enough for them to invite you into their happening lives.

[Sorry for the lack of photos. Sometimes I just like to live in the moment.]

(8th Sept, Mon) Church bell ringing.

Most of us have probably heard them, but this time we got a chance to see the ringing. The action goes on in the tower above the main church, so first imagine a large cylindrical room with 6 (the number of bells) ropes hanging through holes in the ceiling. This is the ringing chamber and the ropes lead up to the bells in the space above. Not everyone gets access to this space - you must either be a bell-ringer, or know a bell-ringer.

In this case, the bell-ringer was J's sup (whom you must've realised by now contributes a lot to our happening lives). We also had the chance to go up and see the actual bells, and had one of them ring while we were in that space = eardrum shock 到. Bells are pretty low maintenance and some of the 6 bells dated to 400 years ago. Not exactly a v lucrative business. And we all had a go at ringing a bell, which involves a pretty precise calibration of strength. If not, the coiling rope would either slap us over the face, or slap J's sup in his face while stood in front of us coaching.

It was also Mid-Autumn night. 月亮在外地会不会比较圆？ I guess so. Kinda ironic that we want to embrace our culture even more now. I also realised that I haven't properly celebrated MA in years now, other than just eating mooncakes. Or maybe it's just fun to each tell our mangled versions of the Chang'e legend, and the various different gory misfortunes that will befall you if you point at the moon.

D: Tongue gets cut off (??)
J: Fingers get cut off (??)
Me: Bleed from the ears + go mute

[Was legit-ly too tired to do my presentation on this night.]

(9th Sept, Tues) Garden introduction.

My sup is vegetarian and he has his own allotment. It's a British thing: plots of land issued by the government or private owners for residents to grow their veg patches. It's basically a 7x50m garden plot within a larger plot of land along with other peoples' plots. He brought us around and quizzed us on some of his plants (think he must've got over 20 varieties in there?). Safe to say we weren't v successful in guessing - go Google what a young asparagus plant looks like.

Also, something that I predicted had a high chance of happening - he gave us quite a lot of veg. Butternut squash, purple cabbage, gherkins, and around 10 apples. That wasn't the intention of visiting though. After years of reading about them in ang moh books, I just wanted to see what a real veg patch looks like. My sup and his wife were really really generous, which is smth I've come to associate with many people here. It's much easier to live in a foreign place where the people are so warm, it makes the weather feel a little less cold.

[Side note: we brought mooncakes to work that day. The Asian supermarket stocks limited flavours (don't expect 冰皮 or durian) and we got the 双黄 and the 五仁 ones. We were worried that the ang mohs wouldn't like them, esp the 五仁 (I used to avoid it, but I think it's grown on me) and there was no plain lotus paste.

They LOVED the 五仁 flavour. My guess is that it tastes like fruit cake to them. For those who haven't tried, here's a short intro. I've had a few people tell me they kept taking slices, and my sup esp kept coming back for more. He made a face on tasting the salted egg yolk though, and I don't blame him hahahaha!]


[Lots of procrastination from then till Fri]

(11th Sept, Thurs) A special dinner.

Now, it was one day till my end-of-attachment presentation and I still hadn't finished my slides and scripted them. Details are vague now, but I rmb waking at 4.30am on this day to get a head start (if you could still call it so). The thing was that I had alr had two long workdays out at a research centre so I wasn't in the best mental shape to think out a presentation.

But I wouldn't have considered missing a dinner out anyway. That night we went to J's sup's house and cooked a Singaporean meal for him and his wife. I didn't have it in mind, but at the end I realized we actually cooked a 三菜一汤 (3-dishes-1-soup) meal for them - the usual Chinese family meal configuration. On the menu: oyster sauce veg, steamed egg, black sauce sesame oil chicken, and pork rib corn soup. Typical fare right?! I myself was happy with the meal (and not forgetting I can claim credit for most part of the chicken and egg ^^). But it was good to eat like this. Even though this is a normal meal in Sg, we eat simpler here (one meat one veg with rice) coz there's only three of us. So I guess it's become kind of a luxury...

After dinner, we sat and talked and talked... Then with a promise of going back to visit (definitely without question!) we left and reached home almost at midnight. I was up till 3.30am in the next morning.

(12th Sept, Fri) Presentation day.

I had 3 hours of sleep that night, but I was able to pull together the remaining bits of my presentations with relative leisure in the office. I did fine in the end, wasn't as nervous as a previous time.

A point to note is that the people here are way more generous with their praises than we are used to. So much so that we sometimes thought that they had pretty low expectations of us haha. To be fair, you wouldn't know what to expect from some random student coming from halfway across the world. It's really nice to be showered in praise for doing my best. They sure know how to make interns feel appreciated.

But even though the Asian approach to praising is more reserved, it's still sweet. I rmb receiving rare smiley faces from my GP teacher in the JC days - those really made me happy.