025 | happy holidays

Was originally going to post a diy for my door wreath hanging thing but I decided it would be cool to try out using Adobe Premiere to edit it. It's done, but I have no idea how to export it to the correct resolution so it's all blurry now. Slightly frustrating. But I'll get to it once I'm done celebrating christmas. Anyway, I'll be back with the new year. Or something like that. We'll see.

In the meantime, merry christmas, and happy holidays!

024 | journey home

I'm back home! My recent travel journeys have been somewhat chaotic. Nearly missed the connecting flight back here and had to run past about 50 gates in the airport. Reminds me that I need to work out more.

And my journey to London was nuts too. They cancelled the train because of Storm Desmond and omg it is an experience I would appreciate not experiencing again. This is basically what happened:

1. Direct train got cancelled
2. Take a bus to Preston station
3. Pass by 3 overturned lorries because of the weather
4. Have the emergency exit of the bus (on the roof) open several times, also because of the weather
5. Pit stop to buy first 'proper' meal of the day
6. Bus refuse to start up
7. Wait 40 minutes in the bus before it starts
8. Get to Preston
9. Get on train
10. Realise it's the train that goes on the longer route to London
11. Get chased out of my seat
12. Find another seat
13. Worry about luggage getting stolen
14. Reach London in one piece
15. Feel bad Ping and Clara had to wait so long
16. Buy a pie to munch on
17. KO at Ping's place

Yupp, the best part was definitely seeing Ping and Clara in person after so long.

023 | Daniel goes to prom

#proudsistermoment

022 | getting into the mood for christmas

We set up the tree yesterday. It really feels like christmas now. And it also really feels like home now.

(Ripped this off snapchat again)

(Heads up, I might not be posting anything other than christmas-related stuff for the next few weeks. Except maybe about Daniel's prom.)

021 | this planet is gorgeous

Just got this Chrome extension on Saturday that shows you a part of earth every time you open a new tab. It's so cool!

How nice that the first place it shows me is Austria (link to the exact view I got). Austria is where one of my hostel friends is from. She does boxing and football and is very happy to eat pizza (but then again, who isn't). She also gets bullied by "the German" fairly often.

Hmm I need to take some portraits of them before I leave. Yes, that's going to be number 2 on my list for this week. (Number 1 is to finish this assignment, and number 3 is to pack everything) oh my, I'm going to London in 4 days, and landing in Singapore in 10!

Also, while making this GIF, I accidentally found out that pressing command-shift-3 on the mac automatically takes a screen grab of the entire screen!

019 | strawberry smoke

Story time

I was walking home one day, carrying all my groceries and being distracted by lights, slightly regretting not paying for an extra plastic bag, when suddenly there was this cloud of smoke that appeared out of nowhere. And it smelled really, really familiar. But being more concerned about my immediate surroundings than the smell, I tried to locate the source of the smoke. Turns out, a man just brisked past me. And there was a cloud around his head. Kind of. He was just vaping (smoking an e-cigarette). Then I realised it was the same smell as the Strawberry Shortcake doll. It was slightly bizarre.

gif by me, images from:

background | dude | smoke 1 | smoke 2 | smoke 3 | strawberry shortcake

018 | Edinburgh

Do you pronounce "Edinburgh" as 'eh-din-bruhhhh' or 'eh-din-buur'? Anyway, I went there during reading week. It was a really short day trip. It honestly felt like I was planning an entire getaway because it was a whole new city. But in reality, it's really quite near. It's like, 1.5 hours by bus.

Travelling has always been such a huge thing because it was more difficult to do in a lot of ways back in Singapore. But this trip made me realise that it's actually fairly accessible and not that out of reach here. (That means I'm probably going to travel more hehehehehehe)

Okay, so, anyway, here's a round up of the trip.

I went to the Scottish National Gallery, and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Good stuff, cool place.

the place

the works

016 | yasssssss

During reading week, I went through all the posts I've ever posted on this blog, and removed all the tags, and then put new tags on everything to make things neater. It was difficult at first. But once I got the hang of it, it was not too bad, and it was like

And then when I was done, the feeling was more

hehe okay, check out the Topics page for more details about the tagging system I've used. Also, looking back has made me realise how far I've come. I haven't blogged much for someone who started here at 17. But -

ps. I didn't make any of these gifs. They can be found on google.

014 | Cross School Course Part II

Might I also add that that drink I was holding in the last post about the project was the first alcoholic beverage I've had since I came here? So just to clarify, I'm not always drinking okay. Okay, moving on! This is my slightly 'small and not-messy-enough' journal (according to the tutor). Can you see that glimpse of the squishy floor tile? It's the silver square thing with black lines drawn on it. It makes a pretty good stress ball.

And this is some of the BTS (behind the scenes) of the very long process of this very short project. And they're mostly from the end of the project when we were actually making things and not discussing things.

And this is us:

Related links:

Part I of this post: final exhibition

Merchant City tour

013 | Cross School Course

I'm actually posting about the project! Yay for actually doing it. This is part I because this post is only about the final exhibition. Part II, which I will be doing and scheduling asap after this post (so I don't not do it), will show a bit of the process.

The Cross School Course (I keep saying Cross School Project but that's wrong. Anyway, it's CSC for short) is done by all the year 1 students from the different departments of the school. We're grouped into groups of about 6-7 people from different courses, and each group is assigned a location in Glasgow. We then have to talk about the future, specifically in relation to the assigned location. My group was assigned Merchant City. I have pictures from our site visit in another post.

We could do anything we wanted, as long as it could be presented within the given space in an exhibition at the end of the course. The given space happened to be a 70cm x 70cm table space. This is my group's submission. And as with most of my posts these days, they seem to come from snapchat. So please pardon the quality.

There's an iPod under the table playing voice messages that allude to the potential everyday problems of the people living there. It consists of:

• an iPad (imagine it's the base for projecting holographic images)
• wallpaper
• squishy floors with silver water in it (imagine walking on those!)
• a portrait painting of the home owners, and their skyline
• a map on the wall
• brochures with information about the space
• books (which are our journals)
• real flowers

Note: the cafeteria in school is a really (read: extraordinarily) bad place for an exhibition. There wasn't enough space, and the lighting was horrid. I think all of us being there was a fire hazard in itself.

There were a lot of cool stuff though! Here's some of them that I could actually take a picture/make a gif of. There were some that I couldn't even take a photo of without using the flash because it was too dark.

There was one that was pretty amazing. It was made of several layers of ice and they suspended it on string to the (upside down) table and it had stuff inside. So it was basically just melting throughout the exhibition. It looked seriously quite cool. But no pictures because it was too dark ):

And that's about all I have. Not a lot but at least still something! And here's us. Well, the girls of the group. I wasn't the only one holding alcohol in the picture okay. They just hid it a lot better than me. Also, the girl on my right is Scottish. And I picked up so much of the accent from her (it actually surprised me).

011

I was looking for things to do in Edinburgh because I'm heading up on Monday and I found this. It looks so interesting and I kind of really want to go, but it's not open yet so idk, maybe next time?

On another note, I've been told that my GIFs haven't been loading so apparently, all this while, I've been the only one who can view them, which is very strange. But nonetheless, I've transferred them to another hosting site and they should now be viewable! Thank you for telling me (:

Also, the whole of last week has been insane with the group project that we were assigned. It's about Merchant City (the previous post). I might blog about it soon. Fingers crossed I actually do.

009 | get fed | ginger chrysanthemum tea

Having a cold sucks big time. I finished boiling all the luo han guo I had with me so I had to brew something else to drink. The first time I boiled chrysanthemum tea, I didn't know how to do it and boiled it for half an hour, wondering why all the water kept evaporating so quickly (how embarrassing). But I found this recipe online and thought I'd give it a go. 1 and 1/3 cup in and I'm already feeling better. It's worth a shot if you've got a cold!

Make sure the water's very warm otherwise the rock sugar will take a while to dissolve. And here's me inhaling it for the first time (the smell helps to clear blocked nose okay - don't judge :< ), while trying not to cough my head off this pair of shoulders.

Post-post notes:

Cold cream helps too. This is my mom's go-to cold cream. She uses it for everything.
And by everything, I mean everything - from mosquito bites to rashes, to dry skin.
E v e r y t h i n g.

007 | get fed | salted egg spinach recipe

Grandma Chui taught me this recipe. And when she did, it had both century eggs and salted eggs in the dish. But these eggs are expensive here so the auntie in me decided to only use salted eggs (it turned out fine). In fact, I'm actually considering making my own salted eggs. But I digress.

Here's how to make this dish.

Before step one (the gif), crack the egg and only take out the yolk. Leave the egg white for later.

You can start to boil the water now. Salted eggs take longer than regular eggs to cook.

When the egg yolk looks more cooked, throw in the spinach.

Put the lid on the pot for a bit (not too long). Spinach cooks fast.

Now would be a good time to taste the soup. Add salt if it's not salty enough.

When the spinach looks almost done, pour in the egg white that you left aside earlier. Count to 3 at a moderate pace, then switch off the stove.

Post-post notes:

I am not numbering my gifs from now on.

I think garlic is optional for this dish. I just like to throw garlic into everything.

006

I just remember taking this photo on the way somewhere after church. But I swear I have z-e-r-o recollection of how this gif was made or how it got onto my google images.

Either way, yay, christmas is coming!

Undies all day, errday : part II : Bubble Baths

We did a lot of stuff. Mostly in the tub of the hotel actually. It’s odd, I know. But when you have a toilet like the one we had, you’d probably do the same. I’m just really thankful I have friends who so openly do things like that with me. Here’s a gif of some of the images I took. Not going to post them individually here because well, let’s just say, I want to keep this place as child friendly as possible.