Day 62

I believed the entry yesterday left off with me saying that I was going to bed even before 10pm. It was by far the earliest time I went to bed, but also the shortest night I had so far. Woke up at 1am, drank some water, fb-ed a little and tried to go back to sleep. Unfortunately, that never materialised as I stayed awake throughout the night, and still managed to make it to the library to study till 1pm.

Must have been the daylight saving, save my head, feels more like daylight distortion. Let's see if I will have a good night's rest today.

The sun was fantastic today, went to Dappermarkt to shop. The human traffic seemed heavier than usual given that everyone came out to soak up abit of that sunshine. Walking on the street in just a pullover, on top of just 3 hours of sleep, everything felt dreamier than usual. The sight of flowers, the smell of fried fish, the sounds of barking dogs felt surreal. The couple of times I crossed the road to go over to the other side of the Dappermarkt almost resulted in accidents as I was really not looking at where I was walking. And you know you are tired when you know you just need to get porkribs, but spend one hour walking aimlessly up and down the market 3 times over. But I just love the market, everything about it.

Spent the night washing clothes, and finally tidying that wardrobe of mine which has been messy and ugly for 2 good months.




I consider this to be of a high standard, neat and organised. I never bothered myself with arranging my clothes at home, since the maid always does it for me. Yes, I know I've been a spoilt child for long enough. Its the seemingly tedious process of washing, drying, folding, hanging of clothes that my maid does day in, day out. But I believe I have learnt how to do all these very well myself too. Heh. I also realised there are too many jackets/pullovers/sweaters/jumpers in the closet now. An inventory check revealed that I have bought 3 from Zara, 2 from London, and my favourite Man United one, on top of the 2 coats from Zara, 6 I brought over from Singapore, that makes 14 pieces of warm clothes that will find a nice spot in my home to collect dust in another 3 months. Getting them back will be another challenge altogether. Hurraf.

However, my table is still pretty messy, I guess I'll leave it as it is until I come back from Italy.




Peter came back from his holiday, and yes its nice once again to have a chit-chat buddy around the room.


The shelf meant for books, but is now storage for some of the most random collection of buys I've made here, or brought over from Singapore.

Decided to personalise the room abit more, considering I've met friends in PHK who brought their entire shelves of CD collection, guitars and hi-fi sets to be placed in their rooms. All I did was to put up this very nice flag.



Yes Man United flag pinned onto the wall with normal tacks.



Apparently I've assumed that all along, walls are so strong that pins cannot go through them. Peter dispelled this assumption in the seconds he took to get the flag up.







I think my room now looks awfully awesome. I could stay in the whole day and not go anywhere. (though it will be stupid to do so) Just like how I put a fish tank in hall 13 the last semester, these kind of small little things add little personal touches to my personal space.

All right, off to bed. Really tired already. The nicely covered bed is waving at me now. Hahahaha.

Day 60 - 61

Day 60

I slept the whole of yesterday morning away, given that I had played my pokemon platinum until 3-4am in the morning. (I didn't check the time on my watch, couldn't be bothered too) Woke up at 1pm, bummed around in the room for a while before making lunch at 3pm. It was a weird time to have lunch, since we had curry chicken beehoon for dinner at 6pm. In between this 3 hours, I went to Chinatown to get the beehoon, and the sight of hundreds of Dutch and Scottish soccer fans, draped in striking orange costumes, or the scottish skirts packed the streets! It was the World Cup qualifer which was to be played in the Ajax stadium. I could imagine how it would have been like when Netherlands hosted the 2004 Euro, must have been crazy!!

Party at the Canadians' place was good. Nice crowd and we explored another part of Amsterdam, some good 30 minutes bicycle ride away. Drank quite a bit, and I thought I was drunk when I saw different times on my computer and my watch. Apparently, its already spring now, so the times in Europe have been advanced an hour, so now the day is supposedly longer. They call it Daylight saving, and for that few hours that I was trying to figure out whether my watch was spoilt, there was this utter sense of bewilderness. So right now Amsterdam is just 6 hours behind Singapore!




Day 61

Woke up at 12pm, or rather 1pm, washed up and went for the pimp-my-bike session! I found my favourite orange paint, it was the only can, but alas, it was only half full. Thanks to that, my orange bike is now only half orange! The rest of the bike has been splashed with other colours, which only means its really one of its kind! hahaha.


The bicycle, made by this brand called Multi-cycle, now comes in a limited multi-colour edition. Orange, Red, Yellow, Lime, Blue and White, complete with a sign-off by the artist. Hahaha.

And this is what happens when daylight saving is in place. The picture below was taken from Seb's room at 7:45pm.


Look at how bright the sun is, still.

20 minutes later, at 8:00pm. I left and along the way, the sun was only about to set. It sure is one of the most beautiful evening/night sky I have seen thus far.











I think its the fresh paint, it makes my bike look new and bright. Made my day too! All right, it is 9pm now, I know its still early, but I am going to try and wake up early tomorrow, so I can try to go to the library early to study. Haha will update again probably next week.

Day 58-59

Dear all,

Its been another 2 uneventful days of trying to study, though it proved fairly futile. Being on an exchange really does feel like an extended holiday, so much so that the primary objective of clearing AUs towards obtaining the degree has become an unwelcome burden. Then again, as much as we all like to complain, an important fact that remains is that for all the fun we are having, trying to pass some modules which would have been way more demanding if we did them in NTU sounds like a fair bargain, which anyone in the right frame of mind would take any day.

Started studying last weekend, there are 22 chapters of the textbook, and since they said every chapter will be tested, it was taken that the whole book had to be read. Then again, who will?! Tried to cover around 3 chapters per day but it was really more like skimming through, spotting possible questions and trying to remember the truckload of technical terms used throughout the book. Frankly speaking, a marketing textbook is the perfect specimen of the very subject itself. You just have to sound profoundly sophisticated, present yourself well and impress your target audience. If marketing has taught me anything, it has been summarised in this previous sentence.

Anyway, I do believe I have put in effort in studying, because whenever I do, my appeitite increases ten-fold. Statistical evidence to support this claim:


3 fried drumsticks..


2 packets of Myojo instant noodles which look deceivingly little..


Drumsticky noodles. Anyway this was for lunch on Monday which I forgot to post.

Lunch yesterday was similiar, with Myojo-noodles rationing in place, spaghetti pasta was called in as a replacement in a similar dish of dark-sauce chicken wing noodles.




The pasta looks like the yellow noodles back home eh? Less starchy but alot more chewy. Inferior but acceptable substitute.

I think friends should know too well the bad eating and sleeping habits you reluctantly get into during the exam period. Well my eating was indeed irregular, eating too little at times and excessively overeating at others, not including the apple rounds, stroopwafels, chocolate, potato chips and the chocolatey chocolate milk I feast on in between, you probably expect an overweight gh very soon.

Eating aside, I had no problem sleeping. Studying for a pass means that my mind has been automatically switched to the 'not-so-hardworking' mode. I don't cram as much things as I ought to, since there will be this voice in my head telling me 'oh you probably don't need to know this, oh and maybe that too.' I go to bed knowing that I had enough studying and I really sleep soundly till the morning. (unlike the nightmarish 3 back-to-back papers I had last semester, with some 4-5 hour sleeps at night only to continue cramming when you wake up. Fear induced from within is a powerful force)



Day 59

Woke up at 9 in the morning to do some final revision, cooked lunch and met some of the girls in my class to go for the exam. The funny thing about exams here are that the location of the exam can be somewhere like a 20 minutes train away. That was what happened today, and I had to spend an additional S$4 on transport, oh well.

Haha, would also like to share the experience of taking an examination here in Amsterdam. First, everyone arrives at the exam location looking like they're going out after the paper. Everyone's fashionable as usual, and there were a few people I met pulling their trolley luggage or backpacks, probably leaving for some holiday right after the paper. Others strolled in with a bagful of snacks and drinks, which would make one think twice about whether that guy was there for a picnic or for an exam. It was free seating, unlike the numbers we would get beforehand in NTU. The invigilators were more like people who just passed down the exam scripts and they hardly walked around. It seemed to me that they place great faith in the university students, that we will not cheat, and follow law by law, so to speak. The chief invigilator's instructions which alternate between Dutch and English made me feel like I was standing at the Jurong East MRT Interchange with the safety instructions given in the 4 languages. Hilarious.

The paper wasn't that difficult. 50 MCQs which took less than an hour to complete, I am fairly confident I will pass it, despite already spotting 5 mistakes. Hope it doesn't get many more than that. I just need to get 25 correct. Well in the event I don't *touchwood*, then I'll have to forgo my last day of June and go for the resit. I admit, that if effort is strongly correlated to results, then it will be a given that my results will be 25/50, plus minus 2 or 3 which also means failure. I know this will make all those friends back in school fume, but preparing for this paper made me felt like I was back in my secondary school days, where I will always study only the night right before the test/exam, and still score fairly decently. University is very much different, you won't be able to pull off this kind of miracle, and close allies should know too well that I do get cranky during the exam period in the semesters in NTU. Then again, this examination may not be such a good gauge, since its an MCQ-only paper. I shall reserve my judgement until the European Economics paper next friday is over.

All right, so much about the boring chanting of examinations, will use the fact that the library isn't opened on weekends as excuse for not studying. Still contemplating if we will go for parties this weekend, 1 each on saturday and sunday. If not, I will spend time trying to better my liquor tolerance. Since our arrival 2 months ago, (YES IT'S BEEN 2 MONTHS! GASP), I've been always telling Seb that I will get my beers and start drinking. We were on that topic again and I realise that if I do not start to drink more often, I will not get too much chances to drink cheaper beer back home.





24 300ml bottles for less than 12 euros, which translate to approximately S$0.90 per bottle. I know, spending the same amount of money buying Coke which will give me higher utility would sound like the better thing to do, but the opportunity cost of not drinking the beer now would mean I will pay much more back at home. We'll see how many beers I can drink from now till July. I know I won't become an alcoholic, I just want to be that irrational consumer who is attempting a temporary change in preference of goods. Hahaha. All right, will update again soon! Take care meanwhile.

Day 56 - 57

Nothing much done these 2 days except reading that marketing text. Reading it like a storybook.. omg how much more serious can I get???

Anyway I am addicted to this video and I seriously think it will be awesome to do some dance in front of some nice European landmarks, though I will most likely be ostracised in the process!



Apparently the star in this commercial became famous before this ad. He did his own funny dance in his previous travels, some company paid him to do it in more countries, before Visa came knocking on his door to do it on this latest one!

Check out his blog at http://wherethehellismatt.typepad.com

He also blogged about Singapore, from an interesting and humorous perspective
http://wherethehellismatt.typepad.com/blog/singapore/


(Click on it and watch it in HD, its much nicer)

And there's the other video he did in '08, featuring 42 countries spanned over 14 months. Just about the thing to put a smile on anyone's face, and the realisation that no other day job in the world is cooler than what he does.

Day 55

Yes my resolution for the day didn't turn out as well as I expected. Even as I type this entry, my marketing notes are still sitting in the same position as of yesterday. I need to embrace it soon! Then again, something from my email just made my day, and should prove sufficient to be the catalyst to kick start the rest of the day.



Wahahaha Mission Zheng My Bike. I want the fierce orange kind! Just when I thought where I could find orange spray paint, here on sunday I'll be able to do it! Hopefully there will be enough orange paint for my trusty bicycle.

Hurraf to PHK RAs!

Day 48 - 54

Hello readers, its been another good week here in Amsterdam, its day 54 of my European adventure so far, and here are some highlights.

Day 48

The Internet at PHK (short for Prins Henrikkade aka my housing) was down for maintenance, couldn't serve the web for the day but it was all right anyway since there was a trip to the Zoo! Well before that, I managed to find another 2 chinese shops selling my fix of chinese food/ingredients/condiments at cheaper prices! Hurraf to market competition! But then again I was running out of time to visit the zoo so I didn't buy anything.

The Artis zoo is a nice place! Located just 3 minutes by bike from my place, it is also equidistant from the university and my house. I cycle past it everyday but it was the first time I was going in! Our RAs organised a trip there with a volunteer showing us around the zoo, and the best thing was the trip was free! Tourists would have to pay like S$38 to get in, while with a UvA student card each trip is only S$5! Haha I could go to the zoo as and when I want! Anyway some nice pictures.



My neighbours.












Heart-shape ass. haha
















I find this picture uniquely artistic. Don't ask me why.


The volunteer showing us the kitchen where they prepare the food for animals.


Elephant teeth that weighs 4 kilos.

Saw 2 kids playing under the sun also! Couldn't help but take a few photos of them having fun!








They spotted me taking photos of them, so they started posing! Adorable!

As much as I had liked to stay in the zoo for a while more, I had to head back to prepare dinner for the gang who was going to go Lulea and we ate early. I'll definitely be going back again since its cheap to go as a UvA student!

The night ended with me trying to prepare the speech for the presentation, but I seemed to spend more time looking at cheap air tickets and places to go to!



Day 49

Presentation was okay, much better than the one last week. It was over in 20 minutes, and thanks to it I had to miss the skiing trip! Well then again I think one week for me to study for my exams is also something good, instead of having fun and feeling the guilt of not studying for the paper (though I think I am still not studying as diligently as I ought to! hahaha)

Borrel at the Heffer was good, it was St. Patrick's day so there was a more canival-ish mood with quite a few individuals decked in green! I spotted a green striped long sleeve with my green adidas watch too so to join in the fun!



Day 50

Attended the last Marketing seminar which also marked the final lesson in this first 7 weeks at UvA. I have every reason to believe that there is such a thing called time warp, 7 weeks don't pass quicker than this! Wanted to go catch a Uefa game at the pub, but they didn't show the Ajax game, so well no go. A normal and boring day by the usual fun Amsterdam standards.



Day 51

Was disciplined enough to go to the library to study 3 chapters of my European Economics textbook. No way I'm going to spend S$100 to buy a textbook to read in the comforts of my hostel when I know I won't do it. The thing about studying in the library is you got to wake up early if not you won't get a seat, and the book might probably be taken by someone else.

Went to the market as well to get some stuff for dinner, and invited the friends I made at Sarphati over for dinner. Went on to drink and chill in the room till half past four in the morning, so ended up sleeping late on friday.



Day 52

My study plan day 2 ended in epic failure fashion, no way I was going to study in the library when I woke up at 2pm, and when it was going to close at 4pm. So went to the chinatown shop to get my sauces, and then to Lidl for some other cheap drinks and snacks. Spent the night trying to study my marketing, but as usual spent some much time looking for cheap air tickets to go places! (lego, lego, lego, lego, lego) Did one of the past year marketing paper, got half the questions right without reading the book yet, thus this false sense of security that I will pass the module without studying! BUT there should be no room for complacency! The questions they ask can come from ANYWHERE IN THE BOOK, even in the chapter introduction page! What the heck really.



Day 53

The Hague, house of the parliment and all those important government organisations, was a nice little city to visit. Approximately an hour from Amsterdam, it had this really nice stretch of trees along this classy, old town sand road which made a lovely walk! It was helped much by the beautiful weather and the old castle-like buildings were just awesome. However, my nice little SD card slipped off my mind again when I needed it in my camera. So yea the lack of those beautiful photos! Though I am certain that I will go again! Managed to get 2 group photos of the NTU NBS girls and other friends from Thailand off fb.


Notice the neat row of trees grown along the road.


In front of this beautiful castle-like structure (not too sure if it was a castle) that is surrounded by a huge body of water, didn't know if pond/river/lake would fit the description. The Prime Minister's office is around that corner too.

Visited the Escher museum too. Maurits Cornelis Escher was one of the earliest and probably most well known graphic artist to have come out with some of the most fancinating and mind-boogling art pieces! While I had earlier dismissed the museum tour when we went in, the tour got progressively interesting, and there were really many times that the vision he had when he made those paintings just amazed me!

You can check out his countless, amazing artpieces by googling the images. His webby is worthy of a click too! http://www.mcescher.com/
P.S. Jinping if you are reading this you should really look at his art works! I think you may like it! Interesting and inspiring! Haha














The most famous artwork of his I guess, since it was hung right outside the museum entrance, and I swear I felt the greatest dejavu looking at it for the first time. I just couldn't explain how, what, why I was feeling it, but yea I just had this strange sensation of seeing it and yet not knowing who painted it. Now I do.

After lunch (which was more like afternoon tea since it was a 200ml bottle of coke and a pure cheeseburger, yes cheese"without-beef-patty"burger),a guided city tour followed. The tour guide was this gentle, grandfatherly figure who spoke at a pace which was one of the slowest I've heard in a long time. I can't help to say this, but if he ever made it as a NTU lecturer, he'd probably take one semester to finish one chapter of the module given 2 hours. HAHAHA. But still, he's very knowledgable, as expected of a tour guide, with this cool book of pictures/photos in his pocket showing the different highlights in the city. And now I know why the Netherlands is sometimes called Holland. To give a summary of what the tour guide spent a good 10 minutes elaborating.. Holland was the most powerful, influential province of ancident Netherlands, and it is the area which emcompasses the modern day Netherlands of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Haarlem. This is why the Netherlands is sometimes conveniently called Holland, regardless of how incorrect it may actually sound geographically. Interesting, no?

The tour ended by 4, and some of the ISN organisers brought us to the beach. It's the first beach I stepped onto European soil. And boy its superb! Alicia realised she had brought along an extra card for me to take some photos!


Shopping mall that oversees the beach!


An extended structure with shops indoors, and a roof walkway which leads all the way out in the sea! (note these 2 photos show the same structure, its just too long to be taken in a single shot)




The brightest and warmest sun thus far. People love to come out to the beach, or just crowding outdoor coffeshops to get their share of such weather.


Note that everyone wears jeans and jackets to the beach. A heat stroke will ensue if you attempt such a thing in Sentosa.






I could send this photo for some advertising ad of 'pro-family' campaigns. Hahaha.


Too tired to attempt the long walk down the beach with no end in sight, the smartest thing to do was to nap! The sand wasn't too cold, the breeze felt like air-conditioning at 24 degrees, and my clothes felt no different from pyjamas! I'd probably spend 2-3 hours sleeping my fill if we didn't have to catch the bus back to Amsterdam!

Wonderful wonderful weather to go to the beach. I've heard much about beaches in Spain and Italy too, wonder how this matches up with the rest. But given the weather and everything, this one's a winner right now! Definitely coming back again soon!!



Day 54

Nothing much too constructive done today. Skyping, msning, eating, sleeping. Then dinner with the NBS girls and trying to read up on more marketing, though it has proved fairly unsuccessful. My resolution for day 55 (which is already into its first hour as I type this) will be to wake up, attempt french toast, study, study and study. I am hopeful that it will work out.




Yes and so that sums up Week 7 of my stay here in Europe. Like I mentioned, there is absolutely no slightest indication that its SEVEN weeks since we've been here. Life's certainly too enjoyable to be zooming past at this speed right now. I know week 8 and 9 will undermine this previous sentence, but I'm sure it will not turn out too badly! Expect another update in another week, take care meanwhile!!