Curry This, Curry That

Curry chicken, curry lady’s finger, curry fish, curry tofu..oh there seems to be something different..*peers at plate*. I was wrong. The Chinese styled cabbage dish was garnished with chopped chili. How surprising. I would never have guessed that it would be spicy as well.

The weird thing with this Indian cafeteria in my university is that they have a section for vegetarians and non-vegetarians. They put both sets of dishes side by side and a staff will be stationed there to serve us the dishes scold us when we take too many pieces of chicken. Not like I want to take more than one anyway, *pukes*. If we take a piece of something from the vegetarian dishes, we won’t be allowed to take something else from the non-vegetarian side. How sad is that? Imagine the sadness I felt when I took some weird lump of protein(or something that pretended to be protein, at least) and wanted to take the curry chicken as well but was stopped by the staff. I only had the weird lump of protein-wannabe and white rice for dinner. It’s been like that for the past few days. Nothing here is edible enough for me. The food is so spicy until it turns bitter in my mouth when I swirl it around my tongue, trying to see what’s my maximum spicy food withstanding ability. I nearly had to rush to the toilet to regurgitate, okay? It’d THAT bad. I’m sorry, I’m not your average Malaysian.

Besides the hostel food, the beds that have been given to us is pretty bad as well. Other than that, everything’s fine. My toilet is bigger than the one I have at home and we have a cleaner who comes and clean the house every week! The bed’s a back stabber. The cheapskates among us are thinking about getting ply woods to put beneath the mattress and the rest are thinking about going to good ol?Tesco to buy extra mattresses.

Other than that, I’m managing well! Been washing my own clothes which is not too bad and have only ruined ONE piece of white clothing article and melted the labels on my three quarter pants with the iron.. but really, other than that, I’m fine. I did buy 2kg worth of langsat from Tesco for RM2.00 and when I went home, I found out that the other 1kg was probably because of the white fungus growing on it. So I learnt something: Not everything that is cheap is good. *hangs head down in shame*. I need fruits badly, need to shit more often you know?

About the human beings here, it’s a blast really. Almost everyone communicates with everyone. (What do you expect, the Bachelor Of Dental Surgery course in AIMST only has 42 students.) Nobody is putting a shy facade because most of us are, ahem, adults. Everyone of us can go to the cinemas and watch 18-SX movies together. Sorry lah, small girl coming into big world ma which is why I tend to make these type of revelations from time to time.

My dentistry lecturers are from the UK and their English is obviously the Queen’s English with a very heavy English accent. It’ll take time for me to get used to it. Where else, my bioscience lecturers are native Indians and Oh My God, I will need to buy a voice recorder and play it back in slow-mo. But buying a voice recorder seems like a good idea as well! I will be able to have an entire collection of lectures and maybe I can make money by supplying it to my juniors. Yes, yes, that will be very good.

We’re damn high tech(or maybe it’s just my jakun-ness) lor. After every Powerpoint presentation by the lecturers(every lecture is done by Power Point, sorry, I’m jakun.), we’ll approach the lecturers with our pen drives and if we’re lucky we’ll get a copy of their presentation which really helps. I’m hoping to turn into a nerd. It’s either turning into a nerd or burning my dad’s money.

So yeah, I actually spent 2 and a half hours in the library making notes for NEXT WEEK’S lectures. Do you hate me yet? Or is this normal? At least I hope this attitude carries on for the next 5 years.

In the 2nd year we will be able to learn basic dental techniques and by the third year we’ll be attending to patients already. How cool is that?! I will be sticking my hands into someone’s mouth legally at the age of 20. Whoo hoo!

Some of you may be glad to know that I’m learning mandarin here from my housemates. If I can’t beat them, I should at least join them. 🙂 It was like this in National Service and I thought in three months I could at least pick up something. Besides, I have 5 years here so I thought I should be able to converse properly in mandarin! I can actually reply them in full sentences!

I wanted to surprise this guy called Ah Thong from Perlis with my new found mandarin skills. I asked him, “Ni yau sui cheau ma?”(You want to sleep?) instead of asking him if he wants to go home. He jumped back in shock because we are not close enough to talk about ‘sleeping’? Very embarrassing leh. Later he think I am suggesting that we sleep together. Then my housemates regret teaching me the mandarin word for breasts. “Wo de sheung hen ta!”(My breast damn big!). I guess you can say I’m being myself here..you know, my typical hamsap self. Ehehe. And my housemates are very amused and disgusted at the same time. It’s good that I can entertain lorh.

We will be having a mooncake festival mini gathering among the four hostel homes. In the entire AIMST, we’re the only ones who stay so far away from the university because they put the new students in a different housing area. So wel be like dungus walking around with lanterns. Future dentists walking around and playing lanterns. Very impressive.

Back in Taylor’s College, there were evangelists lurking around almost every corner in SS15, ever ready to jump at you to read strange verses from their Christian-ey flyers together-gether under the hot sun. That’s one of the ways to get me into ultra rude bitch mode.

Just today, a couple of evangelists were passing out surveys to be filled up.

The first question was:

Do you know that there are three parts in a human man?

First box: Yes. Second Box: No Third Box: Don’t know.

How about a forth box? Something with a tag that says, “I effin’ hate pushy religious people, go far far away.” Notice how I’m refraining from cursing though it’s very appropriate to? Religion’s a sensitive issue. But even in Kedah we have these people giving you Christians a bad name.

I really wanted to crumple and tear the survey form in front of their faces but I didn’t because that would’ve been irrationally rude. But really lorh, my first reaction was to crumple it in my hands when I read the first question. Hate pushy Christians. Please, I love my Christian friends but the moment any of you invite me to your events and functions, you can never get a satisfying answer from me. I tend to like close my ears and go, “La..la..La?”. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to offend but it’s just the way I was brought up. I’m sorry.

Transportation here’s a bitch! Some of the kids here have cars but it’s not good to take advantage of people right? Asked dad if I can have a bicycle here but he says, “You’re worked so hard to get to where you are, so why do you keep putting yourself in dangerous situations?”

Mmm. Mmm. Yes lah, dad, yes lah.

So I borrow Jimmy and Steven’s(my coursemates) mountain bikes(RM220 only!) to cycle to the shops which is like miles away. It’ll be quite a sight for the residents here because you don’t usually see girls my age riding bicycles around. It’s usually young primary school kids, right? I’m like an old woman who doesn’t know she’s old, some sort of eternal youth thing going on in my head. *back aching from the bicycle ride*

Like Lishen said, our lifestyle has been reversed by ten years. We got so excited when we saw primary school kids playing kites in the field and we were yearning to get one. When an ice cream truck passed by, we clutched on to each other and screamed, “ice cream!!!!!!”. Want to go anywhere also must take bus/cycle?so folks, you know that vehicle parked in your garden? Yeah, use it. APPRECIATE IT.