Stepping out off the plane, Lionel claimed he could feel the water droplets in the air. Goodbye to dry, still air. Goodbye to bottles and bottles of lotions and mosturisers. Hello to baths three times a day. My hair feels like a Barbie doll's. Not the smooth silky out-of-the-box kind, but the matted and clumpy kind. I need to see a hairdresser soon. Snip snip! Yeah... I'm home.

Maybe I should add my own fair share of departure stories. Seeing that Friday was a full day of departures. I actually had nightmares on Thursday night that I wouldn't be able to finish packing on time as everything I owned was still in my room in boxes and bags and hadn't been transported to my Godma's house.

Woke up late on Friday morning and rushed to wash up and change in time to meet the Malaysian Imperial Alumni president, Dr. Foo. Quite an obvious generation gap between the bunch of us 20 year olds and the 50 something Dr. Foo. Still found out we were related by some chance. I swear my family's too interconnected to too many people.

After the meeting I practically ran back to Linstead to do my laundry and say goodbye to Jac, Jing Ye and Alex. I intended to leave for my Godma's house after my last laundry cycle but Lionel still hadn't done his laundry and was somewhere in college. Finally left for my Godma's house at 4pm to store my things. Made it back at 5.30pm... and the airport taxi was supposed to arrive at 6pm! And to add to the horrors, I hadn't packed my luggage yet!

I learnt that day that it is possible to pack both your check in bags and hand luggage in 15 minutes. In the rush I didn't really get to give room B12 the proper goodbye it deserved. (And I also left my vitamins in the fridge, but that doesn't make for a tearful departure story). B12 with it's lovely view of the gardens and it's pension for room mates moving in and out and the scent of many many summer dinners, I don't think I'm the only person who's going to miss it.

Yi Shan, our taxi scout had a bit of trouble finding the taxi. It was a good thing he didn't take the tube as orginally planned as Julian texted me reporting delays on the Picadilly line. Finally, at 6.10pm we managed to squash our gigantic pieces of luggage (ok, MY one big gigantic AND heavy bag) into the cab and we were off. Poor Lionel who had been my porter for the day was so tired he slept almost all the way to the airport, which was frustrating due to the massive jam!

At the check in counter, we cheated, as Yi Shan's friend (goodness, I still don't know her name!) was waiting for us at the front of the line. I had to unpack my 38 kg bag and transfer 4 wine bottles to Yi Shan's back pack as the new rules now state that each piece of luggage cannot be more than 32 kg. Andrew who was behind us was laughing at our many many bags and claiming that we had cut his queue. He's such an accomodating senior.

Finally we headed to the waiting area, because Yi Shan's friend just couldn't wait to shop, and we wanted to find Amar who had left earlier for his 'pre-departure rituals'. We found him sitting rather miserably on his own in screen saver mode. Apparently there hadn't been anything good on sale. Decided to make use of him and left him our bags to watch while Lionel and I walked around. Amar was quite right. There wasn't anything good to buy. So decided to board the plane.

And there we were, Lionel, me, Yi Shan and his friend, sitting in a row. Goodness knows where Amar was. He promised to visit us but he never did. Lionel and I watched Starsky and Hutch (or something like that). Quite funny. But we were so tired we pretty much slept most of the time. I didn't get my salted peanuts because of that! *pout* Yi Shan had 2 packets!

Arrived on schedule, but didn't find Amar on leaving the plane. Poor Lionel, broke his heart that Amar didn't even bother to say goodbye. ("You spend 9 months with that Mat and he didn't even stay to say goodbye!"). After finding Lionel's transit gate, I met up with Amar at baggage reclaim who argued that "Well, we'll be seeing Lionel next week, what!". Spent half an hour waiting for Yi Shan and friend to appear from the duty free shops. Still find it ironic that the first shop I see after stepping out of the aerotrain is Harrods!!! Bah! I didn't need to leave London to see that.

My brother and sister with Aunty Amy in tow were ready to eagerly greet me at the gates. However as we were loading my so very heavy bag into the car we noticed a flat tyre. So Lionel wasn't the only one hanging around KLIA for another hour! In fact by the time I finally left KLIA, Lionel was probably on the way to Singapore!

And so here I am at home. My brother has returned to Singapore. I still haven't seen my parents and won't be seeing them till this weekend. I'm officially a babysitter. I tried going out to buy some things while my sister was at school today, but the heel of my shoe broke just as I stepped out of my car (when I had just found a parking space after 3 rounds!!!). Guess I'm not meant to go jalan-jalan. Wanted to walk around the SS2 pasar malam, but couldn't find any kakis to go with me. Passed Damian's house but his car wasn't in. Where is everybody???

So what really is the excitement of being home? Feels like I'm just transiting between lives. Here's to 3 months of not knowing what to do.

Well not entirely. Lionel's coming up to KL this Saturday. I know what I'll be doing for the next week! *wink*

London's giving me the traditional send off - guiltlessly drenching me in summer showers at all hours of the day. Darn, I've already packed my umbrella. It's the ODAC rain god I tell you.

If university life has taught me one thing its that you can never predict the unpredictable. That and how to debone chicken.

Departure details have been confirmed. Departing from Heathrow this Friday at 10pm - London time. It's going to be a rather jolly plane ride with Lionel, Amar and Yi Shan on the same flight, not to mention loads of other IC Malaysians including my senior Andrew. Arriving at KLIA on Saturday, 6pm - Malaysian time. No red carpet welcome. Just my little brother and Aunty Amy. My parents will be in Singapore. Daddy's undergoing treatment at SGH. But I'll be seeing him soon and everything will be alright. Yups, daddy's little girl is coming home.

I can still be contacted on the same handphone number. Not that there will be a whole hoard of people waiting to contact me, all the same its zero-one-two-two-seven-three-three-zero-four-eight. Unfortunately I won't be able to be on call all the time. I'll be working at Gamuda during the day time and baby-sitting my little sister during the night while my parents are away.

Priority this holidays will be a little different. My little siblings come first, and my mummy and daddy who are possibly tired and haggard with all the travelling. I can't invite anyone to the house because of my dad's condition, so bear with me. If I do have any free time at all, MSoc meetings will have to be number one priority, followed by trying to make time to go down to Singapore where I will make it a point to see the TCHBS bunch and ODAC.

Till then... packing is in process. I hate stripping my room bare. It's like peeling away my own skin and leaving it unrecognisable and faceless!

Lionel just left to sit for his first paper. I hope Jacq has done the same. The poor things. Everyone else is partying like crazy and their exams haven't even begun. That's what you get for being biologists or bio-chemists or bio-medics or anything beginning with the prefix bio!

5 days more to go. I've got a bunch of stuff to do today. But baby, it's cold outside. I'm waiting for the cleaning lady to finish scrubbing the kitchen so I can peel some potatoes for lunch. Meanwhile I'll just sit here shivering. The weather's gone crazy. From a steaming 28 degrees, Mother Nature has decided to give us the cold shoulder and plunged to 15 degrees and thereabouts. My duvet has been packed up and transported to my Godma's house, so now I'm left with 1 fleece blanket and 1 thermal blanket and very very cold toes! Brrr... I want to steal Lionel's duvet because he's a natural radiator and never feels cold anyway, but I don't want him to catch a cold during exams. Damn! Choices...

Linstead's Going Down dinner was yesterday. I made a bet with Rich that I would take only an hour to get ready. I was out of my room in 45 minutes and carefully trying to climb 6 flights of stairs in my high heels to Lionel's room to fish for compliments before Amar could take me down a peg or two (I stupidly told him I was going to wear my birthday dress earlier... without thinking of the repercussions...)
Dinner was of course a dissapointment. But the pretty balloons kept me happy. There was clearly less excitement as there were many missing Linsteadians. Our own group was a rather small, only Amar, Soha, Fong May, Darren and me. And the music at the disco was all cheese! Oh well... an expected end to the year at Linstead.
Best part of the night: Rich impersonating Karim with the head of a mop under a baseball cap over his own hair!

Yesterday, Fong May, Chien Liq and I went canvassing for restaurant discounts in China town. There must be like 30 restaurants in China town. While Fong May did most of the talking, I hung around giving moral support - due to my embarrasing Chinese accent and lack of Cantonese vocabulary. (It's amazing how I understand everything everybody is saying... but the words just don't come out right!).
The three of us have also realised an obvious disadvantage amongst us. None of us speak Mandarin fluently enough. Yeah ok, go ahead and smirk and tell me off again for not trying to learn Mandarin properly off you guys. One day Lionel's just going to have to force me to speak in Mandarin.

I've got the contract in my hands right now. I've got my dream kitchen, the room with the fake fireplace and LOADS of storage space. No ensuite bathroom, but as long as the rest don't complain about my pink bathrobe, everything's fine!

Venki came to visit me today. I picked him up at South Kensington station and gave him the grand tour of Imperial College (which didn't take more than 20 minutes). I also gave him the grand tour of my room in Linstead (which wasn't very interesting) and also the grand tour of Hyde Park. We said hi to Albert on the way, in his glistening throne. Then we walked to Harrods to drool at the chocolates and sweets in the Food Hall before Venki went home. Yay! That makes a total of 2 friends from Singapore who visited me this year. I feel popular.

I don't want to jinx this, but:

We're signing the housing contract today! (*Woohoo! - Vivian style*, I don't think many would believe me if I say I have a friend who bounces around like tigger from Winnie the Pooh and frequently "woohoo"s, but I do!).

We being Yi Shan, Lu, Lu's sister Yue Shuang (Jac and I are still adamant we heard her introduce herself as Yu Wei!), Lionel and myself in one household, Jac, Vivian, Marvin and Fidel in the other. And we're going to stay in the same building! It'll be like FRIENDS.

And we're getting the most expensive apartment. It's going to cost me 100 pounds a week. But what the heck! Lionel's happy and that's priceless.

We've got 2 huge double rooms and 1 single room. And we've got a balcony! No fight for the ensuite bathroom (advantages of being the fairer sex in Imperial), and another one in the corridor. The kitchen isn't huge but it's cosy and modern looking and I had this strange vision of myself cooking in it when I stepped in yesterday even though I didn't know I'd be getting this house (I wanted the basement initially).

Well, wish me luck! I have to look for my cheque book now. I do believe I've forgotten how to write a cheque again.

Feeling much better now, thank you.

It's been a hard day.

And I'm not going to mince words. Because I'm upset. I'm upset that everyone is upset. I'm upset that people carelessly give their word without realising the consequences of it, that in the process they've caused so many people to become depressed and unhappy when the day started out so promising.

It's so easy to say "we'll find a place" and "don't worry, sure got one!". But did you ever try looking? Did you ever try worrying? Did you spend those late nights scouring online listings, visiting the accomodation office, calling landlords, emailing agents and calling everyone up one by one to get them to obligingly spend their precious time viewing the place as if its some great honour to us? And don't forget, we did all this even though we had our own unfinished revision and piles of notes in front of us. We did this so that we wouldn't be running around like headless chickens without a place to stay. We added this to our list of worries while we were sitting for our exams. We dedicated our time to trying to suit everyone's demands, and in return we got screwed over.

And I just have to ask... did anybody care about what WE wanted? Never!

And it's easy to just do nothing, isn't it? To give fleeting promises. It's all too easy these days. Your word means nothing. Sincerity is worthless. Everyone's too caught up in their own lives to care about anyone else.

I'm so pissed. F*ck off!

Everyone expects me to be a happy carefree june bug these days. It's been 5 days and counting since my last paper. But somedays when I look at the post-its on my desk, I want to cry.
Is it too much to ask for people to live up to the promises they made before accepting their responsibilities? Is it just too much to expect people to fulfil their promises which they noddingly agreed to? Or am I being to hard a task master? Perhaps I'm being overly ambitious and shouldn't expect things to be done efficiently without procrastination, day after day, week after week. It's just me isn't it?
I'm an overzealous committee member in any committee I've worked in. Before I go to sleep each night I tick off an imaginary checklist in my head, and I wake up most days with an alarming feeling that something urgent needs to be done TODAY. I can't let things rot... my heart palpitates if someone reminds me of something I haven't done. And I take on more than I can manage, always! I nag and I scold and I bug people. Sometimes it gets the job done, other times it turns things against me.
But what can I do? I cannot bear to see things fall to shambles, knowing that I know how to make it happen. You may not like me for it, but I WILL make it happen. I won't be Miss Popularity any time soon for it. It'll be a thankless job. But you are so darn right!

I'll do it anyway because that's just me.

What swear word are you?
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I must be the only EEE/ISE first year who's not in a post-exam high. Honestly I don't really feel any different today than I did while still in the midst of exams. Alex say's it's because I was too slack throught them. He might actually be right.
So while everyone was at Ministry of Sound getting wasted, me being my usual anti-social self went straight home right after exams and started filing all my notes since Lionel was at the A*Star dinner. By dinner time I had completed 2 terms worth of notes. And by the time Lionel came back from dinner I had filed all my past year papers, lab reports and courseworks and was just about to take a nap.
But instead of a nap, Lionel came up with the brilliant suggestion of watching the last Friends episode I had been denying myself for ages! Went over to Jac's room to confisticate her entire 10 seasons of Friends from her (btw, if you're reading this Jac, you ought to be studying!!!), remembered that my CD player wasn't working, so went up to Lionel's room instead to watch it and promptly fell asleep after that. Didn't realise I was THAT tired as I didn't wake up till the sun was peeking in through the windows.
After dragging myself out of bed, I managed to catch hold of Lu to help me carry stuff back from Diana's (the ex Msoc secretary) flat. It took half an hour to reach Diana's flat and probably longer walking back with 4 plastic bags of stuff! And the lack of exercise after 5 weeks of studying was really punishing! Ran a few errands on the way back which included picking up a bottle of shower gel for Lionel. Bodyshop has discontinued the grape seed line (much to Lionel's dissapointment) so I picked up a melon seed one following Lu's discretion from a selection of strawberry, papaya, mango, coconut and brazil nut (Amar says he would have picked mango! G--)
Reached Linstead to find there had been a fire alarm... on polling day! What with Linstead being a polling station and all. Sabotage, I tell you! Then hurried off to college to pass a backpack back to Zeus, picked up 2 paninis for lunch (no not for myself alone!! For Lionel too... I'm not THAT piggish!) and back to Linstead again... feeling highly accomplished for having run so many errands in one morning alone.
I think the effort of it all just got to me, as I fell asleep in Lionel's room after wolfing down my panini. I can't stand my room anymore. The still air and all 23 degrees of heat is unbearable. Lionel's room on the other hand is the proud owner of a desk fan! Sometime while I was sleeping, one of the spanish cleaners knocked on Lionel's door and handed him a parcel with Amazon printed all over it! Yippee! Our books had arrived. Which included Alex's scouting for boys by Sir Baden Powell. Incredibly dodgy title when you think about it. An old man like Sir Baden Powell writing a book on how to scout for young boys and where to find them... *cough cough*
Another fire alarm later (this one smelt of char kway teow! Oh damn... now I'm feeling hungry), and a phone call to mum and a much needed second bath (honestly it's hard to survive a day in this heat without at least 2 baths!), all of us traipsed over to the Main Dining Hall in college for dinner, as our Linstead dining room was still full of voters. What a sight! Everyone's allowed to vote. Even us! And I haven't even voted in my own country yet. How ironic!
After our usual dose of Simpsons, I started to tidy up the dinner accounts and do laundry simultaneously. Panicked for a moment when they didn't seem to balance. But after a few thorough checks everything balanced perfectly! I'm so proud of myself and my rusty accounting skills! Although we haven't really worked out how much each of us has to pay for Carla (Amar's birthday present... go figure!) and the alcohol of which there is still enough to try and get Amar wasted again.
Wrote 2 Brownsea postcards to my brother. Flipped through some of the holiday photos Lionel wants me to sort out. And now I think I'll finish reading my new book before going to sleep.
It's been a long day...

Charlotte's brain status - on long hiatus!
(For those who question it ever being there anyway, well f- ...nevermind)

Exams are finally over. I can now look forward to sorting out Msoc stuff, sorting out accounts, sorting out next years accomodation. I don't need to sort out my notes. I already did that first thing after my last paper yesterday.

In Germany a shallot is known as Schalotte. In Spain it's Chalote, in Denmark it's Skalotte løg, in France it's Échalote and in Sweden it's Schalottenlök.
Now I understand how easy it is for particular friends of Lionel to mistake me for a small purple onion.

Credits to Alex for surfing upon : Shallot.com

p/s: Amar, you are still not forgiven for using Shallot instead of Charlotte just because it's in your sms dictionary and is 2 letters less to key into your phone pad!

When the temperature rises above 25 degrees here, all things seem to come to a halt. Today is a sweltering 27 degrees and I'm sitting here like a hippo, looking for ways to keep cool. I can't be expected to understand caches in this heat! Tomorrow will be 29 degrees and I think it's possible my brain might just melt and ooze out from my ears.
One last papers to go. In two parts. Principles of Computers and Operating Systems. While the triple E's will be done by 12 noon and whizzing around like crazy june bugs I will have to hold out till 5pm. Then come back and rearrange my room and start bugging a few selected people - namely the MSoc Committee.

I've learnt my lesson this time. No more sleeping after dinner. Especially not after gorging too much of Amar's fantastic tandoori chicken with dhal and naan (with half the required amount of ghee - Lu threw it away when Amar wasn't looking. Way to go, Lu!)
As usual I crawled under my duvet while everyone was still chatting in my room after dinner and fell asleep... even after Alex's threats that I'd grow fat. Lionel woke me up at 1am, which was probably a good thing because I felt a horrible surge of indigestion just well up inside me.
After several toilet trips and detoxing tea and ENO... I think I've paid my price for gluttony and pure laziness. I'm kicking the sleep-eat-sleep routine.
Or at least I'll try...

Certain crazy caucasians outside my window are serenading me to sleep with Tenacious D's F*ck Her Gently. Not sure that should be the last thing on my mind before tomorrow's digital paper. Unless it's an omen of tomorrow's exam.

psst!

I'm not supposed to be here. I have another 4 more papers to go, which include the very horrific Circuits module.

I just got up from a lousy nap. Lousy because I couldn't really sleep. Too many things on my mind. The more I tried to push them out, the more other thoughts came rushing in to fill the vacuum.

I worry way too much. I'm worried I won't know how to answer a single circuits question on Monday. I'm worried we won't be able to find a venue to hold the Fresher's camp. I'm worried the camp won't be interesting enough, or they won't be interested in our ice breakers or listening to us talk about MNite or Imperial or London. I'm worried about whether the other committee members are as worried as me about the camp. I'm worried about how the video Chien Liq and Chris are going to produce will turn out. I'm worried about not being able to get enough funds for the camp. I'm worried logistics will be problematic. I'm worried we won't be able to bring back enough stuff to sell for the Pasar Malam. I'm worried about next year's housing and who's going to live with who. I'm worried I won't have enough time to sort everything out before going home.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.