Come back to the village with us on the 12th of March.  

ditto... 

I can't upload a coloured version, I don't know why...so here I present to you, Of Bunga Raya's and Coconuts! Come home to the village this Spring... 

Take the Test! 

Take the Test!  

I'm freezing my little butt off here. Lionel says my butt isn't altogether that little, but that's not the point. The point is that the temperature has decided to dive into the deep end of the freaking ice pool in mid February! Just 2 weeks ago I was so delighted to see daffodils blooming again to mark the beginning of spring... but NO! You cruel, cruel February winds had to crush their delicate little stalks and force them to crouch, pitifully, head down towards the ground.

What's wrong with you February? Can't you at least snow angelically to make up for it?

In accordance to Lionel's 'I will not celebrate Valentine's Day because it is a commercial and expensive affair' I stayed home on the 14th, and instead of a celebration of couple-hood, Lionel and I cooked a nice all-british beef steak dinner for the Flat 1 household. Tis a far better thing to do for others... as Cher would say on Clueless.

My schedule is in shambles. The pressure is on overcook. My msn nick says 'This is a slow and painful way to die' which has caused much alarm from quite a few MSoc people. If you can't guess why I'm slowly dying, take a look at the other committee members and see if you will notice our tempers getting hotter, see if you recognise the depravity of sleep, see if you can pick out our trembling fear...

Less than a month left. One coursework due 2 days before M-nite. One compiler to program 3 days after M-nite. One literature exam to sit for 5 days after M-nite. I am doomed! Really I am!

To quote Fidel:
"Brussels and mussels... hey, that rhymes!"

Without being my usual cynical self, one weekend is too much time to spend in Brussels. There has to be more to the mussels and waffles and chocolates! (No complaints about the mussels though... I had close to 2kgs worth!) The home to the EU and NATO headquarters is surprisingly a subtly charming little cobblestone and gothic inspired town. (And I mean gothic as in 16th century architecture, not gothic as in Ozzy Osbourne). Lionel and I wandered around (in rain, sleet and hail) for two days without a proper map (the only one we had was in Dutch!) and after about 5 hours of walking, we had covered almost every touristy thing there was to do, including paying the little peeing boy, Mannekin Pis, a visit... three times! By the end of Saturday we were such experts on Brussels, we were giving other European tourists directions to the little Bronze statue (who must be dreadfully cold now that they've taken away his little costume).

Brussels is so small, we managed to bump into Fidel, Raymond, Manda and Khairiah twice! At the same spot! Belgian restaurant owners around the Grand Plaza are also the freakiest thing, as we discovered. These guys beat the Petaling Street peddlers at being completely in your face hands down! It's a good thing the schweeeet mussels totally make up for it. Also I hear that the chocolates are the best part of Brussels. I wouldn't know. I still don't like chocolates. But the displays were really pretty. And the chocolate strawberries and waffles were yummilicious. The more I think of it, the more Brussels becomes symbolic of all the best aphrodisiacs.

Our 4 star hotel was probably part of the attraction too. The best part of it for Lionel was TV (I know it sounds jakun, but we live without a TV in London!) and being able to watch BBC and football highlights. The best part for me was being right in the centre of museums galore! But we didn't enter a single one. Nope! We were for most of the day, stuck at the Grand Plaza exploring every single road and alleyway until we could map out the city ourselves!

In fact we got so good at it, we walked all the way from the Grand Plaza back to the Eurostar train station pretty much by instinct. I wasn't all too happy walking about some dodgy areas and what looked like Edgware road slums, but you just can't get lost in Brussels. And we managed to get into the shade of the station before the weather turned crazy and started sleeting like mad! To add to the excitement, Lionel had to leave his camera at Brussels immigration... which thankfully Fidel managed to pick up since he was leaving 4 hours later than us.

Now we're just waiting for Fidel to bring the camera home.

I can't stand writing this presentation for tomorrow. Stupid group project!

Just passing by to say...

Happy Year of the Rooster! Every year got fish! 1000 success!

And that Wednesday's steamboat was a really tasty way to start the new year. I must say I hate all the work that's involved in preparing the steamboat, but watching everyone tuck in after a day of preparation is all good!

Back to my presentation slides. Off to Brussels tomorrow. CL has given me a mission to find the female Manneken Pis.

And just for the heck of it... a Confucius saying for the new KFC year...

Confucius, he say - Man who put rooster in freezer get stiff cock but woman who pounce on dead rooster go down on limp cock

If you were the all true engineer type, you might be tempted to plot a graph of my blogging frequency against time and notice a consistent lapse of blogdation during times of impending coursework doom-dates (I find deadlines much too gentle a word).

This time my excuse is the second year EEE Group Project. Do you know what I love about Group Projects? It's actually fun to be researching a topic completely out of your course (in my case - legislation on electronic privacy rights in the UK and US affecting e-commerce, workplace privacy and medical privacy). Do you know what else I love about Group Projects? Nothing else!

I celebrated the end of my group project by attending the SingSoc Chinese New Year dinner and making a tiramisu cake - which was devoured by my housemates and Fidel in a day and a half. My second attempt at making another tiramisu to replace the one the almost instantly vanished was rather poor. When they say too many cooks spoil the broth, the were soooo right! In this case, Lionel, Lu and Fidel taking turns to beat eggs and whip cream resulted in what looked and tasted like egg mayo. Luckily the chocolate cheese cake I made first turned out nicely (like a gigantic chocolate chip cookie in a mixing bowl!), but I'm never letting the guys help me make tiramisu again. Lu tried making meringues out of the leftover eggwhites. Even that strangely failed.

Did I mention I've finally put to rest the M-nite script? Save for a few touch-ups here and there, it's finished! Thus after putting so much blood and sweat into it, not to mention the many nights dreaming that M-nite had only a handful of an audience and I always turned up after the show (which stank!) was over... I think it's only fair that you grace this year's Imperial College Malaysian Night. Script-writing may seem like a trivial task, but script-writing for IC's Malaysian Night (which is a one of a kind!) isn't just about writing dialogue nor story-telling. The times I had to envision how one scene melts into another as smoothly as possible, entrances and exits which didn't clash, the settings and the ability for props to build the stage, using the talents we had to the maximum, trying to fit dances in, songs, stunts, not to mention trying out several witty jokes on people before I picked the best one to put in (thank God I live in a nut-house with a stand-up comedian wannabe... and the crazy boyfriend who wants to read what I'm writing over my shoulder!), I don't think I knew what I was dealing with when I first started!

So, the point of all this is - come for Malaysian Night! All of you! Wherever you are! And only Maggie gets a free ticket for bringing me a stubbornly hard-to-find textbook from India.

By the way, I chose Brussels!