Just a ride

Do you remember the first time you rode a bicycle?

I can vividly recollect a zealous younger me zipping around the neighbourhood (where I couldn't tell the difference between this road and that street) practicing pure peddling on my 4-wheel spanking new bike (with ribbons at the side and a basket in front).

Not long after, came the nasty, no longer cute 2-wheel bike - which at 7 years old seemed like a sign from my parents that I had reached the peak of my maturity. It was no easy feat, the 2-wheel bike. I remember all the white lies my Dad told everytime I bit my lip nervously and mentally psyched myself to cycle off, "Don't worry I'm holding the back of the bike", and when I turned my head, he was like 5 metres behind nodding proudly.

Thanks Dad for the scares and teaching me how to ride a bicycle, now at least it gives me the privilege of waking up another good 25-30mins later as opposed to if I had walked to school! Bicycles here are like the main mode of transport that they even paved out designated cycling lanes on the road in a maroon'ish colour!

Thanks Cake for kindly selling us the 20 euro bikes. I'm still retaining the name Lucy, while Poh came up with a new name for his bike its called "The Stups Bike", because it gave him several problems on the first day. haha. Don't worry, I'll take good care of Lucy :p

Ps: Brandon and Dad, when I return, we Must go cycling again, lets show Jalan Rindu how its really done- the Lee way.

Below are some photos of when Poh & I had a doubs date with Lucy and The Stups bike:
boons & weims, nabs and kams, lams and shaun...don't JEALS!



xoxo

perspective into hall life. part 1

As most of you guys know, we stay pretty near campus at a place called the UM Guesthouse which is like a 10-12min bike ride to school and city centre. Well, this is probably the first time in my life that i get to experience what 'hall life' is all about; basically in my opinion, its sad. I am glad i dont need to experience something like this long term well for me its just 4-5 months but i can foresee the long term detrimental effects it will have on me.

The most important basic skill you need to survive down here is probably know how to cook a decent meal as you will always be confronted by the option to cook in and save the money. On our first night here, lee thohir and i headed down a really nice place for dinner, the bill amounted to 60 euros so it was around 20 euros per person. It was a good meal no doubt, but as budget students especially asians, we cant finance this sort of lifestyle for a long time with no steady income. Okay, back to the cooking essentials, well we went out to buy some groceries and all excited, but i was soon horrified when lee sheepishly informed me that she would not be participating in any cooking due to inexperience. I was left stunned for a moment but i assured her that i could do the cooking as i had some experience back in camp and during some apparent dinner i made for a girl which will always haunt me. Eventually after consulting google and numerous eHowtodoit.com sites, i successfully whipped up breakfast which involved cooking eggs; let me inform how technical frying an egg can be for a newbie, 1st is to avoid cracking the egg too forcefully and the white just slimes down your hands and also shells should be avoided after cracking! and 2ndly, its important that the yolk stays in shape throughout the cooking as you dont want half cooked yolk and raw yolk in a pathetic sunny side up. I cooked some swedish meatballs yes, its pretty simple and for dinner it was boiling sausages for the communal dinner!

Wah, the communal dinners have been awesome thanks to the other singaporeans. Let me attach some photos here.

Well, its been awesome cooking from our singaporean friends and these people are pretty serious about their cooking that they sent up their sauces, spices, shit etc a month in advanced. Lee and i sometimes feeled pressured when they ask what we can offer each night, thats simply because our novice cooking standards pale in comparisons with the thousand jumping Buddhas soup they cook, the hainanese chicken rice they cook and also just tonight, the special traditional porkchop.. basically in such situations, and they probably know that we can only provide what i call the 'Super Sideshow" dishes, sideshow because its not the main course but its super because you need it in a full meal. haha I am just glad the budget meals we cook were snapped up pretty quick during dinner.

Anyway i am hoping to be able to cook some corn beef hash soon so please stick around for some once its done. Its 12.11am now and there's school tomorrow, would be interesting to see how it goes. More about Hall life the next time.

Poh.

four days and still so surreal

Happy 18th month anniversary Poh!

Can't imagine being here with anybody else (:
(would prefer it though if you could please cut down on the "shagg", "tired", and "sleep". I hate wet blanks haha thanks!!)

Our 14 hour flight from Singapore - Amsterdam

Who can spot Poh and I at the Schipol Airport during our 3 hour transit?

Finally, we're at the Maastricht Aachen Airport

(yes, people I'm in Maas'ish not Ams'ish)

Shopping in Maastricht City Centre

xoxo, Lee

It only takes a spark to get the fire burning

Hello everyone! :)

Before I embark on this exciting journey ahead, I think I deserve to emo a bit & reminisce on all the good times that took place during jam/gem-packed January. Whoever was there to spend my pre-Maastricht month with me back home, thank YOU for taking the time. I'll miss sharing stories & hearing resounding laughter anywhere anytime of the day – hanks panks in bangs, nights of revelry, GGW shenanigans, chill out Japanese riverside dinners, Vcorp gatherings, KFC buckets, water sibling catch-ups, female cousins’ only activities, bowling tournaments, music appreciation nights at inks, revving to guitar hero rock 'n' roll, photo(whoring) sessions, DVD nights, all the supps, poker faces, gorging local hawker food like nobody's business, Melben shimmery crab outings, filling-the-Samsonite-to-the-brim sessions together... Basically everything that both you and I know would be physically impossible to relive Together for the next 5.5 months, I'm glad we got to experience during the month of January :)

These memories really do help keep me warm in this cold dry weather.

Thank you for everything :)

xoxo

Fun facts about holland

Hello everybody!! :) Honestly, I've never had a blog before and even just being the co-author of this blog, it gives me great pressure to write my FIRST official blog post ever! So this is how I plan it to be. I decided my first post will be a "did you know" (ge kiang act factual only) trivia styled one just to get YOUR feet wet and hopefully allow you to get a taste of the dutch culture which P-sters and I will be immersed in during the most formative time of our lives at Universiteit Maastricht.

-Puts on BBC newscaster voice-

Besides Heineken, G-Star, ING Group, Shell, the Anne Frank diary and Vincent Van Gogh amongst others, what else do you know about the Dutch??

Well, not too long ago when Poh and I were bored waiting in queue at the Netherlands Embassy in Singapore, I picked up this orange little handbook about life and study in holland kindly provided by nuffic.nl which I found pretty interesting:

-The dutch are statistically the tallest people in the world
-The Netherlands was one of the European Union's founding nations
-There are 16 million bicycles in Holland, which is about one for every inhabitant
-The highest point in Holland is 323 metres high and is called a 'mountain'. It is situated on the border with Belgium and Germany in one of the more remote parts of the country
-You'll find a bunch of flowers in almost every living room
-People of 200 nationalities live in Amsterdam
-When your plane arrives in Schipol, it lands 4.5metres below sea level
-The Netherlands has one of the youngest populations in the EU
-The International Court of Justice sits at the Peace Palace in The Hague
-Some of the major cities of the world were once Dutch: New York (USA), Colombo (Sri Lanka), Recife (Brazil) and Jakarta (Indonesia)
-One in every three Dutch people are members of a sports club
-With almost 1,000 museums, Holland has the highest museum density in the world
-The first World Press Photo Exhibition was held in Holland
Those are facts which can be read off most Holland tourist information books.

What Poh and I will try our best to provide you on this blog will be OUR Dutch experience from a Singaporean perspective.

A shoutout to everyone back home, you know who you are! Stay tuned! :)

xoxo, GG ( heh jokes)

hello folks.

Apologies for the delay in getting this blog up, had so much to deal with the last couple of days which included tall dutch people, good looking dutch people, frantically searching for some asian delights and just pretty much procrastination which Lee can swear to that. Anyway's hows CNY? well i guess this years Hong Bao's income will take a hammering for me as i was forced to leave a day before the celebrations. However, i tried my best to indulge some form of CNY customs by 1st finding a nice chinese small mini-mart and buying a little plate of chinese noodles which she claimed was for CNY, so i bought it for a nice 2 euros and ate it by while i walked proudly around the city streets showing off my yellow noodles to the rest of Maastricht. Thohir and Lee were by my side, both refusing to participate in my little world of celebrations, but after a while Lee couldnt resist the aroma of the random yellow noodles. After that we all headed to a nice pub/restaurant for our first proper dutch meal and it cost us each a whopping 20euros. At that point in that time, i gave up converting the euros and sing dollars but just told myself to just wack if necessary and pray maybe the ECB lower the rates.

Oh back to the CNY, so when we returned back to the hostel, we were kindly invited to celebrate CNY with the other Singaporeans here which included Chian from SMU. The other singaporeans were from NTU and NUS and they had really whipped up some good food that night, i cant remember what but all i remembered was the after dinner drinking sessions. The amount of alcohol brought up was insane and maybe because everyone was showing off their cheap alcohol the just bought in the supermarkets. All except for Thohir's original johnny walker or what it is. So we all sat in a round circle and played random drinking games. I learnt one thing, never let a Korean be the game master! There was Korean dude called Shaun next to me and he was running the show with tons of drinking games and he loved to just drink johnny walkers and beer straight and everyone was quite impressed by his ability to drink so much and also coordinate / explain drinking games. Eventually he got tired and the hk dude next to him started to introduce more games. So it was just games games drink drink and as usual Poh got red but towards the later part of the games he got stronger as the others wilted in the complicated numbers and hand -eye coordination games. We all left around 12am and went to our individual rooms to rest for the night.

Anyways, its like 7.51am now and its called Jetlagged and its been like this the past 3 nights, Lee's happily sleeping. I do random things like watch Rihanna's videos, google maps my locations, watch jackass2.5 when i am bored. I feel like going for a run now at 1degrees outside, yesterday it was like 5 degrees, and i was so hot under my jacket i decided to remove my jacket and walk around in my t-shirt, you should have seen the stares i got from everyone wondering what the hell this wacked asian tryin' to do .