in budapest

After spending 3 nights in swit, i am now in budapest! Just reached a few hours ago. My hostel is a little place in the middle of some buildings, and the train ride to get here was a nightmare. The trains in budapest are seriously the worst I have ever seen. Old, creeky, and there were bus conductors EVERYWHERE.

now reading up about thehistory here andstuff.:)

LOL. The edison chen scandal is so big, it was even reported in french newspapers.

Wonder what the french must be thinking. Its either "wow, chinese people so crazy" or "quoi!? What's so big about this?"

Will be leaving tomorrow. Bye guys!

stade de gerland

845PM: manchester united vs olympique lyonnaise!

I will be going to stade de gerland later to soak up the atmosphere later. Havent had luck in buying the tickets though. oh well.

YAY!!!!!!!!

***

Ok I am back!!!

I have made another life time resolution: TO Watch Man U at old trafford after I start working and have the $$$$ to buy the tickets.


Yuvraj with his match day banner.

I didn't buy the tickets because they were sooo expensive. Instead, we were standing next to the entrance of the stade soaking in the atmosphere. And I tell you, even from outside, you can really really feel the excitement!!! We saw the stadium benches shaking because the OL fans were jumping away and chanting "qui ne saute pas n'est pas lyonnais" (whoever doesn't jump isn't lyonnais).

Outside the stadium, there were loads of riot police. Most of the riot police were stationed near the away side of the stadium. There were some fights, and the police had to break them up. I was amused when I heard one french dude commenting "there are police in lyon?" Guess they only appear during soccer matches.


We saw people trying to climb in, and the guards and dogs chasing them. Exciting.

The english fans were quite rowdy. In the metro, we could identify the english fans the moment they stepped in the train. They were talking loudly and drinking. There was also one drunk dude who was swinging a wine bottle in the train and saying "algerians".

Outside the stadium, I could smell vomit while walking at the Away side of the stadium. Gross. Quite a pity, as I used to think English people were quite proper people who drink tea and knit.

We watched the match till half time at the OL shop, next to the stadium. It's quite funny to watch a match on tv that is going on just meters away from you. I will try to catch an OL match here before I return to sg.

****
I hate to say this, but the french are REALLY REALLY good with maths. They can do expansions easily, they can do inverse matrices in 1 line (when we write 15 lines to solve it), lagrange multipliers, dot product cross product blabla. Its like 1 + 1 to them lah! When I see things like that, I always think to myself "yes... I have seen this stuff.... like 2 years ago?"

They can also remember stuff like melting points of certain materials, yield stresses of materials. The lecturers are amazing too; they don't need to bring anything to class, and just teach from memory with no references. They can remember horrible formulas and numbers.

It's only now that we realize (the hard way) that our education in sg has only taught us one thing: how to pass exams. And that's why we are all suffering now.

Teachers here pose questions to the students every lecture. Teachers in sg feed students with solutions and tell them "study here here here to do well for exams". And in sg, when you dunno how to do tutorials, you can always refer to lecture notes because there will be a similar example there. Not possible here; my lecture notes are all about concept, and we've to figure out how to apply on our own. It's craaaaaaaaap man.


***

My breakfast last sunday: Prawn noodles. YUMMMMM.

perouge!

Perouge is a little town accessible 30 minutes by train from lyon. When i mean little, I really mean little. There are only 80 people living in perouge. We got off at meximieux and walked to perouge.

Nice flowers. Europe has nice roadside flowers. Nicer than the bouganvillas we see in sg. -___-


View of Perouge. Perouge is on top of a hill, and there were no maps at the gare, so we had to ask for directions to the town.


Perouge is a medieval town, and all the buildings are made of rocks.


Some prince's garden.


Church in perouge.


This is a famous square in Perouge, because it's illuminated in the day by the sun. The people there used to worship the sun.


Sun dial. It reads: Je ne te marque roi que l'heures des beaux jours.


Some well.


One of the entrances.




Sheeps.


Another well.



This is one of the specialities of Perouge- the galette.


Yang fang and wanqing with their galettes.
We bought a piece each for 1 euro/piece and it was really good. I loved it, and we were planning to get a big galette, but we didn't in the end.


This is the shop where we bought the galette. It's just a bakery inside, and you have to knock on the window and ask for a piece of galette to buy.


Corns hanging from someone's roof.

We finished perouge in about 1 hour, so we made our way down to meximieux.



Cathedral in meximieux.

We went to find the chateau there...



we walked up another hill, and when we got there, we found out we couldn't get in because the chateau has been converted into a private night club. BAH!!!!!!

We then went over to the cimetiere (cemetery)

Over here, you can buy a plot of land, and you and your entire family will be buried in the piece of land together. Very different from singapore, where you buy a little box and a selection of your remains will be kept there, haha.


We had a picnic at the cimetiere because there was grass and a good view of perouge. Nice.


***

Ok, I'm getting lazy to blog because I've got too many things to settle. Will be going to swiss on friday (lucerne, lausanne and geneva), berlin on monday, and budapest on thursday.

***
Jay chou's birthday.


We surprised Jay chou on his birthday (14/2) with a birthday cake, and loads of balloons.


:)

Ok, last but not least, a picture of my yummy dinner on sunday night.

My first beef dish was quite a success. Could have been better with some beef sauce.

pictures from kane

Kane just uploaded some pictures, so I downloaded some and posted them here. :)

On my first weekend in Lyon. knowing that we didnt have the time to shop and cook during the weekend, Kane cooked for us.

me, ben, fengxue.
Yummy Pasta with mom's secret soup. There are no canned campbell soups here. Instead, people buy soup that is packed in a packet and just heat it up.

CNY "dinner"- in the canteen, as usual. See my fork with carrots? Well, that was our lao-hei, using a bowl of salad. Sad right. We were throwing the carrots around and saying things like "恭喜发财，万事如意，年年有余 etc". I bet the french at the next table must have been thinking "crazy asians".

Shen han, me, fengxue, jaychou, heqi.


Shenhan's farewell dinner:


The starter.


Me and my main-seafood platter.


Girls! He qi, Fengxue, me.


group photo at hotel de ville. From left: me, Jaychou, heqi, fengxue, shenhan, kane.

Ramblings

The BAD: My first week has just passed. Well, work-wise, things ended up worse than I expected. I went through my linear systems tutorial in which I emerged learning nothing. I found out that it was not so much linear systems mathematics, but more of engineering management.

The GOOD:

- One of my lab partner (I have 2 lab partners) sat beside me before the lecture after the tutorial started and taught me everything that went on during the tutorial. Thanks to her, I understood the entire 2 hour tutorial in 5 minutes. She even tried to explain some stuff in english, and did some translation for me during the lecture.

The cream of the cake was, she even photo-copied her linear systems tutorial for me the next day, for free. I was so incredibly touched, can?! To think I couldn't contribute much for my lab, yet she helped me out so much. Where in the world can you find people nicer than that?!

When I came to france, I never ever expected anyone to go out of the way to make me feel welcomed here because that is something did in Singapore. Plus, I didn't hear many good things about France before I came, so I wasn't expecting much.

- One of the modules, Material Science, is just a repeat of christina lim's module last semester. This means one less module to study for.


DAY before Valentine's day:

Liren was quite disappointed to hear that Valentine's day here is... just another day. Seriously. I didn't see any exchange of flowers here, nor any balloons or anything. The only thing that was going on in the grand resto here was by organized by some "eat less meat" movement. They were standing at the door of the resto and asking people to eat from the vege line instead.

Haha, having a kiss named after them (french kiss) doesn't necessarily mean that france and french are the most romantic people in the world.:P

I spent the night before valentine's day playing poker in KFET with flo, matt, jean, gigi and sonic.

My chips. It was my first time playing poker, and I think I did pretty well. I ended up in the final two in both games. The first game ended up with sudden death because we were too slow. I had 3 pairs while my opponent (sonic) had 2 pairs. But I lost because there is no such thing as 3 pairs, and sonic's 2nd pair was bigger than mine. :(

I lost the second game because I was tired to play and did a "all in".


Nanard the postman.

Vday post later!

crepe party!

URGENT PLEAD FOR HELP.

ANYONE TAKING LINEAR SYSTEMS OR MECHANICS OF SOLIDS FOR TEs please please please send me your nus notes in soft copy. I will bring back chocolates for you in return.


I had linear systems tutorial today and I understood nothing, so please send those notes!

And I just looked at the NUS mechanics of machines notes... and they are nothing like mine here. My mechanics of machines involves: studying moving planes, courbes planes, mecanismes articules (movement of joints), and mechanics of cams. All mathematics.

merci.

***

There was a crepe party last night, which i will touch on later.

First, some random photos!

This is what breakfast looks like. I initially found it very difficult to drink from a BOWL. The french like to put coffee or chocolate in a bowl and dip their bread in it. I tried it but didn't fancy eating soggy bread.


My church here - movement de pentecote.


The congregation.


Someone's door covered with post-its with birthday greetings. Whoever did it must be damn free. There were even post-its in the lift. So the whole world knew whose birthday it was.




I cooked black sauce chicken with porridge. LOOKS YUMMY RIGHT? It was fantastic. I am getting really good at this.

Some pictures from a dinner I had on Friday night at a restaurant. YES RESTAURANT.woo!

Studying the menu. It was so difficult to decide what to eat because everything was so expensive. Like, sg prices but in EUROS.


The teaser before the meal, which was free. It tasted AMAZING.


The main. I ordered a fish platter which was really small but tasted real good and cost 14 euros (28 SGD). I was inspired to cook salmon this weekend after eating the salmon in the fish platter. Really sweet and juicy.


CREPE FETE!
There was a crepe fete last night for exchange students and gatecrashers. Prior to last night, I have never ever eaten a crepe. Yes, I have been living in France for over one month now but I have never eaten crepe. WHY? Because crepe costs 2 freaking euros outside.

Crepe. It is like cold roti prata.


There was a little group of french playing traditional french music. French music is more soothing than Brazilian music. Very folk-music-ish.

We met another french who has been to singapore for exchange at ntu. Somehow all the french people I've met who did exchange in Singapore LOVE it there. This dude, Remi, could speak singlish, with the "lah, lor, leh"s all in the corrrect place. "Like that ONE", "walao". In fact, he found us because he overhead our accent and he said he loves the singaporean accent.

Anyway, he taught us how to do the traditional french dance to go with the music.

Derryn and Remi (the french dude) dancing.


CReeeepeeeee.


Crappy me with crepe. To be honest, I don't know why but I didn't like Crepe. I thought I would like it since I love roti prata, but I guess the taste is very different.


Remi eating creme off a knife. He was spraying creme into his mouth. We were asking if all french people spray creme in their mouths when they are hungry.