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!!!!!!!!

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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.

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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.


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My breakfast last sunday: Prawn noodles. YUMMMMM.