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Juz someone who wants to lead an ordinary life. =)
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memories carved at the back of my brain
Thursday, April 23, 2009
easter break...
 great sunset over stockholm!
okie easter break is over and now i am back to my mundane life of a chemistry student who just started her lab =( survived 3 out of 15 labs so far and i am super overwhelmed by the chem labs they have here. its more sophisicated and they are much more persistent in the handling of the dangerous chemicals and the waste! not like we do whatever we like in the nus labs. the fumehoods are much bigger and they even put in the skrantline for nitrogen gas and gas which is so userfriendly. my lab partner is chinma, a swedish gal (who has a vietnamese mum and a chinese dad from canton so she can speak cantonese!) who is very nice and i am so glad for her. she knows a lot and craps with me sometimes. hope i will have a great time from my organometallic lab and don't suffer from any of the hazardous chemicals. (did risk analysis of EVERY chemical before every experiment and get to know that 99% of the chemicals that we use are either skin irritant, carcinogenic, tumourgenic or poisonous other than our dear water).
i took a 10 day vacation over the easter break by rushing off for my train after my lecture towards stockholm! stockholm is a very nice and beautiful city with great skies and buildings! but sadly right we kind of found it a bit disappointing with the lack of places to go other than the cathedrals and museums so we went to have a picnic ourselves! it was kind of nice picnicing next to the lake and playing lame games to finish up the food that we bought from the supermarket and it seems like picnicing is common in european countries especially now when the sun is up most of the time from 5+ am to 9pm at night. visited the vassal war vessel as well. pretty outstanding and magnificent! only vessel remaining from the 18th century and must really appreciate the effort the archeologists put in to restore the vessel.
at the icebar
at the picnic place
 vasa warship museum
after spending 3 days in stockholm we headed to helsinki, finland via a cruise! its been ages since i took a cruise with my family and this time taking a cruise with friends is so different. we travelled with a bunch of hongkong people so total there was 10 of us! we had fun taking jump shots at the sundeck and enjoying the beautiful sunset. and we spend around 70++ SGD to enjoy a wonderful buffet that is really much more worth it then the paris buffet back in singapore. or rather i think we are too deprived of food for months already lol. they had roasted meat, caviar and some weird stuff around but it was really superb! free slow of wines and beer as well. we eat and drank to our fill till the restaurant closed. and we drank at night lol. basically we were drinking every night because the alcohol in the duty free shop as well as in russia and estonia's supermarket is cheap muahaha and we played lame drinking games as well. but i wasn't drunk luckily =)
reached finland! eric's friend jason who is exchanging in finland brought us around! i love the trams that are tunneling through the city! they are small but looks cosy. finland is also the home of nokia. but sadly there wasn't any new nice models that i see and the prices are the same or more expensive than in singapore. finland looks similar to sweden! but we had a nice day walking on foot around the whole helsinki looking at places of interest. one of them was a cathedral which is built out of a cave! pretty cool and they had nice wall decorations. next was some area dedicated to some musician with many pipes made to form an art piece! passed by helsinki school of economies too and their school is really extremely small! you wouldn't even notice it if no one pointed out to you. the highlight of the day was a chinese buffet for 4 euros! we ate to our fill and was extremely satisfied with it! fried noodles, pork etc. food that we never had for months! speaking of food chinma treated me some char siew that her mum made for her today! total satisfaction! =D okie back to travel recount.
 inside the cathedral
 the pipes!
stayed only around 9 hours in helsinki which was in my opinion more than enough, then headed onto a train towards russia, moscow! on board the train we had a 4 room compartment to ourselves. i can say that russia is really very tight about their borders. the custom officers will come on board to collect our passports and our immigration card and we are not allowed to move anywhere including the toilet during that 1 hour period! we were prewarned about the
russian police and custom officers so we do feel intimated by them but luckily throughout the whole trip we never had problems with them. reach moscow the next morning and we had a 4 hours day tour around which most of us was sleeping through and we headed to our 4* hotel hotel cosmos! =) very cosy and nice hotel! BUT their hotel efficiency is lousy. they have to keep our passports for 8 hours to process our check in! 8 hours! best part was they just took out
the whole box when we collected back our passports which is super unsafe! imagine our passport being stolen! luckily nothing happened. headed to explore the red square and lenin's krelin many many times including the royal palace. its so different from the europe countries (i think we just got too bored of europe buildings and stuff) and we were pretty fascinated by it! however, there is discrimination against chinese there and we had to be on alert all the times over our belongings and our surroundings so it somehows cuts some of the fun. the sales people or counter staff always don't bother about us or throw us an ugly look but after a while we got used to it. nevertheless moscow is a nice place despite being slightly run down in some places and the bad air due to the sand on the roads.
heading to st petersburg! its more built up as compared to moscow. but we kind of feel that st petersburg was more boring than moscow. other than the winter palace, hermitage and the ford, there was nothing much to explore again except spending time in the museums again. but it was there we had our KFC and some good russian food and we watched russian ballet! russian ballet was really quite good and outstanding! watched swan lake. totally no lines, the dancers have to express themselves using their body actions and their facial expressions which was really interesting but being too tired i was nodding off during the front part of the show. we spend about 120SGD to watch the ballet in the hermitage theatre! its a once in a lifetime experience i guess =) and we stayed in park inn hotel (4*) for another night! =) i think we are too pampered haha.
  icy sceneries and i am standing on ice!
 night scenes
 scenes from the swan lake ballet and the theatre
headed to estonia via a long bus journey! spent time clearing customs in the wee hours. feel exactly the same as clearing customs when we go over to malaysia via the causeway where we had to bring everything down the bus yada yada. the custom officers are SLOW. russia is also known as the land of inefficiency. nevertheless we managed to reach tallinn, estonia! since we reached on a sunday, it was easter! the city is like totally dead and we spent around 8 hours in that place. we explored the old town of tallinn and the church tower. climbed all the way up 120m but the view was significant! and we had estonian food! i had wild boar stew in cranberry and it was superb except that it is slightly oily. the porkchop was good also as well as the hare's meat! =) headed back to stockholm on a cruise again which marks the end of a good but long trip =)
sceneries from the church tower and town
estonian food!
sunset from cruise!
from this trip i realised how handicapped i was not knowing how to speak cantonese! hanging out with a bunch of hongkong people sometimes i feel sian when i understand what they are talking about but i can't answer in cantonese. and my lab partner speaks cantonese as well which can help us bridge some gap when she sometimes don't understand my english haha. and another thing is how different the cultures in other countries could be especially in russia when it is in asia but the culture can be so different due to the different ideologies. and the discriminations against chinese made me wonder why there are such discrimations when russia themselves are considered part of asia and china is just next to them! i can understand the discriminations against asians in european cities but not the russian one. and it really does not feel good to be discriminated again. hence i am appreciating more of singapore's open culture and will try and accept people from different backgrounds and cultures more readily instead of judging them by their skin color etc.
back in lund for now till june trip! (may trip cancelled =( ) not covering eastern europe sadly but heading to italy france spain UK wales scotland switzerland in june! reaching back in singapore on 1st july! can't wait to be back! 69 days to go! =) meanwhile back to my sad life to study my organometallics and an upcoming lab report tmr =( missing everyone back there! =) and to end off with a pic.. it shows a cup noodle which i got from russia, my current alcohol collection, the pasta that i made, the passport page which showed all 3 modes of transport! train flight and car! cool eh =)
1:44 AM
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