Disappointing and disappointed

A reminder that knowing and understanding are 2 different things..

wtfffff..

Grrrrr..

Damn freaking irritated..

My internet just keep discounting, and i cant talk to the supplier in peace..

So i cant buy my things..

ANGRY!!

Mosquitoes!

The mosquitoes are horrible, they are devilish..

They buzz around your ears while you are sleeping and bite you like helll..


Hate them!

My feets are breakingggg..

Just because i went out for 4 hours in heelss.. omgg..

Stressed

Haven been so stressed before..

200SGD for: 5 pairs of shoes/sandals, 6 more formal dresses, 7 casual tops/dresses and 8 bagss..

Should i buy or not?

OMGG...

I guess..

We have been taking things for granted..

It takes two to clap..

The silence will not last for long..

How how how??

Saw like 5 sandals that i like yesterday..

Today saw another like a dozen bagsssss that i like..

Can i buy a few more and promise myself not to buy a bag in singapore for the next 1 year?

Sounds reasonable right? A bag in singapore will allow me to buy 5 bags here.. So i can choose 5 or maybe 10?? hahahahaha

Kang Kong!

Finally found it..

Cooked sambal kangkong today!! Not as nice as those in singapore but still quite okay..

2 more months to singapore food!!

Taobao

TAOBAO is AMAZING!!

Other than the fact that they have EVERYTHING in there (including 旺旺 and 生煎包).

They are also very organised and efficient (for most).

Most but not all of our things have arrived, some are not even sent out yet!!

But the thing it, the progress of the parcel is very detailed and updated that we can easily check where is the parcel at the moment.

Thats how we find out that Sharon's bag is taking a tour in Beijing.

Ebay is NOWHERE near them.

And they work such that, after we made payment, the supplier will deliver the item, only after we confirm that we received the item will the supplier receive their money. So less worries about being cheated!!

Keeping my fingers crossed that they do delivery on Sundays!!

Shopping!

Wooooohoooooo!

As of now, my 3 sandals, 1 bag, 2 skirt and 1 top have arrived!

Half more to go!!

You drew the line..

I will toe it..

Tireddd

Feeling very tired lately.. Think haven't been sleeping well lately..

Alot of things in my mind, been too busyy..

Things to be done:

1. My IA report.
2. My 2000 word chinese essay, 2 of it (ultimate killer)
3. Plan for my trips, xinjiang and zhangjiajie, and book air tickets as soon as possible
4. My experiments, very hard to make progress. The ventilation in my lab keep spoiling and once that happens i cannot do experiment. And i can only run 1 experiment at a time becuase people keep stealing my thingss. Worst thing, each experiment takes 2 days.
5. My company monthly report.
6. The worst one, produce 10g of the compound for my boss within 2 weeks. SHIT.

No wonder i can't sleep well, the only time that i can really concuss is when i am on the bus..

Spring

It never came..

Since we came we have been waiting for spring to come, because we cannot stand the coldness..

But when we left for beijing it was still pretty cold (~10 degrees), definitely not spring temperature..

When we came back the temperature is ~27 degree, is summer time!! Which i like..

But where is spring?? Have it been forgotten??

Chicken Head

Yes, chicken head..

Sharon is crazy. We want to cook some herbal chicken soup, so we bought a whole chicken. We wanted to cook it a bit tonight so that it will be nicer for tomorrow's dinner.

She took out the chicken and found the chicken head is still attached. After screaming, she pluck out the chicken head and went around scaring people.

She made Hedi come out of the toilet when she want to shit just to scare her.

We came out with a plan though, to hang it outside HER door. Yes, lynette, she totally deserve it.

XinJiang!!

Finally the details is more or less confirm, we will spend 10days there. Skipping Urumqi, the capital of xinjiang, our target will be the legendery Kanas Lake and Turpan.

And the most exciting thing is! We will be hiking for 7days straight to Kanas Lake! A distance of 65km.

We are kind of crazy. Sharon and i have been wanting to carry out our plan of bringing a tent with us when we travel and camp overnight wherever we think suitable.

Here's the plan:

Day 1: From Urumqi take an overnight bus at 8pm to Buerqin.

Day 2: Take a 2.5h car ride to Jiadengyu. Start hiking from there to Hemu. Over there we will stay at a frame house for the night.

Day 3: We will head to Hemu Kampong. Along the way we will go through, pine forest-covered 1300M-high mountain, the Bulalehan Bridge, bank of kanas river and Hemu river. A distance of about 18km. And we will camp overnight on a meadow!



Day 4: Will be a 4-6hours, 15km hike to Hemu. Will hike by Hemu River, a Brich forest and cross the Hemu bridge. Will get to feel the local life of nomadic Tuwa people and Kazakhs (no idea who are they) and will camp outside again!



Day 5: Will hike about 20km for 8-10hours to the Black Lake. According to the instructions, supposed to reach a valley and wriggle our way for about 15km and ascend a 2350M high Daban. Will camp overnight at Little Black Lake.



Day 6: Climb over a 2200M ridge to reach Kanas Village. Will then pass through a dense pine forest and finally reach the magnificent Kanas Lake. About 4-5hours and 15km distance. We will get to stay in a Yurt!!



Day 7: Will go around Kanas Lake!



7 days and we are only spending 2 nights in a proper accomodation. Think Donghong was kind of stun by us being overly excited about camping out. haha..



The pace of the hiking seem to be set at a leisure pace, so we probably will try to go faster and complete the hike faster so that we got more time for elsewhere!



After this we will head to Urumqi and finally Turpan! At the Turpan, there is the 火岩山, the one in 西游记. The ground temperature there is like 80 degrees. Always thought those places are fake.



Haha, cant wait for time to fly pass!!

Staying home sunday

I love staying home sundays, just relax and laze around, watch my xin guang etc..

I will be cooking tomorrow's lunch and sharon will cook dinner..

My lunch menu will be:

1. Sliced pork with shredded ginger
2. Minced meat with bitter gourd

haha, i suddenly got cravings for the first dish and sharon got cravings for bitter gourd, so ya..

Can't wait!

Grocery shopping!

Just came back..

So fun, my damage is 200+RMB! So expensive..

But next week's menu is:

1. Bak Ku Teh
2. White fungus dessert soup
3. Herbal Chicken Soup
4. Sweet potato porridge

Woohooooooooooooo......

Cooking!

Its pretty fun to try to come out with a dish with whatever random leftover ingredients in the fridge.

The fridge was only left with lots of lemons, a bit of veggie, 1 potato and spring onions.

Don't know what to cook but the first thing that came to my mind was 怱油餅. So since i have the time, i shall try it.

The outcome?

I can only say that, my cooking is not usually so bad..

Ooopss..

Ohhhhh..

Forgot to mention, we did not eat a single instant noodle on this trip! Which is a huge achievement because we always eat them on loongg train ridesss.

On the return trip, we bought like 1kg of strawberries, about 1kg of cherry tomatoes and 3 cucumber. Why the cucumber? Because we always see the chinese eating them, so we decided to try too.

What we did in Beijing..

Cant really remember exactly what we did, because by the last day we were really just anyhow finding a place to go.

Stomach wasnt feeling well since i was on the train to Beijing. Which sucks, because i didnt really get to fully enjoy the food there.

Took the T104 train to beijing. The train was packed! Really packed, worst than the time when we go Xi'an in CNY. But this time managed to sleep much more than that time.

We arrived around 11am, and went to the hostel. After going through all the checks in the underpasses, we went to Tiananmen which is filled with people. And GuGong, but after going in for awhile, i went back to hostel to rest, too not feeling well.

Slept alot. Really alot.

Was slightly better the next day. Second day, we went to a flea market somewhere. Didnt know what else to do, we went to the Qinghua university here. Lastly, to the 798 art district.

Third day was the highlight. We went to JinShanLing! Woooooo, we super cheapo. What we heard from the others was that, there is not public bus there, so need to book car. BUT, we found a bus that goes there! Which of course is cheaper. We super proud of ourselves. But we still super cheapo. After we alight from the public bus, there is still a 4km distance to the entrance. We were offered a 10RMB ride in for the 3 of us. BUT the cheapo us, refused to take the car, we decided to walk in. Under the HOT sun and before we are going to climb the 10km great wall which we were given ample warning by the guys that will cause cramps.

So we walked in. And climbed JinShanLing, part of it we have to climb with hands as well because it is not restored. Thats the beauty of the place. The other touristy part of the great wall are restored which means they are not exactly the original structure of the Great Wall. We walked from JinShanLing to SiMaTai. At SiMaTai, the great wall are mainly restored which is ugly. Took 4hours to walk the distance, not including the 40mins we took to walked the 4km beforehand. And the weather was super hot, maybe not as hot as singapore but still about 32degrees, got so much tanner after that.

On the last day, we were really anyhow whack place to go. Went to the bird nest, just took picture outside because we didnt want to spend 100RMB to go in. After that we decided to hop into a public bus and see where it bring us to.

Did not go to any fantastic place. Oh, i forgot to mention, Beijing have those trees that release cotton like things, so they look like snow flying around. It looks nice, but horrible to be in, because it makes the itchy nose even more itchy.

Anyway, at night we went to night market and i bought my PANDA. My panda~~

hahahaa, but the night market sells all kind of food. Like live scorpion to starfish to goat stomach to HUGE strawberries! The last one is my favourite of course.

The next day we took our train back to Shanghai. Was totally dreading the ride because we got no seats. Means we need to stand for 10h. BUT we went in very early and planted ourselves on the floor of the cafeteria. We really just plant oursleves there and made ourselves very comfortable, even more comfortable than the heat seat as we got leg room. hahaha..

And Home Sweet Home...

Beijinggggg!!

Frankly speaking, i don't really like Beijing.

Not that it is really that bad. Beijng as compared to Shanghai, have the cultural feel in it. The buildings are nice, those older kind of designs and the people are friendly and nicer too. The things are cheap too!

Almost everything there is cheaper than Shanghai! The train is only 2RMB no matter where you go and the bus rides are only 1RMB, that if you do not have their transport card, if you do there will be 40%. The starting price for the transport in Shanghai is already twice that price.

Other than these points, i can't think of other reason i would choose Beijing over Shanghai to stay in.

Had a bad first impression of Beijing.

From the train station we were going to take their metro to our hostel. Then, we saw a looonggg queue, not 1 but 2. The first is to buy the train tickets, the second is to go into the station.

Not only that, when we were making around, we realised Beijing uses mainly underpass at major crossing. Not that it is bad, especially in China's dangerous driving conditions, it is actually safer. But the thing is, in the underpass, there are lots of security checkssss, so we have to undergo security checkss just to cross the road. Very dumb. I would be more understanding if this is happening in Shanghai, there is the World Expo after all, so there have to ACT like they are checking even though the people behide the machines are just dozing off. But it is Beijing, and the last i heard, the olympics was over 2 years ago.

On top of that, they have a wonderful way of crowd control. Our hostel is located near a metro station (Qianmen Station) which is near the tiananmen (but there is another Tiananmen station). Because it is the labour day weekend and China people love going to Tiananmen during this kind of holidays and they expect a HUGE crowd there. The best solution they can come out with to curb the huge crowd? Close the MRT station. They shut down the Qianmen station for 3 days. Thanks.

Not forgetting that Beijing air is HORRIBLE. Considering that i do not have a sensitive nose, means that it is really BAD. From the first day i arrive, my nose start to itch non-stop till i leave. And the air there is very dry, so the inside of the nose tend to bleed a little, which makes it worst.

Other than JinShanLing (Great Wall), i am not interested in the other attractions. All the different temples or gardens and can you believe it, the universities there are actually an attraction. It was filled with China people and there are actually people queuing to go in. WTH..