HEY! Haha, finally got time to update the blog here. Most of the time it's just laziness though. However, just finished a CS homework that is due today at 11:59pm so at least that's out of the way.
I just got back from a Broadway Musical, "The Lion King." IT was AWESOME. It was quite good, the best of all? I got to see it for a total of $0! FREE! This is thanks to my friend Natasha and her prof for being so nice and giving away his extra ticket for free. Of course also thanks to Sam for letting me sit in his car there and back.
It a great show. The effects were awesome and the singing was good. Would recommend to everybody to try to catch it if they can.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
To continue the story
Okay! So now I have a bit more time again to update and add onto what my last post gave.
However, I'm a bit LAZY so basically I'm going to shoot through what happened a bit faster since I don't wanna spend toooooo long on this. So since I tagged along with the people who are moving into their new "home" for the next two years or so I had a chance to go to IKEA.
Since I'm staying in their house for free, I feel obligated to help out as well so I went to help them shop. Basically they were there for the whole day. My friend sort of went crazy there and bought things like whole beds, tables, book shelves, and rugs. Anyways, they spent in a range of $350 (the guy who was the most thrifty) and $1000 (the guy who got a great bed, it's really awesome, but the bed's about half of that total cost.) Hui Ting spent almost $900. The number's quite large for me personally =__+;; but then again they are going to live there for 2 years.
NOW, the problem isn't that the things were expensive.... but it's that they bought A LOT OF SHIT! And we only hav ONE truck.... ONE! Even if its a freaking TITAN, but TITANS aren't big enough to carry 4 people's BEDS in one trip! And guess what.... IT STARTED RAINING!
Oh yes... and Weiyi happened to have bought a mattress base at Salvation Army prior to coming to IKEA... so it got drenched... XD that part's funny cuz he wanted to save some money... he kinda poked a hole in it after like 5 minutes of getting it so he's kinda pissed off about that. NOW it rains... so it's drenched and got thrown away in the end.
ANYWAYS, so it RAINED... the f***ed up part is that IKEA had no loading area that's COVERED! HOW OUTRAGEOUS is THAT?!?! So we had to load the truck in the rain... when it's like 0-1 degrees Celsius... and by that time it's already like 8pm! It was like hell...
So I helped them load the truck with them in the rain. It was FREEZING! Good thing the coat dad gave was water-proof. Since we couldn't do it all in one trip, we had to load some and leave some back and let me tell you, the stuff are FREAKING HEAVY!
I went with the truck to help carry the stuff into the house, 3 stories.... heavy as hell.... and raining... During the ride, the windshield fogged up... so we had no choice but to lower the window and turned on the aircon so the fog would disappear, we didn't have time to find the de-fog button so we drove like that both trips, it was crazy. I admire Andy for driving in that cold.
Anyways, that night was like hell, just that it was really really cold, lol. Good experience, but never wanna do that ever again. My back ached after that.
So that was the trip to IKEA. Now onto less depressing things.
Now I just finished the first week of school. The professors here are extremely good and teach extremely well. Some courses are damn hard and I have no idea what the hell they are talking about, but hey, my grades don't count XD so I don't have to worry that much. I'd just have to pass.
Food here is extremely expensive and tastes like shit, so that's the bad part. The cheapest meal I can get on campus is $4 so that's what I've been eating everyday. The portion's big so it will feed me properly. It's cool how these food are sold to students. They come in trucks called "Food Trucks" and it's the most popular with students because they are the cheapest option on campus. Other places you'd have to expect to pay upwards of $6.
If you eat in a restaurant you'd have to expect to pay upwards of $10 and for a good meal, at least $15. IT'S EXPENSIVE if you consider that in singapore you can get a meal for S$3.50 and that's already considered pretty expensive in Singapore. Oh well, I guess that's the price of living in the states. That's why yesterday I went to the grocery store "Giant Eagle" to buy some ingredients for sandwiches and bananas + cereals so that I can get cheaper meals at home...
That turned out not to be totally true... I made some sandwiches from stuff I bought yesterday... and I calculated that I actually spent about $7 for the sandwich.... I think the hams are expensive... BUT the sandwiches were AWESOME! Tastes damn good, and I'm very proud of making such awesome sandwiches, WAHAHAHA. I don't regret spending $7 in ingredients, lol. I had turkey ham + balony ham stacked up 8 layers, with 2 layers of lettuce, one layer of pickles. I two of those. It was heavenly. Gonna make more when I can, wahahahaha. Then I had salad (actually just lettuce + salad dressing) and banana. It was a good lunch. I'm definitely making more of those soon, hehe. If you guys are interested in what it tastes like, I can make them for ya, I'll charge $10.
Anyways, there was a CMU Singaporean gathering today so I just attended it. Got to know more people and went out to eat with them. It was fun, made lots of new friends and starting to feel more at home at this freezer of a town. It's actually quite beautiful. Went to eat at a restaurant... called "Steak & Lube" I think... weird name... but they only sell chicken wings, lol. And that's about all the update I have today. Good night!
However, I'm a bit LAZY so basically I'm going to shoot through what happened a bit faster since I don't wanna spend toooooo long on this. So since I tagged along with the people who are moving into their new "home" for the next two years or so I had a chance to go to IKEA.
Since I'm staying in their house for free, I feel obligated to help out as well so I went to help them shop. Basically they were there for the whole day. My friend sort of went crazy there and bought things like whole beds, tables, book shelves, and rugs. Anyways, they spent in a range of $350 (the guy who was the most thrifty) and $1000 (the guy who got a great bed, it's really awesome, but the bed's about half of that total cost.) Hui Ting spent almost $900. The number's quite large for me personally =__+;; but then again they are going to live there for 2 years.
NOW, the problem isn't that the things were expensive.... but it's that they bought A LOT OF SHIT! And we only hav ONE truck.... ONE! Even if its a freaking TITAN, but TITANS aren't big enough to carry 4 people's BEDS in one trip! And guess what.... IT STARTED RAINING!
Oh yes... and Weiyi happened to have bought a mattress base at Salvation Army prior to coming to IKEA... so it got drenched... XD that part's funny cuz he wanted to save some money... he kinda poked a hole in it after like 5 minutes of getting it so he's kinda pissed off about that. NOW it rains... so it's drenched and got thrown away in the end.
ANYWAYS, so it RAINED... the f***ed up part is that IKEA had no loading area that's COVERED! HOW OUTRAGEOUS is THAT?!?! So we had to load the truck in the rain... when it's like 0-1 degrees Celsius... and by that time it's already like 8pm! It was like hell...
So I helped them load the truck with them in the rain. It was FREEZING! Good thing the coat dad gave was water-proof. Since we couldn't do it all in one trip, we had to load some and leave some back and let me tell you, the stuff are FREAKING HEAVY!
I went with the truck to help carry the stuff into the house, 3 stories.... heavy as hell.... and raining... During the ride, the windshield fogged up... so we had no choice but to lower the window and turned on the aircon so the fog would disappear, we didn't have time to find the de-fog button so we drove like that both trips, it was crazy. I admire Andy for driving in that cold.
Anyways, that night was like hell, just that it was really really cold, lol. Good experience, but never wanna do that ever again. My back ached after that.
So that was the trip to IKEA. Now onto less depressing things.
Now I just finished the first week of school. The professors here are extremely good and teach extremely well. Some courses are damn hard and I have no idea what the hell they are talking about, but hey, my grades don't count XD so I don't have to worry that much. I'd just have to pass.
Food here is extremely expensive and tastes like shit, so that's the bad part. The cheapest meal I can get on campus is $4 so that's what I've been eating everyday. The portion's big so it will feed me properly. It's cool how these food are sold to students. They come in trucks called "Food Trucks" and it's the most popular with students because they are the cheapest option on campus. Other places you'd have to expect to pay upwards of $6.
If you eat in a restaurant you'd have to expect to pay upwards of $10 and for a good meal, at least $15. IT'S EXPENSIVE if you consider that in singapore you can get a meal for S$3.50 and that's already considered pretty expensive in Singapore. Oh well, I guess that's the price of living in the states. That's why yesterday I went to the grocery store "Giant Eagle" to buy some ingredients for sandwiches and bananas + cereals so that I can get cheaper meals at home...
That turned out not to be totally true... I made some sandwiches from stuff I bought yesterday... and I calculated that I actually spent about $7 for the sandwich.... I think the hams are expensive... BUT the sandwiches were AWESOME! Tastes damn good, and I'm very proud of making such awesome sandwiches, WAHAHAHA. I don't regret spending $7 in ingredients, lol. I had turkey ham + balony ham stacked up 8 layers, with 2 layers of lettuce, one layer of pickles. I two of those. It was heavenly. Gonna make more when I can, wahahahaha. Then I had salad (actually just lettuce + salad dressing) and banana. It was a good lunch. I'm definitely making more of those soon, hehe. If you guys are interested in what it tastes like, I can make them for ya, I'll charge $10.
Anyways, there was a CMU Singaporean gathering today so I just attended it. Got to know more people and went out to eat with them. It was fun, made lots of new friends and starting to feel more at home at this freezer of a town. It's actually quite beautiful. Went to eat at a restaurant... called "Steak & Lube" I think... weird name... but they only sell chicken wings, lol. And that's about all the update I have today. Good night!
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
First Few Days
Hey! This is the blog dedicated to the CMU experience! I'm finally in CMU and I've been here for 6 full days now I believe.
I haven't been free at all in the last 6 days to do anything like blogging. Now that I can sneak some time, I hope to finally write something so this will actually take some shape before the school term explodes in my face and I have no more time for this kind of thing (again.)
Anyways so I would like to update all those who care enough to read this rambling, or actually know the address to this blog and actually cares about what's going on here, about what I've been up to in the last few days.
****** January 9th - Day 1 - Travel Day ******
This is now officially the longest January 9th I've ever had in my entire 22 January 9th's I've ever experienced in my life. To me... this is hell, but hey if living your days in a plane sitting for over 24 hours is your cup of tea then you might actually like it.
As usual… since my flight is scheduled at an ungodly hour of 6:00am in the morning, I never slept so that I could pack and prepare for the flight. I left the house at around 3:30am in the morning (a bit earlier than expected.) This is because I had to drop by Hui Ting’s place to pick up her I-20… -___-;; She called me 1 hour before I left telling me that she forgot her I-20 in Singapore… anyways long story short, I picked it up from her mom at her place for her.
Got to the airport, the check-in process was no problem so that was good. Strict security checks for the U.S. as usual, so that’s nothing new there so I’ll fast forward through this whole travel thing to the more important thing.
………………… fast forwarding…………….
OK, so 30 hours later, after landing in Narita Airport, after landing in Minneapolis Airport, after landing in Pittsburgh Airport, after sitting next to a Japanese guy 3 times my size for 10 hours… my journey to Pittsburgh came to a close.
AND it’s just 4:30pm on January 9th when my friend and I stepped out of the Pittsburgh Ariport. So you could imagine how bad that travel was… Surprisingly I wasn’t tired since I slept quite a lot on the plane and I was rather energetic from being able to move around normally again.
We landed on a day with nice warm temperature of 3 degrees Celsius. Not bad at all…
Luckily a group of friends who came here 2 days earlier came to pick us up with a rented car. We all needed to shop so they stopped over at Walmart near the airport to buy stuff. After we finished with shopping (bought lots of stuff for their new house) we left to see the place I was going to sleep for the night.
It’s the place the group of friends are going to be renting for 2 years since they are on the fast track. It’s a small 3 room apartment which is unfurnished but it’s not a bad place. The problem is that there are currently no beds at all. So we all ended up sleeping on the floor for the night.
****** January 10th – Day 2 – IKEA Shopping
So… we all woke up with aching back… and our asses almost frozen to the floor therefore everybody decided to buy their furniture so they could sleep properly with blankets.
That’s why Andy went and changed the car we used the day before to a Nisan TITAN (a huge ass #@*$@#& truck) so that we can transport all the stuff they were going to buy today back to the house instead of having to pay IKEA to transport the goods back to the house. (Which turns out to be too small, you’ll find out why later)
On the way to change the car I tagged along to check into my apartment building. Since I needed their help to transport the luggage and I didn’t really have enough stuff to move into my apartment AND I didn’t really wanna see my room mate yet, I decided to stick with the bunch of people going to IKEA right now.
I’ll leave this entry like this at the moment, I’m quite tired, I will add onto it soon.
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