Last school week of first semester

Hey all!

Time has gone by so fast! Some of the exchange students are already starting to leave, to their home countires or to travelling around before going back home. So sad!

I decided to write an intervening text about my last week before continuing about Bali. Something in time, for once, yay!!! ;)

Last week was our final week of lectures and tutorials. Because of that, I had dead lines for two lab reports, a Chisese exam, a Chinese oral exam and a quiz in one of my bioengineering modules. So, I had quite a busy week.

But luckily, starting from last Monday, the central library at campus is also open 24/7! ;) It's a really funny consept actually, so Singaporean! The higest floor of the library is open all night during the last week of semester (last week), the reading week (this week) and the two exam weeks (next two weeks). Also in spring during the exams. This idea has been proposed by NUS Student Union.

Oh, by the way, when ever the library is closing, they are starting to play classical music 15 min before, to get people out of there! It does work in that sence, but I think it's also quite nice actually, and it's nice to do people watching at that time: students are ending their readings, starting to chat with friends a bit, and look relieved that the day's work is over. That small "buzz" added to the classical music gives it sort of an "academic" atmosphere, which to me is pretty inspiring - best time to figure out how to write those last sentences. ;)

So, on Tuesday I decided to try the nightowl thing, to see what is the atmosphere like in the library at night! :) Firstly, it's a procedure: The highest floor, sixth floor, closes 9:30, so half an hour before the rest of the library. I guess it's for cleaning purposes. Everybody have to move to lower floors for the meantime, before it opens again. Then, when the other floors of the library close at 10pm, you have to leave the library through the main doors, go upstrairs using a staircase outside and enter the sixth floor again though another door.

The entrance to other floors is closed and there are a couple of students from the Student Union as supervisors. Already on Tuesday there were quite a lot of students, not too many though, but I can only imagine how crowded it can get closer to the exams! I think I really have to do a "night in the library" then. Just for the experience! The atmosphere was nice but nothing very different from a normal library. Although, I was there only for two hours.

Before I start sounding TOO nerdy (:P) let's move on. After all the weeks work, on Friday a few friends and I went to the hawker center near our house. There is a drink stall called Polar Cafe that has - for some reason - become very popular among exchange students. Maybe it's because of the nice owner, maybe because some of them arranged a Singtoberfest there. Anyway, we went there as our usual way to eat and have a couple of well earned polar beers ;).

Some of us decided to continue to a club, where Expat Connection had arranged a party. Expat Connection is a facebook group, which - as the name says - arranges all kind of happenings to expats in Singapore. It was a kinda fancy club, downstairs of a hotel. As expected, there were a looot of western people! It is always SO funny and weird in some way, to see so many white people in a same place in Singapore. (I get the same funny feeling when I go to Coldstorage, a grocery store where you can find imported food, i.e. everything you miss from your country, includind rye bread! :D) Well, the advertising of free flow had attracted quite a lot of exchange student there as well, and we had a really great time!

On Saturday evening my friend Kati and I went to the Botanic Garden with a Singaporean lady that we know. She is really nice and previously we have been to a couple of concerts in NUS Conservatory with her, for example. This time we went to the Botanic Garden to have a picnic while listening to an open air piano concert. The Botanic Gargen is a really beautiful place, (I might tell you some more about it later) and the concert was also good. There was an Italian pianist Julian Gargiulo playing Copin's and his own pieces. The bad part was that it started to rain, but we were lucky - it didn't rain so much we couldn't have been there under our umbrellas, and the lightenings were also actually quite beautiul in the backround of the stage! Another distracting thing: In botanic Garden you can see a lot of families (and especially expat families, so I got another overdose of white people!!!) and so the audience also consisted mainly of them. Althoug it was nice to see kids running around you again, the voice level in the audience was sometimes quite high in order to just enjoy the music.

After the concert Kati and I returned home and watched Yes man. On Sunday I had planned to go swimmig, but when my alarm clock rang, I heard it was lightening again. So, no use of getting up, right? After sleeping long, I pretty much did nothing special. It was rainig, so I was just inside in front of my computer. In the evening we went with friends to a hawker center in Clementi (a few MRT stops away) to have chili crab. It's a Singaporean dish, a whole crab in a chili-tomato sauce. I hadn't had it before, so it was about the time. It was really good and so were the other seafoods we had.

That's about my week! I hope you weren't too bored reading the text without any pictures! Stay tuned for the updates continuing the Bali holiday!