Yes, I'm still alive... barely... but hey, it's friday, and that's always a good thing. I could spend the next 15 minutes summarising my life, but then again, I could do that in 15 seconds - class, homework, sleep, although the third one has been a precious commodity. So now that I've met the last deadline for the week, I decided that I could waste a little time.
It's interesting and sometimes amusing to have to deal with the differences between this country and back home. Well to start off, there's the whole 's' vs 'z' thing that I've already mentioned in some earlier post... and it's irritating, coz that's acutally the language they use here - I can't just get away with cursing Ms-word. Then there's the date format thing, which is irritating too... it's ok when you have 29/2/2005 vs 2/29/2005, but when you get to 10/11/2005 vs 11/10/2005, it gets really challenging to figure out what's what.
The most obvious yet absolutely irritating thing is that everyone here drives on the wrong side of the road. Most of the locals I meet here insist that it isn't the wrong side, but hey, these are people who put Bush in power right, what do they know. Anyway, I haven't got a US licence and I most defintely don't have a car, so you wouldn't expect the whole left-hand drive thing to be a problem. But the difference rears its ugly head when you least expect it... at bus-stops. Well, as a side effect of cars driving on the wrong side of the road, buses have to drive on the wrong side too. And that means that bus-stops are on the wrong side of the road too... but sometimes, when there's no traffic on the road, and you're waiting for a bus, you tend to get confused and wait at the wrong bus-stop. And miss your bus. It's happened to me twice...
Then there's the whole cycling thing. Everyone here cycles. In fact, there are so many cycles on the road during peak times that it's probably a miracle that there aren't more accidents. But cycling around is quite cool. It gives me a false sense of security that I'm actually exercising when I'm not really. But it's a quick way to get to class, since the internal shuttle buses only come once in 15 mins. Everyone says that the campus is really nice to cycle around, since it's so flat and very few ups and downs. I think it's just devious. It's flat, but that's just because there's a gradual but consistent slope from my apartment to my faculty. And that's not good when it's a I-woke-up-late-and-my-roomate-is-in-the-toilet-so-i-can't-get-ready-and-i'm-going-to-be-late-for-class-and-i-need-to-cycle-really-fast-to-get-class-in-time kind of day. Of which there are several. The bright side is, at the end of a long day at work, it's a cruise back home.
Then of course there's the whole difference in power supply voltage and the pin-type. i have no idea why different countries use different shapes for their power plugs... Anyway... that's not my point... there's a more serious difference. You would think that in a country such as this, with all the brilliant technological breakthroughs that it has produced, there would be smart person who has thought of putting a switch next to each power outlet on the wall. But nooooooo... (and that was meant in a russell peters kind of way), noone here has thought of putting a switch next to each power supply outlet. What that means is that if you connect something, it's automatically on. That isn't usually a problem, since most appliances have a on-off switch of their own. But of course, as you would expect, there are exceptions. And one such exception is the rice cooker. Now the rice cooker has a lever, which you can put on either 'cook' or 'warm' - which means you can't really turn it off. So if you make some rice for dinner, and there's some left over so you leave it in the rice cooker, it'll be nice and warm next day for lunch. You'll have to be careful though, coz by that time, it's hard enough to break a few teeth.
So yes, there are many differences to deal with. And learning to deal with them is part of the fun, I guess. I'm still waiting for daylight savings to kick in... I wonder how many people will screw up then. Anyway, I think I've more than made up for my lengthy silence. Now I need to make up for my lack of sleep.
