BAH

harloe all. this is going to be an angry post. for abt 5948 times i tried to post my amsterdam photos but everytime blogger hangs. strange. maybe it doesnt like amsterdam. but i shall try again later. i think this all words post shdnt post as a problem la huh..?

anyway tdy's 24th dec! in germany it is called the heilige Abend. its the most impt day of christmas. usually e family gathers, goes to church, goes for dinner, then kids recite christmas poems for the relatives, then exchange presents.. :) thats what im going to do later on with my host family :D we're travelling to nearby-city Bonn to meet up with their relatives.

tmr some relatives of theirs are coming and more celebrations i think. its actually v nice of them to invite me and im excited to see what goes on. but.. im sick! damn. cough and runny nose. argghh. hope i get better soon :( bought some presents for host faimly & a few friends im gonna meet in austria, and also went to see half a concert yesterday. choir concert :) qt nice but i felt qt sick so :( left early. bahhh. ok everyone merry christmas! ur cards will come later! :P i havent finished writing!!

lester's bday on friday 16 dec, so i went to aachen to have a nice comfy dinner with the seniors. thats the birthday log cake, baked by siewhoon, the wife of chenning who's doing his phd there. basically we were sitting ard, eating, watching trashy tv, and talking. qt nice la :) lester cooked hokkien mee which was not exactly like that in sgp but was still really really gd. :)

instead of making dinner..

.. i'm sitting at the comp typing this post :/ haha this reminds me of wijaya, and also xuamy (didnt u once comment u were starting to blog like wijaya hahaha :))

anyway there's a gd reason why i'm typing this now. cos i finally have a picture of my class to show everyone! this is one of my classes (have had 3 different ones now in 3 mths) cos every mth pple come, pple go. some pple are missing as well but nvm :)

today we had christmas celebrations anyway :) so in the picture below u can see how each table was laid out, there was abt 10 - 12 in all. so there was coffee, cakes, biscuits, chocolates and what nots. :) yumyum.

in the picture below u can see my class performing! we did a performance of "silent night" (in german of course) with a violin solo, a tenor solo, a jazzy part, and an alltogether part :) gd fun. and it sounds really good in german, i think! :)

and finally a picture of my class. back row from left - leo (or loki) the georgian film-director-to-be, takako the japanese medical-engineer, santaclaus (aka nikolaus) who was actually my teacher :) who is real fun and funky, atsushi the japanese opera-singer-to-be. front row from left - katia the russian girl who wants to study here, joohyun the korean violin-player, machi the japanese lady who's here to work, and me :D:D hehh. a few are missing, quite a pity. but my class is a nice one i must say :)

ok if i dont cook now i will starve to death so ciao! next post after amsterdam! plans for next few days look like this - 16th night aachen birthday celebrations, 17th to amsterdam and meeting yijin yifan & co at night, 18th tour amsterdam and coming back at night. :) whee! happy happy.

pleasant weekend in kassel

hello everybodys :) am back from kassel! left on fri afternoon and arrived safely in kassel after a delay in a train (i had to change thrice) caused me to miss a connection and to end up taking a different train. :) first night simply walked ard, had a nice italian dinner, visited the christmas market as u can see below, and then went back to watch a movie - "les choristes". real gd! :)


second day went to visit a herculespark where we walked abt an hour & a half, saw some very nice scenery shrouded in mist, took some pics, and felt real cold :P hahaa but hey it was a nice place, really! a lake we saw was frozen then we stuck our feet in to test it out and it broke immediately haha :D whee.

2nd afternoon we spent walking ard abit more, then went on to bake a cake & then made a nice dinner. kassel crispy noodles :P hahaha its like the hongkong crispy noodle, really tasty, but the sauce was abit different. special :D haha yeah then watched another movie at night, "the shawshank redemption" which was good too! pretty dark & depressing at times but at the end of it it does make u think abt hope, attitudes, and e way prisons work.

nex morning we woke up v late haha, slept in, then had a lovely bread breakfast, then went home. yay :D good trip. nice seniors (not like i know them v well but still all friendships need beginnings, yeah) and pleasant city kassel. dun think its especially interesting but the company was gd! yeah :D

interesting news of the day - may be meeting up with ms chen (fer pple who dunno her she was my 78 relief chem tutor for half a yr) in berlin :) shes travelling in europe and will be in germany for 4 days so prob 2 days in berlin, 2 days in koln :) whee!! to be arranged. yay!

nürnberg :D

hello everyone :) ahaha ok im posting this at erm 10+ am which means im not in sch. nvm abt that. there is a gd reason ok. las night my damned train had a delay of half an hour, and i was in this compartment that made me feel positively sick so ended up with a headache. hence i over-slept :) its ok la huh, first time :) hahaha

okok abit abt nürnberg. its a really nice old city. old but destroyed during the war so mostly restored buildings. but still, very lovely. the picture below shows part of the city wall that surrounds the Altstadt (old city). its almost fully restored :) v nice. we stayed in a hostel right next to the wall :D
nürnberg has some really great museums, i was told, and i was not disappointed! went to visit the Dokuzentrum the first afternoon. its situated at the rally grounds of the nazi party, and was really superb. apart fr the great fotos, descriptions, settings, they also haf an audio guide for each visitor, and can be set to lots of different languages. saw some of the sites itself, and would haf seen more if we were earlier - it was getting dark by 4+ or 5 so :( but nvm still v satisfied :)
heres one of the sites

next, this is jus a nice building next to a river hahaha :) the architecture and all in nürnberg is real nice, and with the rivers its jus v awww.

on the 2nd day we visited a few buildings. one of those was Kaiserburg which means king's castle. from the top we could see a great view of nürnberg, here's one of the pics. its mostly short buildings with some church spires or whatever sticking out. :)

and here's the kaiserburg itself from one side, its actually bigger than what u see here cos there're gardens and the whole other side which cant be seen here. :) qt a nice building too.

here's one of the 29 pillars that write the declaration of human rights. 29 pillars showing the 29 articles, all in german + one other language of a pple that once had its human rights violated. sth like that :) qt nice lah. not spectacular but its jus there for pple to read and think abt. :)

alright here's the hostel. not a great deal, considering we paid 19 EUR for a bed without bedsheets, without breakfast, in a 12-bed room, without a key even! (i.e. anyone can go in anytime) and with poor lighting and cleanliness. ah well desperate lah, all the hostels were booked and this was so conveniently located jus 5mins away fr the Hauptbahnhof (main train station). here's my travel mate, Karine fr canada :) shes v nice and easy to discuss things with, prob cos we shared similar interests :) whee!


a stall fr the famous Christkindlmarkt - a christmas market where lots of stuff and food were sold. i had some of the sweetened-roasted almonds, real gd! and some chocolate-coated pineapples and bananas. and the famous Bratwurst with bread :) yumyummm. this stall sells christmas deco as u can see :)


okok this is the end of pics. also visited an underground prison which was v cool but hard to take pics so i dun think u all wud find them interesting. saw the cells, the torture methods, and all that. qt eeky but interesting :) think nürnberg is real nice! :D gd trip. whee! ok nex weekend going Kassel instead of paris, cos i think paris deserves a few more days. am leaving on friday afternoon and coming back on sunday afternoon, and my senior in Kassel is hosting us (me and azman a senior) so yayyy :D shes real nice too. whee. :D