Livin'! Livin'!

I must apologise for the long period in which I haven't posted; in return, therefore, here is a post that details my life over the last month and a half!

July 26, Monday 3am

I have just returned from an outing with the Pig and Kelvin--well, Kelvin had to leave early because something he ate during dinner disagreed with him, so I spent about two hours with both of them and about three hours with the Pig alone. We had drinks at Coffee Bean--White Chocolate Dream for me and Pure Vanilla for the Pig and hot water for Kelvin (who wasn't feeling well by then)... perhaps I should get things chronologically arranged first, though. And there's a lot to tell...

I have a lot of reminiscing to do: the eighteen eventful days in Cambodia over the mission trip; the four days of orientation that immediately followed those; the day I spent in Singapore; and then my time here in Patience so far. It's a lot of typing to do, and it's already 2.30am or so--we caught a late screening. Perhaps I shall limit myself to the sojourn in Patience so far, and the time in Cambodia and the orientation days can be recorded in a later post.

So I will therefore begin my record on the 24th of July 2010, Saturday. I woke that day around 8, in a bed where I had fallen asleep due to tiredness from the events of that day--mainly lazing around and sitting in the room gorging myself on Facebook time. I woke because the roommate of the person I was/am/will be squatting with has a very loud and very persistent alarm ringtone, which both the roommate and the person (let us call him Announce-chan) have evidently become accustomed to; every morning I am the first to wake, which I assure you is a definite first for me. In any case the alarm is commonly set for 8am, and so I woke, then attempted to return to sleep but failed; the buzzing of the alarm persisted and was impossible for me to ignore. Presently everybody else began waking up, and by 11am or so the roommate had gotten up and shut off the alarm and showered and departed with requests to help him take in his laundry (Announce-chan is something of a Literal Genie as far as requests go); and then I began packing for the flight.

The flight had been booked some time earlier, on the first night of the orientation camp in fact (which is to say, on the night after the day I returned); it was booked for Saturday, at 5.35pm, with up to 15kg check-in and an in-flight meal. Therefore I had planned to spend Friday packing, but procrastinated, and actually only packed on Saturday itself; I began around 11am and made a list and did my packing within about 2 hours, because I was done and ready by 12.30pm or so.

I and Announce-chan left the room at around 1pm (after he had showered, changed, and been struck by a sudden whimsy to book a last-minute ticket to Patience and accompany me), and had a quite small and unsatisfying lunch nearby; then we took the MRT to the airport, where I checked in my luggage; then we had drinks and then he left at around 4pm for his church. I then went through the gates and so forth, bought a book at the Times bookshop (SuperFreakonomics), attempted to use the airport wireless but failed (there were some permanent terminals which I didn't notice until far too late), and eventually made my way onto the plane.

The flight was uneventful; I finished SuperFreakonomics over the course of the flight. The other main memorable thing is that I stepped (I was wearing hiking shoes with thick and heavy rubber soles) on the exposed toes of a sandals-wearing young lady who was behind me; I have a habit of stepping backwards to assess situations, and at that point I had just placed my backpack in the overhead compartment and was wondering if I should push it in farther--so I stepped back and there was a brief, soft yowl of distress.

I arrived without incident; having checked in early, my luggage came out late on the conveyor. I remember wondering if there might be a way to design the system such that luggage checked in early comes out early, as a sort of incentive to check in early. I found the Gobbler waiting for me with an airport van (the fee was RM35) and thus we made our way home; the parents were out at the time at a wedding dinner of another distant relative (in this case, my maternal grandmother's elder brother's grandson).

The next day, which was today, we had church in the morning (and then, to drive home the point that Patience is a small place, I ran into my old high-school Physics teacher at the church); then we had a vague sort of lunch--mostly bananas and biscuits and buns; I spent the evening on my Cambodia mission trip report--my task is to do writeups of some of the events that were organised; and then we went out for a dinner that consisted mostly of seafood. I rather regret not bringing my camera along to photograph the food, as it was definitely of the sort not usually found in Singapore, or at least not cheaply; 7 people ate and were filled for about RM171. After dinner we returned to the house, from which I departed with Kelvin and the Pig at about 9pm.

We headed to a cinema and bought tickets for Inception (by the by, it is a pretty good movie--no apparent special effects failures, a relatively believable plot, and quite good acting); we bought 11.35pm tickets because the 9pm screening had already been going on for 27 minutes when we arrived. As it turned out that was a good thing; Kelvin was ill and had to leave around 11, which would have caused us to miss the ending of the film if we had watched the 9pm screening. During the intervning 2 hours or so we gossipped about old schoolmates' graduations, illnesses, etc., and sat around sipping drinks and eating a slice of Chicago Cheesecake (whether Chicago has a unique sort of cheesecake is not for me to tell).

And then I got back to the house around 2.30am or so, and have been typing this since.

July 26, Monday 11.10pm

Well then... the family just got back to the house from a quite long dinner at my uncle's wife's place--the uncle himself is away, which is a good thing because he's a politician and so his conversation tends to... shall we say it never quite reaches beyond banality. The dinner was good, though; lots of talking and reminiscing and so on; I don't think I've met the uncle's wife or their kids in at least five years, and there was quite a lot to be talked about.

...my computer's annoying me. I just had to restart the computer because the explorer.exe chose to go haywire--it does that every now and then... I never like to shut down and start up the laptop because of the long time it takes, and the number of programs that also start on start-up is rather large, and most of them are useful enough that I wouldn't normally remove them from the start-up menu; it's just that they become entirely useless in the absence of an Internet connection. I should start hunting places where I can regularly and cheaply use wifi; there was a little restaurant near the church here but things turned sour when they found that offering free wifi does get your customers to hang around longer but doesn't get them to order expensive and many foods. It, in fact, is starting to look like Starbucks (or a different coffee chain) is going to be a regular haunt.

I think I shall begin my recordings of my memories, such as they are; my memory deteriorates quite quickly, unfortunately, so all you'll get is impressions of things; sometimes I have very detailed impressions, and sometimes not, and very often the impressions are of things nearly or completely unrelated to what was actually going on. So what you'll get from me is something of a slide show of images and events and people and things... and of course the slide show might not even finish being told in one post--eighteen days, more or less, of thoughts and musings? It'd be a killer of a post to type and even worse to read. So I might separate it into periods--the simplest way seems to be to treat it in terms of weeks--half-week, week, week--or periods of events--preparation, events, illness, meetings, departures--perhaps the second is better. More separations means a smaller window per separation, which then means more ease of typing and reading. So the second method it is, then.

Come to think of it, I actually have about six main sections of the trip to describe; they're not all equally long, obviously, but they're convenient to use.

The first period, I think, would be the time of travelling and settling in; that began slightly before the 1st of July. In fact it occurred about a week before the 1st of July, as that was when I did my packing and set aside the things I expected to need in Cambodia; they filled a wheelbag, a backpack, and a small cloth bag--mostly food in that cloth bag, really; a friend had recently returned from his mission trip to Macau and had given me a bunch of Macanese foods. I packed, and then that bag went with me to Announce-chan's room where I stayed for the rest of the day (I had returned the hostel keys that morning and so was temporarily homeless) until night-time. I left Announce-chan's room with my bags and with Announce-chan, and we had dinner together--burgers, as I recall; I also changed some money into US dollars (about a hundred). We ran into the overachieving coursemate (he was apparently returning to his house from army training or something similar) while on the way to the MRT, and then I left Announce-chan to board the MRT.

On the MRT I found that my Zen had stopped working entirely; I had charged it in Announce-chan's room to full capacity, but it wasn't working then. I should add in here that I had previously planned to sleep over in the airport, as the flight was at 6am and I didn't wish to take a 4am taxi, but the only other male on the team (let us call him Sir Marker) had offered to get his parents to let me ride in their car too; so I was heading to his house. His parents were genial, and his house was a chaos of bags and clothes and things being packed. In fact my general impression of Sir Marker is that he is a sort of clone of me, except grown up in quite different circumstances--and of course, he's a lot more driven than I am. But then most people are a lot more driven than I am. In any case he was still packing, and in the process of handmaking a little blue notebook that he brought to Cambodia and never once wrote or drew in, which was a pity because it did look like a quite impressive handmade notebook. In any case I found, at his house, that the Zen would not only not turn on, but that it had also somehow become completely undetectable by any computer in that house; essentially my headphones had instantly become dead weight.

We hung out while he rushed about making final preparations; we watched a couple episodes of Doctor Who; and then I slept while he continued packing. We woke around 3am and had hot chocolate before heading out to the airport in his parents' car, and we arrived at the airport around 4am; the team had previously decided to meet at that time so that we could check in our luggage and get all the little random things done on time. So we did; some arrived later than others due to various things, and Sir Marker and I weren't even the earliest at the airport. We took photographs at the terminal with the people who had turned up to send us off, had some prayers, and then we checked in the luggage and went through the various security screenings and things that the airport does to people all the time. I add here that one of the people from my Bible study group was also on that plane, travelling to Siem Reap; we met her and her friends at the check-in counter, but lost track of them all immediately after.

We also had breakfast--toast and coffee--in the terminal, and then we headed for the waiting area. We boarded and had our seats and took more photographs and took off without incident. While on the plane I fell asleep, only waking occasionally to fill in the arrival/departure white cards and so on; but of course, the plane stopped over at Siem Reap where the Bible study friend and her friends left the plane. We had to get off too, and so had about half an hour to stroll around the Siem Reap terminal; so we had toilet breaks, photo sessions (you'll notice by now that photo sessions were a constant motif of our team), and then we re-boarded the plane and had the second leg of the flight with a whole new set of co-passengers before we arrived at Phnom Penh International Airport (at least, that is what I presume the building is called. We got our luggage without much incident, as we had put bright yellow ribbons on everything for ease of identification, and then we headed out; we were met by two of the local Campus Crusade (hereafter abbreviated to CCCC) staff and a couple of vans sent from the airport, into one of which went all the luggage. The people went in the other, and we rode back in the van while the staff introduced themselves and we introduced ourselves and we stared at the scenery. To be honest, though, Phnom Penh reminded me more of Patience or of some of the villages in So Hour than anything else. It's just got that giant small-town feel about it--a "small provincial town" as Belle might have put it.

At the hotel we got our bags and were assigned to rooms (there being only two males on the team, we were de facto roommates). The CCCC staff offered us chewing-gum, which goes to show how (in?)famous the laws of Singapore are outside Singapore. We also discovered that the luggage van had knowingly or unknowingly forgotten to unload a couple items of luggage, and so we spent some time making phone calls to track down the van and the luggage, which eventually were returned to their rightful owners. One of the owners, I might add, was quite incredibly calm about it--she sort of ambled along telling people, with a perfectly cheerful face, that her luggage was nowhere to be found; it's not terribly surprising therefore that we all thought at first that it was a bit of a joke, although one with an odd sort of punchline. We had lunch at a nearby restaurant, and found that Cambodian food is quite similar to Malaysian/Singaporean food, except that it has much stronger tastes--contains lots more salt and pepper, less greens, and revolves quite a bit around soups and eggs; apparently of the meats, beef and pork are cheapest, and chicken and fish (and seafood) are the costliest.

July 27, Tuesday 12.15pm

I have just woken up due to the efforts of several people; the Gobbler has departed and by now is either in So Hour or in Spore; either way he will be back in Spore by the time I return there, I think. And then there was a parade of people into the room to open the windows and let the sun in, tell me to wake up because it was past 1pm, and so on. I've fallen for that "it's very very late!" gambit so many times that it never fails to irritate me; causing a panic attack may be effective, but it does absolutely nothing for the mood of the person who panicked. In my case I simply head for the nearest timepiece, verify the claims, and if I've been fed false information I glare at the feeder and return to sleep.

At any rate there's probably lunch downstairs; the parents are as usual trying to convince me to sleep and wake early, but I've never been a wake-with-the-dawn sort of person. I tried that over the internship and very quickly decided I'd rather suffer lack of sleep than try to sleep early. And of course my view of the holidays is that they are the perfect time to toss all biological clock balances out the window because there's plenty of time and opportunity to fix them up again later.

I now continue my account of Cambodia... where? Ah, yes. The afternoon of the 1st of July, lunch... well, after lunch we had a bit of a meeting and then we headed out to the CCCCHQ in a couple of tuktuks (6 people to each tuktuk). A tuktuk is a sort of little carriage on two wheels (one on each side), and is pulled by a motorcycle affixed to the front. There are two sofa-style seats, one facing forwards and one facing backwards. The sides are open to allow the passengers to climb in and out, but there are rolls of tarpaulin hanging from the ceiling, three on each side. When the weather is inclement, the tuktuk drivers (they are recognisable by their jockey caps, which appear to be a sort of informal uniform) stop the tuktuk at the nearest convenient place and unroll the tarpaulins to keep the passengers dry. The tarpaulins also have a little window of transparent plastic in them to allow the passengers to continue gawking at the streets while staying dry.

July 27, Tuesday 6.45pm

It's evening; I have just spent a relatively boring and uncomfortable afternoon outside... there was lunch, and then we went out for what was initially described as a joyride but then turned into visits to people only known to the parents; so I and my two siblings were obliged to just stand around (seated positions are few in little shops) while the adults talked and talked, with little or no need for any input from anybody younger than 30. We then went shopping for picnic provisions, as we are apparently planning to go to an island tomorrow--of course I'll bring the camera. As it is I already wish I brought the backpack out more often; the shops this afternoon were uncomfortably hot due to a power outage and a fan would have come in very handy.

In any case I again return to my own remembrances: it's odd how long it takes to document just half of one day... some time soon I shall put this into MS Word (it is currently a .rtf in WordPad) and do a word count. But at any rate we went to the CCCCHQ in tuktuks--we found out a bit later that the CCCC has those two tuktuk drivers on call, and so we were driven around a lot in them. At the CCCCHQ we met the National Director, the remainder of the campus staff, some of the Christian students (and some Christian non-students, of course), etc, and some speeches were given and then we were split into little groups to talk and so on. I think we were supposed to stay in those groups for the entire trip: two or three students to one staff, to allow for easy translating and follow-up and tracking and so on--administrative stuff mostly. Then we had fruits and dinner at a little nearby restaurant, which I remember because it served refillable dishes--the owner kept asking if we wouldn't rather order 10 different dishes, but we insisted on ordering 2 each of 5 dishes; it was only later, when we started noticing the owner taking away empty dishes and replacing them with filled dishes, that we figured it out and started eating lots. I think this was the time when the girls of the team decided that Cambodian servings of rice are too large, and so they started putting all the rice they didn't want on my plate; with there being 10 girls on the team and 1 of me, I often wound up with about 7 times as much rice as the average girl. After dinner we went back, showered and so on, and had a team meeting in the room of the staff-in-charge before going back to our rooms to sleep. (I should put in here that I wound up with the only queen-size bed in any room; every other person had a single bed or mattresses on the floor--it was that sort of hotel.)

Thus ended the first day in Cambodia; we woke up the next day, had our free breakfasts and our first encounter with the incredible sweetness of Cambodian drinks: order any drink that they make on the spot, and the bottom of the glass is at least one inch of condensed milk; the rest will be the drink you ordered plus ice and so on; stirring would turn black coffee into very light brown, and it would be nearly undrinkably sweet; I got used to it after awhile, though--my sweet tooth kicking in again, no doubt. After breakfast we met the CCCC staff in the room of the staff-in-charge (it became our default meeting-room for these things) and then headed over to the campus, where we were ushered into a room. I should add that we were all dressed quite formally--long-sleeved button-shirts on the guys and blouses plus floor-length bottoms (either pants, jeans, or skirts) on the girls; as it turns out that's what all of Phnom Penh seems to wear, because T-shirts continued to be a rare sight throughout our time there. At any rate we went and sweated, and remained in the room while the university's Student Association filtered in and took seats and introduced themselves to us and so on; we had formal introductions when they'd all arrived (they were, for Southeast Asians, remarkably punctual).

July 27, Tuesday 10.15pm

The family has just returned from the Monday prayer meeting at the church, where there were only three members of the congregation; as the number of the family currently in Patience is five, it means we were roughly 62.5% of the total number of people praying just now. It was okay, I suppose; singing and praying and so on; but I wasn't really that enthusiastic about it. I'm not generally enthusiastic about things I get volunteered for, or things the family does that I'm automatically expected to participate in; generally those things are things the parents want to do, and they don't usually ask the kids if they want to go along. There isn't even usually a choice about staying back... of course, this kind of thing probably works on younger children; but I wonder sometimes if the parents haven't just got used to making all the decisions and haven't quite got used to the idea of a bit of democracy. Then again, sometimes their decisions work out okay, like their plans to go to an island tomorrow (this definitely means the hat and fan and camera!); it's just that very often their idea of enjoyable times are sharply at odds with their children's.

But I return now to Cambodia.

We met the people of the Student Association in their office, talked a bit, and then they asked me to play a song on their electric piano (donated by some French company or other, I think) so I played Amazing Grace because whenever I'm asked to play anything on the piano, my brain freezes and I can't think of anything to play that would be relevant to the people asking me to play anything. A case in point would be that at the Student Association office, I could think of nothing but Jonathan Coulton and some hymns. But it seemed to go over well, and some time later we set out on a tour of the school grounds; I found out quite quickly that the campus, despite being one of the older and more prestigious universities in Cambodia, is about the size of the average Malaysian high school; certainly small enough that no map was needed.

We walked around the school with the staff and the Student Association members--mostly the main committee members, though some of them were subcommittee members too--learning about the system and the lifestyle there, and various other trivia: for example, the tuition fees are about USD380 per annum and the school day is generally about 3 hours long; most students study one course in one university and another in another; grades are printed out and posted on a noticeboard where everybody can see; and so on. We walked around a lot, in the course of which I lost track of my original assigned guide and so roped in the nearest student as my new guide, and then roped in a third when I lost the second. In fact I think I lost the entire rest of the group at one point when they headed to the library and my guide headed for the computer labs. In the end, though, we got to the canteen, where we found that in that canteen (and another food court, at least), cash isn't used; rather, one changes cash into coupons and uses those instead. The reason we were given was that cash might be dirty and this helps keep people's hands clean; I'm not terribly sure of its efficacy, but it was an interesting system. And of course, one can later change unused coupons (the stallkeepers also give change in coupons, so no worries about having to try and get small bills for exact change) back into cash; the coupons are only valid for the day they are issued.

We had lunch--I had omelette with bread, which became something of an instant favourite amongst the team. Cambodian omelette is awesome--somehow they manage to have it be very very moist, and it's generously salted and peppered and there's frequently onions and meat and suchlike in it--and the bread was French loaf--probably a relic of the French occupation. One thing about Cambodian food is also that it's very heavy on the eggs--omelettes and soups and so on. But given how nice the omelette is, that's no surprise.

We had lunch, talked awhile; and then--my memory deserts me at this point.

...you know, this trip to Patience is turning out better, at least so far, than I'd hoped; but then I hadn't hoped for very much... the last trip was okay until the parents arrived, at which point most of the enjoyable parts of life were curtailed severely; the day or so before this trip I kept worrying that the parents would spend lots of time complaining at me and telling me that I needed to be a lot better, wake early and study lots and generally set a good example for the younger siblings and suchlike. So far there's been a surprising lack of that, apart from the almost-traditional mutterings about wanting the car washed and us up early and painting the grilles.

Perhaps I just have very low expectations of people in general; but I don't think so, else I wouldn't be disappointed in people ever, unless it's that I set low expectations that people fail even to meet, which is a rather depressing sort of idea. But then depressing ideas are everywhere; Inception, for example--the idea that dreams are nearly indistinguishable from reality to the dreamer, and the only way out is death--there are at least two ways that idea could go horribly wrong. One is, obviously, the possibility of people committing suicide to get back to the "real" world; the other is that (if you're only a projection of somebody else's subconsciousness, or if everybody else is only the projection of your own subconscious) then there obviously isn't anything morally wrong with running amok and murdering people left, right, and centre, is there?

...the next few days of Cambodia are a blur to my mind of going to school in the morning and walking around, talking to people; I'm not good with people, and was highly difficult to persuade that people would be friendly and perfectly fine with being talked to by a complete stranger. However, it turns out Cambodians are very sociable and very friendly, and perfectly okay with talking to a foreigner who knows little to nothing of the local lingua franca--in this case, either Khmer or French--it was quite an agreeable surprise. One of the encounters that stands out in my memories is the boy whom I approached; he was scribbling on paper (and may I say, the Khmer script is very pretty) but stopped when I sat down and started talking; some time later, perhaps around 11am, I asked when his essay was due. He replied, perfectly equably, that it was due at 12pm, and yet seemed perfectly willing to have me and my companions hang around a little more to talk; I was probably more discomfited than he, and he didn't seem the type to not give a whit about homework while I most certainly am. I've forgotten his name and course and year, but the behaviour still strikes me as quite definitely unlike anything in Singapore--or Malaysia, for that matter.

At one point we and the Student Association went on a tour to Tuol Sleng, a high-school-turned-prison where 20,000 people were at one point or another held prisoner and tortured; there were only 7 survivors. It was quite sad and a great reminder of the things that human ingenuity will come up with, even (or especially) for the pain and suffering of other humans. And it was also a reminder of the human drive for profit, because there was a little souvenirs shop right beside it that sold not only books and DVDs documenting the Khmer Rouge, but also sold scarves, silver cigarette cases, and pirated DVDs of such things as the Simpsons, Family Guy, etc. It was quite jarring. From Tuol Sleng we proceeded to various places along the riverside--a market where we bought nothing and only took photos; the area outside the Royal Palace (we actually entered it only on another day) where we took more photos and had coconuts from a roadside vendor and found another vendor selling fried crickets; we bought 50 cents' worth of fried crickets and filmed ourselves eating them. They were small, very oily and crunchy, and slightly salty; the larger ones had an additional aftertaste of grass. It rather scared some of the girls, but some of them also ate the crickets.

July 29, Thursday 12.52am

Well, a lot has happened over the past... well, now. It's a couple of days since I last posted, isn't it? But I've reason; yesterday was busy, and today... well, today's been differently busy. I shall recap the more recent events first, and leave Cambodia to later; I haven't showered and I ought to...

Yesterday was predominantly taken up with revisiting Sappy Island; we woke in the morning to prepare picnic items--mostly packing baskets, preparing the cooler, boiling and smashing eggs, etc. I think we actually left the house around 9am or so, and arrived at the jetty around 10am; we got a boat and left and after a rather boring boat ride (during which we ran into some China Chinese tourists whom the parents talked to) we arrived at the island. Our activities from that point were a hodgepodge of swimming and sitting around and eating and walking around to gawk at the other people at the beach (one of the other people was busy for a couple hours in sculpting a giant sand turtle which other people eventually came along to gawk at too). Sappy Island is in a rather bad state, though; apparently there's a lot of illegal immigrants on Style Island (which is very nearby) who are permitted to go on living there because the government finds them a useful source of ghost votes, which keeps the government in power, at least in the state of Patience. Unfortunately all these people generate lots of rubbish that they don't dispose of properly, and so it floats on the seas and is driven by the currents to Sappy Island from Style Island; and the corals and fish of Sappy Island are definitely not what they used to be. The corals are bleaching, the fish are less in number and less energetic than before (and they seem to subsist entirely on bread from tourists), and I saw nearly no live seaweed in the sea, which explains why the drifting bits of it were so attractive to the fish--fish normally completely ignore floating clumps of seaweed.

At any rate we left Sappy Island at around 4pm, when there was a bit of a drizzle; during the boat ride it whipped up into a lovely storm and stung the faces of everybody on the boat, including the China Chinese tourists; they nearly lost a couple of hats in the wind. The rain was very painful, very cold, and very wet (when we finally alighted we could all wring water out of our shirts) and very, very fun indeed. The entire trip was worth it for that ride in the rain...

And yesterday night I went out with Kelvin and the Pig, for a round of drinks; we would have gone for a movie but there weren't any that we wanted to see being shown at the time, so we didn't.

This morning I was on the Internet for most of the time, commenting on Facebook and talking to people and so on; the Pig and Kelvin and I had originally planned to see a movie at around 12pm but it got postponed to just now because of the Pig's school work (which Kelvin and I agree is an euphemism for "girlfriend"). All in all today has been uneventful; I woke up, was online, did some chores, had dinner with the family, and then went out just now for a movie with the two of them (we've been seeing lots and lots of each other these few days) and then came back.

Now I go to shower, and then I shall sleep.

July 30, Friday 11.06am

The family is all annoyed, to various degrees; it's what, the fifth day since I came here? and already tensions are showing. Of course the tensions were always there, as I've said earlier; but I think the main reason behind all the pother is that the children have very different desires from those of the parents, and neither side has really learned to compromise yet; we tolerate instead of cooperate, I think. Which is why we grumble when the parents burst into rooms at the crack of dawn and announce that it's 10 when it's really 8, but we get up and go along with the programme anyway; and the parents grumble when I go out at night but they shrug and let me go as long as I remember to take the keys and lock up behind me when I get back.

And of course the parents came here as adults, and so their contacts were all adults who'd pretty much settled down in Patience already; and now, six years later, their contacts are all still around for calling on and talking to and reminscing and so on; in the meantime, all the people that we the children knew have grown up and changed and gone on with their lives. It's why my circle of contacts outside the family and church (none of which I'm all that close to anyway; the ones I'm close to have also grown and gone) has shrunk to Kelvin and the Pig--and of course, the last time I was here it was just the Pig. And now the parents want to go gallivanting around to talk to their friends, and then they drag the children along... and we the children get very, very bored listening to reminisces and discussions about things of no interest to us (seriously, how much am I supposed to care that housing prices have changed throughout Patience when I have no intention of settling down anywhere near it?). It's not surprising therefore that when the parents barge in and announce that we're going out to eat with X (the names change every meal but are almost never recognisable), the children respond with a resounding "meh". After all, there's nothing to excite us. Of course we go along, dutifully, and eat, and so on; but the conversation doesn't involve us and wouldn't interest us even if it did involve us, and anyway we wouldn't have anything to contribute.

I've noted before that my father, in particular, is particularly forceful in character. It's no surprise that honest opinion (amongst the children) flees in his presence like bacteria from penicillin.

In any case this morning was like that; the parents wanted to go out at 8.30am to meet a certain friend for breakfast, while the children were mainly interested in getting breakfast. Naturally breakfast occurred, after a bit of yelling from the parents about the virtues of waking early and how waking late is just the first step off a slippery slope at the end of which is complete moral ruination and financial bankruptcy. After breakfast the children excused ourselves as the conversation became increasingly irrelevant and boring, and we drifted from hardware store to pet shop where the kid sister melted into puddles at the animals in it... naturally this meant that we kept the car waiting for a bit before we noticed the adults at the entrance waving for our attention (they got a lot less attention than the puppies).

My father also happens to be a very impatient sort of person who hates waiting; multiple times in the past he's preferred to drive off and then come back to the house to pick us up rather than sit there and wait in an idle car. I'm not sure if it comes with having been a manager for so many years or if it's just some sort of integral part of his personality.

At any rate when we arrived at the house he immediately grabbed the laptop and attached dongle which is our only method (we haven't got any any wifi spots so far) of accessing the Internet and disappeared for awhile; then he came down, started the car, and drove off. I haven't been able to find any trace of the laptop or dongle which is why I'm typing this, really; not that I'd be able to use it for long even if I had found it, since it's the only Internet-accessing laptop amongst four people (not counting the father) in the house, and the connection is unpredictable, sometimes good and sometimes... not. Though, of course, that may simply be due to my techbane capabilities.

I must return to my documentation of the time in Cambodia, or I fear I'll never quite finish it, and that would be a pity.

Well, then. Tuol Sleng and the Royal Palace all occurred within the first few days or so of Cambodia, interspersed with going around on the campus to talk to people; I exchanged emails with quite a large number of people over the course of those few days, and I hope none of them have tried emailing me or they'll be greatly disappointed with the tardiness of my replies. In fact I should probably initiate the emailing, but I think I'll leave that 'til I get back to somewhere with a more reliable Internet connection... that's at least 12 days away. It's odd how tedium so rapidly makes one look forward to being busy again. Today in fact promises to be full of lots of typing, because I've little else to do anyway.

July 31, Saturday 11.54am

Last night was pretty okay, against all my expectations; or perhaps because of them... It was cell group, and of course the parents took the children along willed we or nilled we. Commonly my reaction to this sort of thing--the church is, unfortunately or not, primarily composed of rather aged people--the younger people aren't particularly committed and are particularly wishy-washy, at least to me--and thus, again, the problem of them talking and being incredibly boring--but my reaction is to sit and endure it and go daydreaming off. I'm very good at daydreaming; it's not a particularly productive skill, but the amount of entertainment it provides for me more than makes up for that. But last night I prayed and was more of a "well, this isn't the best of circumstances, but since I'm already here I hope it'll be interesting and be of some good to me"... and what do you know, it was. Well, it still wasn't the best of circumstances, and there were definite parts (like the unscheduled Korean-style praying in tongues that went on and on and only stopped after an uncomfortably long time) that I could've done without; but on the whole it didn't put me to sleep the way it did the last time I went for one of these.

On the other hand, the fellowship after the cell group wasn't particularly scintillating; people talked to me, and I talked to them, but either my responses were boring or they were acting out of politeness and nothing more, and the conversations died away quite quickly. In particular one... for lack of a better word, dialogue... stands out: the other person had been on a mission trip recently, to Nepal, and had also been with me for the OM camp last July, the one I still remember with a little sourness for having been dragged away before it even ended. Well, not a little; bitterness is a particular problem of mine and I still resent not having been able to complete the thing properly.

At any rate he talked to me, and it soon became clear that he has a certain definition of "missions" and going around campus talking to students doesn't fit into it; he kept going "so you go around making friends? That is all?" and I kept telling him that yes, that was what we did, and we had events (which I will record shortly). And then he asked how many had come to Christ in the time we were there, and when I answered a single-digit number, the conversation died away quite quickly... Perhaps it is merely the arrogance of youth, but I can't help wanting to know his definition of "missions" and what he did in Nepal. But I'll find out tomorrow when he shares in church, he and the other uncle who went with him.

I'm expected to share, too, though; five minutes of me talking about the mission trip to Phnom Penh... I'll probably take about three minutes just to give the background information--Campus Crusade isn't terribly well-known in Malaysia, so I'll need to explain all about it and then all about the background of the university and why we went there and so on, and by the time I get to explaining what we did and why, I'll probably have been speaking for upwards of three minutes, if I'm speaking intelligibly; the main danger with me speaking in public is invariably that I get nervous and wordspam and then nobody understands a word I say. The next danger is that I'll have no idea of the level of detail they want and then I'll go way too deep and they'll lose interest... still, I'll just have to trust that as long as I go up there and speak, it'll be of edification to them, somehow.

But back to the records of Cambodia.

So, we went around the campus talking to people. I should mention at this point that we were officially forbidden to be obviously Christian on campus; that particular university, apparently, has a history of being the starting-point of major uprisings and student protests, and so is under rather strict government watch--spies and police apparently patrol the place watching for seditious activities. In addition, we were there under the Student Association as some kind of cultural exchange activity; so we went around saying that we were there to learn from the students about Cambodian culture and stuff, and we were also having events to teach English (like China, they are moderately good at reading/writing English, but not so good at the speaking/listening bit) and to tell them about Singaporean culture, particularly the education system there (this was suggested by the CCCC staff--apparently the brightest and best of Cambodia want to go abroad).

Our events were all held within one week, on alternate days--Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday, and English Class and Cultural Night and Friendship Club respectively; it was very tiring, but not for me, as that week was also the week I fell badly ill. It stems from the fact that we had visited a particular mall to obtain supplies for the events, and thus had also had a meal at the food court there. I was feeling particularly adventurous at the time and so ordered something called "7-colours fried rice"; each colour turned out to be a different item of food--white was a bit of squid, yellow was the rice, and so on.

July 31, Saturday 5.50pm

...as it turns out, the GameHouse Universal Patcher doesn't work on games downloaded from PopCap, which is a pity, because Plants vs Zombies is a ridiculously fun (and cute) little game.

But back to Cambodia!

...well, we ate at the food court on, let me see, I believe it was Wednesday--it can't have been Sunday because we would have been at church and then at the sports fellowship. By the by, the sports was a little better than I'd thought it would be; generally the mention of sports conjures up visions in my mind of pain and grime and lots of injuries, and those did happen, just not to me. I spent my time in badminton and playing something that, for lack of any other name, I will call Boules--that, after all, is the word printed on the side of the cloth bags they use to hold the game's implements. It's really a simple game, and requires a dirt patch, a bottlecap (or some other such small, easily-seen, durable/replaceable thing), and twelve iron balls, of which six are perfectly smooth and six have lines scored into their surfaces. You play by stamping the bottlecap into the dirt so that there is a little white dot amongst the brown; then you use a foot to draw a line in the dirt. Then the players separate themselves into two teams (there is no requirement for both teams to be of equal size, but it is done as a formality), and each team is either smooth or lined. Then a representative from either team steps up and throws the iron ball once, after which the turn passes to the other team. It remains that team's turn until their ball either lands closer to the bottlecap than the other team's, or until they knock the other team's ball away so that they have a ball nearer the bottlecap than the other team. (It is a distinct disadvantage to throw a ball directly upon the bottlecap too early in the game.)

We were tired and dirty after the games (which had lasted from 3pm to nearly 7pm) and after dinner, my roommate convinced me to attempt 20 pushups and 20 situps; I managed the pushups by doing quite pathetic ones, but only managed 18 situps and even then I think I pulled my abdominal muscles.

At any rate the next day I was sore in the stomach; I don't really remember that week's Monday or Tuesday, except that some of the other teammates complained of bad stomachaches every now and then. Ah, yes. Tuesday was the English Class, and it went incredibly well; we got loads and loads of attendees, and I was told to introduce them to some online resources for the improvement of their English, so I told them about things like Dictionary.com and so on, and then threw in TVTropes just for the heck of it. I hope I haven't singlehandedly destroyed all their free time for the next few decades by that.

By Thursday morning I was running for the toilets every hour or so, which was very bad; I couldn't hold any conversations because I might have to run at any moment, and so I tagged along with my roommate and was mostly silent and strained-looking. I became quite well-acquainted with the toilets around the canteen, and later with the ones near the Student Association room. I would in fact have wanted to return to the hotel, but we had the Cultural Event that afternoon, and I was required to be around for (at the very least) a mass dance performance.

However the strain must have been quite apparent--either that or the roommate got concerned enough to say something to the rest of the team (not that I'm complaining about that!)--possibly I was pale; after all I hadn't eaten at all for the entire day. It's a bit difficult to get solid food down when you essentially have been pooping lumpy brown fluid all day (and I'd thrown up quite a bit too), and I had zero appetite anyway. (Those who know me well will know that this generally means quite extreme sickness.)

That was the beginning of the three days of sickness, and that was the first day, when I was still able to put a grim face on it and go around the school; by that night I was too physically weak to leave the room, and they had porridge sent to the room for me. The next day I was forbidden to leave the room, though I couldn't have anyway; again I had porridge, and in the afternoon the roommate came back to the room to check my temperature and so on. The rest of the team had also produced various diarrhoea medications and suchlike, and I had brought some charcoal cubes (which hurt quite badly to swallow--sharp edges do not go down the throat well), so I was on quite a bit of medication. It was during this time that I got decidedly depressed about being stuck in the hotel room and not being useful, but I got into some rather convoluted thoughts that sort of make sense without actually doing so. I'll have to set them out later to avoid disrupting the flow of the narrative, though. The third day, Saturday, was the day of the last event of the week, Friendship Club (despite the name it wasn't at all exclusive), and I wasn't there; that afternoon I'd been taken out to a local polyclinic for an injection and some medications. As it turns out medications aren't at all regulated in Cambodia; we arrived, didn't even need to show our passports, and were immediately ushered into a little room where a nurse gave me a blood pressure check and then an injection, both on my right hand; I think she thought I was left-handed because I wear my watch on my right wrist.

At any rate the doctor wrote a prescription and I was supplied with more medications for the next five days. It seems it was quite a potent injection, or else I was already healing by then, because I was well enough to go to church the next day and I even managed to participate in the sports fellowship, though I limited myself to Boules--as it is, it's a very challenging game because there is no perfectly even dirt patch, and one needs to figure out how to use the hillocks and depressions to one's advantage, and of course if one throws the iron ball hard enough, one makes one's own depressions in the dirt--and a few mass group games that were quite fun. We also played Jacob's Ladder, which involves people scrambling over other people's legs, and I stumbled because I was trying to overtake the person in front of me and he was trying to block me; so I tripped over a bag strap and plowed right into a guy's side. I expect it was rather painful; I'm not light by any means and he didn't have a cushion of fat.

Monday we spent at the Royal Palace, and I took upwards of a hundred photos there. It was quite fun, although my stomach remained queasy throughout (and after the jumpshots it was even more so). I didn't sleep terribly well that night, being afflicted (though I didn't know it then) by hives which were very itchy. At the time I just felt bumps on the skin and scratched accordingly.

Tuesday morning the hives were still there, and rather extensively covering both my legs up to the knee; they alarmed the staff-in-charge and the CCCC staff, and by mid-afternoon I had antihistamines to take in addition to my other medication (although the roommate, having been a medic when in the army and being a Life Sciences student at the moment, insisted that I should stop the medications in case they were having worse and harder-to-detect effects than the hives).

I should note that at this point, we weren't doing random campus ministry as much as before; we'd made quite a number of contacts and friends over the past week through randomly talking and through the events, and many of them wanted to meet up for fun and profit (the profit in this case being a chance to practise their spoken English); and of course they would specify the teammate they wanted to meet with. I'd been sick for three days and even when healthy I'd been distinctly less sociable than everybody else, and so had no contacts: a quite depressing sort of thing, especially when some of the more outgoing teammates had more contacts than the hours of the day and were constantly moaning about being tired out from meeting people. It's not a nice way to put it, perhaps, but it did seem like it at the time... still, all things work out for good, and they who had many didn't have too many, while we (I wasn't the only unsociable one on the team, it turns out; at least two others on the team had no contacts as well) who had too few still managed to meet people by sitting in the canteen and being recognised and being available for people to just plop down and talk.

(One thing which still amazes me about Cambodians is their willingness to plop down beside people or have people plop down beside them; there's never any worry about intruding on people. Then again, the orientation did say that Cambodians regard being alone as something to be avoided--the polar opposite of my general inclination!--so that explains that, I guess.)

And so we approached the end of the time of Cambodia, in meetings and sitting around and talking and so on; it was around this time that I think I began disconnecting myself from the people around me. Perhaps fatigue, perhaps because I knew we would be leaving soon; but my journal around that time has "with but not of" as something of a motif. I just, for some reason, found it extremely difficult to care about the people I was talking to, and I think at least one of them sensed it, because of an outburst--well, outburst makes it sound more violent than it was--Cambodians are peculiarly gentle and given to physical contact, which I rather enjoyed--more like a plaintive question? an interrogative? but he suddenly noticed that he was the one asking all the questions in the dialogue and I hadn't been seeking any information throughout. And I thought about it and I came to the conclusion that for whatever reason, I just wasn't... interested. And that was terrible for any number of reasons, a major one of which was that it probably made me appear a lot more arrogant than I am. And uncaring, too, but... well, goodness knows. Perhaps I'd simply exceeded my monkeysphere quota.

August 5, Thursday 11.11pm

Egads; even when there's little to nothing to do, I manage to procrastinate the typing of this blog... still, not much has happened over the past five days, not really. Today, maybe yesterday, have been somewhat more filled, and that's why I'm typing now really.

So I shall recount the latest things first, and then return to the last few days in Cambodia, if I have the time; tomorrow I must wake very early and I think I shall need the sleep--either the sleep or a steady supply of mints and sour chews, and I definitely have not the steady supply.

I downloaded a cracked copy of Plants vs Zombies on Saturday, and then a walkthrough; it's been the main occupation of my free time for the past few days. It's ridiculously cute and fun, and the Zen Garden definitely is something of an addiction with me, the way I keep playing the minigames to get new plants for it. But it's fun!

On Sunday my father was sharing with the church... I should note that before coming to Patience, the family attended a missions camp with some of the people from the church here, after which one of the local church members went on a missions trip to Nepal (I do hope that mentioning it doesn't cause a huge problem for the Christians there). With me having just got back from Cambodia, my father decided that it'd be a good idea to have the local church members and I to share about our experiences: one sharing about the camp, one about Nepal, and one about Cambodia (no prizes for guessing who did which). The one who went to Nepal, incidentally, was the one who was bothering me about my missions on Friday night.

As it turned out the church members gave very--I don't mean to be condescending or patronising, but I am trying to be kind to them--very lacklustre is the kindest way of putting it--their sharings consisted mostly of photos of the scenery while they said "next" to get the projectionist to put the next slide up. I mean, really. The man who'd been asked to share about the missions camp decided to put up a series of photos of the beach and food and group shots with just one or two photos of the camp speakers (and even then the only information given was their names--nothing about what they'd taught), and the one who'd gone to Nepal... showed photos taken from the plane of roads and buildings. And that was all; nothing about how long he'd been there, what they'd done, who they'd been with, nada, zip. You'd think his mission trip had consisted entirely of two plane trips. I had no photos but I did have an outline, and I don't mean to brag but I'm convinced that I conveyed a lot more than they did. (As it turns out, "and whatnot" is a new verbal tic of mine, which I append to the ends of lists: "we met X, and Y, and whatnot" for example... I'm not sure, but it's a much nicer tic than most anyway.)

Monday passed uneventfully, I think; at any rate I don't remember anything about it. Yesterday evening I went out swimming; the pool was quite crowded, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the changing room has got turned into a sort of informal pick-up place for the local homosexual population; at least that would seem to be the logical inference when people start randomly stepping out of the showers and grabbing their crotches in each other's direction. Still, nothing terribly overt (but if there had been it wouldn't be a sneaking suspicion!) and it may just have been adolescent machismo showing-off. I think I may have some degree of alexithymia; I'm no good at describing my own feelings or those of others, and as far as nonverbal cues go I'm almost always completely in the dark. It probably contributes greatly to my preference for electronic communication over face-to-face: at least this way, body language doesn't come into it and I can carefully pick and choose my words to convey the appropriate tone. I only got to swim for about half an hour, though, and I swam without goggles: I'd forgotten to bring mine from Spore and I had originally intended to buy some at the sports complex store, but as it turned out I'd underestimated the price of the cheapest pair of goggles by nearly RM7. In addition I'd had a surprise dinner sprung on me by the parents, which necessitated a short swim.

Today I woke in the morning... Again I find myself compelled to provide some background. There is a group of Christian professionals called the Eagles, in Singapore, and they occasionally have conferences and suchlike; my parents are quite involved with them, somehow--my father has many connections--and they so happen to be having a conference in Patience, which (again) my parents are involved in. Somehow they inveigled an extra attendance form and signed me up: so I spent the day from the afternoon onwards in the company of about 600 people, predominantly middle- to advanced-age citizens. It hasn't been too bad so far, but tomorrow promises to be tiring. I shall sleep now, therefore, and leave Cambodia to another day's telling.

August 17, Tuesday 7.48pm

How time passes! And how long it's been since I updated! But at the moment I've got the time, so I'll go on; and let's see if I can't finish everything I want to type down tonight before I sleep--and sleep comes early in So Hour, where I currently am.

Let me therefore finish off the time in Patience, and then I'll end my recap.

The Eagles Conference was apparently the first of its kind in Patience, and it went quite well; I did get pestered for awhile with questions like "so what did you like best", "how can we improve", and (something of a personal peeve) "what did you learn from it"... my answer was invariably something along the lines of "a lot, I'll have to take time to review the notes and process", which is true; my life is a lot less sudden jumps than small nudges here and there that help me along to decisions and suchlike. I suppose in the world of business you're expected to process information a lot more quickly, or at least have some sort of acceptable canned answer ready on hand; I, however, don't usually rely on canned answers. Well, not usually.

After the Eagles Conference I spent a lot of time out with the Pig and Kelvin, mostly at nights when we'd head out for a drink and to sit around talking. Of course this means we occasionally proved the truth of the axiom that it is easiest to converse when one does not say "let us converse"; but on the whole it was a good time. Shisha, I have found, is an interesting experience; something like cigarettes, not as addictive and a lot more herbal. I got lightheaded partway through the shisha time, though, mostly because I did a lot of inhaling on the smoke and so (most likely) caused myself oxygen deprivation. At least, it didn't seem to happen to either the Pig or to Kelvin. I note at this point that the Pig's girlfriend has him quite firmly under her thumb: I inadvertently caused him trouble the day after the shisha by posting it on Facebook--to me it was an event, after all! and a first, too--but somehow she has extracted a vow from him to never smoke anything, and thus trouble ensued. Well, he's not actually under her thumb; he's just dead scared of her, which I'm equally amused and horrified by. (It also makes me want to give them a leather whip for their wedding gift.)

The Monday before I left was relatively busy; we had to do a fair bit of coordinating, because everybody had errands: my father had people to see, I had a pair of glasses to pick up--a most disappointing experience, that; the glasses were one week late and they were available on Monday only because we'd kept calling and threatening to cancel the order. I'm never going to patronise that outlet ever again.--, my kid sister had some paperwork to be prepared and done something about, and there were only two cars. Thus we had a bit of a heated discussion about what should be done first and by whom, and the upshot of it was that (as I had planned, actually!) I had got my new glasses and was free to sit around the house by 5pm or so--I had planned such because I wanted to visit the local swimming-pool one last time. Unfortunately, it turned out to be closed--I had thought it closed on Tuesday because the Pig had said so, but as it turned out he'd got confused with a different pool.

I returned to Spore on the 10th by a 7-hour journey; the journey began at 5.30am in Patience and ended at around 1pm or so. I completed my packing at around 1am that day (having been out with Kelvin and the Pig earlier that night), and now regret it; I left my rope belt in Patience and will not be able to get at it again until maybe December, when Kelvin and the Pig want to climb Mt. Killer (and I want to tag along). Of course I could simply buy more lengths of rope in Spore and use those, or I could modify the computer lock into a belt; but I did quite like that particular length of rope. At any rate it was one flight (the bag I had intended to be a carryon turned out to be too heavy and too large for the cabin and so it became a last-minute check-in, which irritated me quite badly--I hadn't had much of a breakfast), two bus rides, an MRT ride, a bus ride, and then a bit of a walk before I arrived at the room where I've been squatting. I got breakfast around 10am--a tin of coffee and a piece of bread--and lunch at the very end of the trip--an unsatisfyingly small and cold package of nasi lemak, which I suspect was practically thrown at me as the remainder of that vendor's breakfast supplies.

The main reason I left Patience so early on was that there was the SMC beginning the next day; as with the FOC, what happened was that I threw things out of the bag and then threw other things in, then went out for dinner with the roommate and then slept and the next day I set out.

The SMC went well; it was quite tiring, and I took lots of naps, but it was very fun. Also rather saddening, because it looks likely to be the last SMC I ever attend unless the December one falls on a very convenient date, and also because it's a big reminder that my school life is coming to a rapid end.

After the SMC? I've been hanging around in the hostel; the roommate and I are quite comfortable. And of course over the weekend there were the House of Bread reunions and a karaoke session on Saturday during which I found out that the musical tastes of practically the entire House of Bread community are widely varied; very few songs were sung by more than two people. And now I'm here, in So Hour, having just come over this morning; so far I have eaten, gone out to buy food from the buka puasa pasar, watched some TV--it is ironic that I only watch Singaporean TV channels when in Malaysia--and talked to the grandfolks and the cousins.

And now that we're up to date on what is now, I have only the end of Cambodia and the FOC and the journey to Patience left to detail.

August 18, Wednesday 10.51am

Well, then. The last few days of my time in Cambodia passed in a haze of slight fatigue--I am an introvert, even if I've learned to enjoy the company of other people--and then there were three events that week: one follow-up and two farewells, all three of which were to some extent organised by ourselves.

The follow-up event was actually planned even before we knew for certain that there would be anybody to follow up on; "planned in faith" was the way the team leader put it, and of course we had backup plans just in case. Thank God, though, that the backup plans weren't needed, as it turned out. Actually I was rather worried at the beginning of the event, as most of the new believers (towards whom the event was geared) hadn't turned up yet; eventually I did a mental throwing-up of hands and went "well, if it helps even one person then I'll trust that it was worth it"... and within the next half hour or so a bunch of new believers showed up, apologising for lateness due to rain.

The two farewells were interesting; lots of gifts exchanged hands and lots of hugging occurred, as well as exchanges of emails and promises to keep in touch. I was... a weird mix during that time, I think; weirder than usual, at least; I was happy to be leaving for more familiar places, but it was a pity to leave those people--the Cambodians, for all their flaws, are a ridiculously friendly and happy people, and very prone to hugging, which I rather enjoy.

We left Cambodia on a quite sunny morning, and were sent off by a large group of people who'd inquired about our flight times and so on; they turned up at the airport in their large numbers, took loads of group photos, and made us almost late to get through the security scans before the boarding time was announced.

We arrived in Spore around afternoon, somewhat sleepy, and the group almost immediately dissolved as people's parents showed up to claim them and so on; I had nobody claiming me, so I was about to drift off to the MRT when Sir Bob's (he had been my roommate and the only other male teammate in Cambodia) parents decided there was space in the car for one more and besides it was lunchtime.

Thus our time in Cambodia ended; since then there have been team meetups and random get-togethers and lots of Facebook conversations with the Cambodians--I feel quite guilty about having introduced them to that massive time-waster, but hey, it keeps us in touch, right?--and so on. All my Cambodian souvenirs are still lying around the room somewhere.

The day after I returned from Cambodia, I set out again: this time for the NTU Crusade Freshmen Orientation Camp. It's basically an annual camp for people who're going to enter NTU, and of course seniors are encouraged to participate to help the juniors out. It was fun, and tiring, and a pretty okay way to reacclimatise to Spore after Cambodia; the hectic, full life, where jaywalking is not allowed (or safe!) is vastly different from the more relaxed life in Cambodia; although I'm sure that had we stayed on longer, we might find ourselves becoming a lot less relaxed and a lot more hectic: after all we had our moments of tiredness as well, amidst all the stuff there was to be done.

It was during the FOC that I decided to visit Patience--the tickets were actually booked by my mother on the first night of the FOC--and so I stayed just one day in Spore after the FOC to do my laundry and packing, and then I left the next day's evening.

And thus my recounting is up-to-date and complete.