Well. It's been a very long time. Strange how I always start with that sentence. Anyway, I've decided that I'll only update either weekly or bi-weekly, depending on how much stuff I've got to tell, whichever one comes first. Then again, it shouldn't be much of a fuss even if I don't update. People don't read this anyway. Which is good, in a weird, runabout sort of idea. People leave me alone.
The Lunar New Year is just around the corner and we see ourselves dashing off to supermarkets to buy boxes upon boxes of Mandarin oranges, Yeo's canned drinks and assorted sweets and junk food to prepare to welcome guests into our homes. My family wasn't really the open house sort, but we still needed groceries, so we went off to Tesco. Yay.
I was really looking forward to this because I'd just spent the whole, entire morning at the theatrette in HUC main campus, alternating between spacing out and napping while my Malaysian Studies lecturer went on and on and on. And before any of you say I'm turning from a good student to one who sleeps in class, I have my reasons. It all started on the first day of MS where I was so excited for the lesson to begin, I took a seat at the front. Big mistake, as it turned out to be.
Mr Azri was a lecturer who knew his stuff, but that was in BM. In English he threw my hopes against the wall and crushed them into pieces. He's a good teach, but the grammatical errors stunned me. His notes were literally translated from BM to English, really I'm not exaggerating. Terrible. I cringe everytime I look at the slides. That was the first subject I wanted to sleep through. Paid attention though, first day and all, but every single lesson after that and I shut him out. And don't even think about chiding me about it. Yes, I agree we should pay attention but really, if it weren't for the Powers That Be, I wouldn't even be taking the bloody subject and paying for it as well.
So today we were having a 3 hours replacement class, and Lily and I were chatting. 'I have a feeling that MS is a waste of time and money,' I muttered. Lily glanced at me. 'You don't need to feel, it's a fact.' Laughed quite a bit at that. Lou was right. Lily was crazy, fun and remarkably witty. I'm impressed. Really I am.
The moment he walked in the lesson began with the presentations. Unfortunately, only Xin Yi, Lily and I were present out of the rest of our team mates. Jeya had to bailed to attend her grandma's funeral. Zean Shiung had to go for debate. Eldwin was missing in action, and so was Dhiren, while Joel, who was supposed to present, was MIA as well. So we managed to skip the presentation by giving the excuse that our mate who had the pen drive (yeah, seems it had to be a powerpoint pres. He never told us anything about that!) wasn't present. We had meant for it to be Joel, but when Joel and Eldwin (who got lost) turned up halfway through the presentation, we girls simultaneously agreed that Zean Shiung would be the one we use instead. Sorry, pal :) Almost fell asleep a few times during the many presentations.
Azri let us out for a break at eleven-ish, came back slightly late, and he was talking about something (which I wasn't listening to because I felt bored and started playing with my cards) when he talked about something and said, 'Like the British people say, A hungry man--'
'--is an angry man,' Lily finished, but his version turned out to be, '--tends to be angry.' He then proceeds to write it on the white board, but his spelling was a bit out of sorts and the sentence ended up being 'Hungary man tend to be angry man.'
Lily, I, Xin Yi and practically the whole class was trying hard not to laugh out loud at him. Lily kept on giggling every few seconds and I prompted it by saying, 'Men from Hungary are very angry, Lily. We shouldn't go to that country.' And Azri actually thought we were laughing in agreement with him!
Well, after that Dad picked me up and drove me to Tesco, and I was planning of asking my mum if we could have pizza for lunch because honestly, I've been craving for pizza for ages. Then my dad said the magic sentence: We're going to eat pizza.
Dad chided me for screaming in the car with that exasperated look on his face.
After parking the car (saw a lorry with the lion dance people in it) we went off to lunch. Just as we finished, we heard the lion dance people at it already in the entrance. Sis and I walked onward, just as she was telling me the story of a pal of hers whom she was going out with when they passed by a lion dance. The pal was about to make a turn to watch the dance when he realised she wasn't following, just walking straight past it. So he asked, doesn't she want to watch? She gave him a look and replied, 'Why so jacun one? Lion dance also never see before meh?'
So we were laughing all the way up, got a trolley and continued talking while Mum and Dad and neighbour were busy picking out groceries. Then we heard the noise of drumming and we were like, The lion dance is up here. So we pushed the cart to one side, pulled my sis in closer, and we were watching the first lion (which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a tiger - Year of the Tiger) walk past. Then we saw another tiger, and behind it, the people whacking the drums, which were seriously loud I could barely hear myself. In front of the second tiger was this guy on a video camera, who was walking backwards to record the whole dance of the seoncd tiger. So I was talking to my sis, who had her back to the aisle and thus, the tiger dancers passing by, and I was telling her, 'You know, when the video guy walks back just a few more steps,' she leaned in closer to listen because, as the dancers got nearer, the noise was getting louder, 'They're going to see us in the tape because we're right beside them!'
'What?' My sis asked loudly. I pulled her closer to avoid getting knocked over by the dancers. I explained it to her again, and I was watching the video guy when, having previously pointing the video camera at the tiger dancers who were right in front of him, he suddenly swung the camera to the right.
Namely, in my sis and my direction.
Thought it was a bit funny, really. Why the hell was he filming us? Turned around to tell my sis, when I saw the second tiger standing right behind her. My sis, who had her back to them, was oblivious to this. I don't think I moved, except I was grabbing her arm and shaking it. And she was getting a bit annoyed really when I pulled her arm (she later mentioned that one second more and she was going to say, 'Why pull me in for? Tiger very fat meh? Got so much space for the tiger to walk lah! Even an elephant was walk lah!' Thank God she didn't say it.)
You know how the dancers manipulate strings inside the head so they can move the tiger's jaw up and down? Yep, the dancer inside did it so that the tiger was actually "biting" at my sister's shoulder. She felt the pressure, turned around slowly, and raised an eyebrow at the tiger, trying to see who was inside. I was still frozen there, with that stupid grin on my face, kinda like the one people show when they find themselves part of an act or something.
My sis was actually staring at the tiger's head, then I think she patted it? And as the tiger moved on, I saw the dancer inside (bespectacled Chinese fella) trying not to laugh as he went off. Meanwhile, Mum was rummaging trying to get a good shot of us with the tiger but failed.
Suffice to say we spent the rest of the shopping trip talking about it and how we should've punched it in the nose or something and I was cracking up mock headlines for our day dream and stuff. Got to the point that Dad was getting annoyed and kept telling us to help with the shopping and stop talking so much.
Cheers.
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