Lund University: CNY Celebration

One saddening fact to be realized during exchange - barely a fortnight after arriving here for exchange it's the Chinese New Year Eve, on 22 Jan 2012 (Sun), which is going to be celebrated out of hometown.
Another not so saddening fact is, no holidays for Chinese New Year in Sweden, or in almost all European countries.

Also, as you can see, what a "White CNY".

And so, all the NUS exchange students in Lund are ethnically Chinese, 11 of 14 of the NUS exchange students plus 1 NTU exchange students, had a 'reunion' dinner at Gareth and Wei Ling's house in Stralsundsvägen, Östra Torn.

Preparation






Reunion Dinner

After the dinner, we moved to Yiting and Sy Jia's house for some forfeit and drinking games before the hour hand touching 12, to 守歲, maybe?

Skål!!! (Cheers!!!)

And at 12am in Lund, some SMU exchange students and Östra Torn residents dropped by to wish us a Happy Lunar New Year.

And so this is my first and hopefully last CNY celebrated overseas.

恭祝各界：
龍馬精神　生意興龍　龍飛鳳舞　龍騰虎躍

For more photos, please check out my photo album Lund University: CNY Celebration on Facebook.

SEP Arrival

Doha International Airport

Approximately 6 hours of flight from Changi Airport to Doha International Airport, 2 hours of transit and 7 hours of flight from Doha International Airport to Copenhagen Airport Terminal 2, I've reached the destination.

The place where I'm going to do my exchange, Lund University in Sweden, is so near to Denmark that the easiest way to reach there is to take train (Öresundståg) from Copenhagen, Denmark that travels across the sea between these two countries, or in other words, Lund is a very southern city of Sweden.

Kastrup Station

We just touched this foreign and unfamiliar place with unfamiliar languages and customs, and these definitely made us wondering where and how to get train tickets to Lund.

A lot of us just stood inside the airport and some of us went out of the airport to taste the temperature - cold, really cold, it's like when I was in China.

Well, back to the train tickets, Wei Ming has bought 14 of us train tickets from Kastrup Station, the station beneath the airport to Lund Central Station, which cost about SEK140 each. Yup, Scandinavia is expensive to live in.

Our very very first photo with all 14 of us the NUS exchange students in (at least for my camera)

There's toilet (or you may call it lavatory) in the train, good that you don't have to rush for toilet before hopping on the train.

The train route is Kastrup - Hyllie - Triangeln - Malmö Central Station (Malmö C) - Lund Central Station (Lund C) and it took roughly 30 minutes.

After alighting, we're supposed to find some mentors in blue Lund University T-shirt as they'll be picking us up and fetching us to the AF building for registration, and we did found them, or were noticed by them.

I forgot which track but the track where we alighted doesn't have elevator, too bad we had to carry our heavy luggages through the stairs.

The mentor that drove me is a Chinese girl, who speaks Swedish, apparently sort of like a local student in Lund University.

Registration and Housing
Registration was fast, sitting on chair forming a queue and being issued a welcome package with free SIM card and some letters containing our university WiFi login ID and password.

For housing, I queued for a while and got my room key, whoohoa.
I don't know why but it took freaking long after my turn and till the end, everyone was waiting for Aletheia.
The reason, she couldn't get an accommodation because her contract of staying in Sparta starts in February.
I really did feel sorry for her, but... nothing could be done, the person in charge for private housing was out for lunch, seemed like she had to think of some other ways.

She ended up decided to stay in Min Khai's room for the first month, as Min Khai, Aletheia and I are staying in Sparta while most of the rest stay in Östra Torn.

We then waited outside the AF Building for some mentors to drive us to where we're going to stay, which eventually took more than an hour.

During that hour, I ran up to the AF Building and registered for SUSA01 - Swedish: Introductory Course for Exchange Students 1, which I didn't plan to take because I'm not interested in Swedish and didn't intend to map this back to NUS, but these just lost to peer pressure.

My room (E307) at Sparta

My housing rental is the cheapest among all others, lucky me, and it's very very near to LTH (Faculty of Engineering). There's even a supermarket (ICA Tuna) downstairs, thank God!!!

However, bathroom and kitchen are shared (for Sparta International Corridor), I'm ok with that because that's what hall's like.

My room, I can say that it's bigger than any hostel room you can find in NUS, but one fluorescent light tube is spoilt, and you can only review on that but can't get it fixed by the caretaker, so have to fix by yourself.

There're also stuffs left by the previous tenant like mirror and table light, so I'll just utilize them.

Spent some time to unpack my luggage and set up all the plugs, extension and LAN cable. The bed's springy, the table's big, the wardrobe's spacious enough.

It's 3pm and I should be meeting Min Khai and Aletheia but I've been straying around at the entrance there and I couldn't find them, the sucky thing was, we couldn't contact each other as we didn't have each other's number, and we have to top up first to make calls. I was going to give up and walk to AF building to meet the rest by myself but Gareth told me that the Östra Torn people were at ICA Tuna shopping for stuffs. Well then I walked back to ICA Tuna since it's where I'm staying.

Dinner

Our first dinner in Sweden was pizza at Olympia Pizza & Café, just next to ICA Tuna (at that point of time I was just considering myself as the luckiest one to get to stay in such convenient hostel, haha...).

We ordered three huge pizzas and each of us paid SEK40, which is cheap. And as new arrivals, we'll automatically divide the price by 5 to get the rough conversion to SGD.

Pizzas are common and relatively affordable in Europe, we're definitely gonna be fed on pizzas for countless times in Europe.

Wart

Some call it corn (雞眼), which are pretty similar to wart and callus (since salicylic acid is the most typical solution for these kinds of disease), which I had for over 4 months but didn't really have time to find a cure for it.

Toes are the common places of infection of warts. For my case, it's the web between my right ring finger and pinky.

It looks like this when it's one step from almost fully recovered.

This is really a very late period of the wart growth, or rather, close to its death. How close? Less than a quarter of hour after taking this photo, I manually picked off the black dried 'about to drop' thingy and my finger web went back to normal.

Before this, it grew to be a big white hard tumour-ish thingy which looks horrible and terrifying, but fortunately on the part which is not so visible, especially when I just keep my right palm closed.

If not mistaken, it started to grow in August 2011 and as mentioned I didn't care about it and after 4 months when I'm back in Penang, my mum told me that it's corn and brought me to pharmacy to get DuoFilm (Salicylic Acid 16.7% w/w, Lactic Acid 16.7% w/w) but didn't manage to bring me to the nearby clinic because it's not opened, plus I wasn't in Penang for very long - soon had to fly to Singapore in December.

DuoFilm has powerful scent that you shouldn't smell, unless you wanna get high. It hardens the affected area and I guess makes it fragile to be peeled off when time comes.

I consulted my university clinic (UHC) doctor and he asked me to stop applying first and instead dip my affected part into the potassium permanganate (KMnO₄) solution (it's free!!) to dry the web for infection prevention and apply the ointment (this one only cost a few dollars) he prescribed. Oh ya, and that's when he told me that it's a wart because of the black 'chilies' inside the white shell, which were only visible at a latter time.

One has to be careful while using the solution, if not, it stains all your stuffs, which I bet are not removable even after spending forever washing. It's clumsy for me to dip my palm into the solution as I'm using a disposable plastic party cup for dipping as I don't have any disposable bowl which has larger exposed area. And I can do nothing other than watching movie when I was doing that.

It's becoming better after following the doctor's advice and the black scary things are more visible. They're like rooting into your skin and it hurts when you're trying to pull them out. So just let them be and apply what should be applied and they'll harden and rather fall naturally.

Thank God everything is fine now and I can finally play music instruments with my elegant fingers again!! LOL~~

Universal Studios Singapore

Jonathan (my youngest brother) and me

As early as 10am, we've reached Waterfront station at Sentosa Island prior to entering USS after meeting my family at VivoCity.

You only pay per entrance to USS so it will be stupid if you go late.

Despite the fact that it's a weekday, we kind of visited at the wrong time - December school holiday + post festive season,

The first attraction we visited was CYLON at Sci-Fi City, it's been ages since my last roller coaster ride.

Nevertheless, this one was pretty scary and exciting because of the increase in acceleration in the beginning and a couple of free falls from great height.

Jonathan was seated left to me and he closed his eyes throughout his ride, what a waste, and I wasted my energy yelling and asking him to open his eyes during the ride.

HUMAN is next to CYLON and we're about to visit but my mum suggested that we proceed to other attractions first instead of riding roller coaster twice in a row. Plus, my brother was freaked out and dare not ride HUMAN.

Right ahead of Sci-Fi City is Ancient Egypt, where they have Revenge of the Mummy ride that you must ride.

We queued long for that as well. It's dark inside with those scary Egyptian background music.

The ride was thrilling in an extraordinary sense, it's very dark when the vehicle started to move at high speed and you don't know when will it go downwards. Furthermore there're mummies which rise out of nowhere to frighten you with loud screeching.

And the most memorable - there's a backward drop and you don't know how much it will drop. At some point it's quite painful due to high deceleration at the fire chamber where they light up fire which produces the heat.

Well, the story of the ride comes with the objective of finding the Book of the Living and we found it and sealed the mummy? :D

And we had the opportunity to take photo with Indiana Jones as a token of appreciation for fighting the mummies... If you really thought so... :)

It's already 12pm having queued and visited two attractions, time for lunch.

As expected, food and beverages inside this theme park are absurdly pricey. Bring your own food if you wanna save some money.

My mum was doing her job of planning which show to watch at certain timings, and it's reasonable to start queuing for WaterWorld at The Lost World.

Big crows in the queue, as the show is held somewhere like a stadium that fits thousands.

The actors started off by squirting and splashing the audiences with water guns and pails. None of us want to get wet because we didn't bring any extra clothes. Fortunately, we're seated at the red zone, where they're not allowed to squirt at.
Thank God without realizing the fact that "those in the blue zone might get squirted and splashed; those in the green zone might get some shower.

The show was quite capturing and amusing. The casts (almost all are Caucasians) must have spent time and great efforts for putting such a synchronized and dangerous show.

The next zone Far Far Away is Jonathan's favorite - the dreamland he used to watch in cinema...

... where you'll find Shrek, Fiona, Puss in Boots...

Gingy... lol...


Our next attraction will be Enchanted Airways, and while queuing, we saw...

Puss in Boots

I was able to bring my compact camera with me, so some dangerous shots here:

We're wrong thinking that the ride was for children and it wouldn't be that thrilling (thank God my mum didn't join us for the ride).

The next zone followed by Far Far Away is Madagascar. We didn't manage to visit the attraction Madagascar: A Crate Adventure due to technical issue at that point of time, so we thought of visiting it later.

In the meantime we went to queue for the must-visit-attraction - TRANSFORMER The Ride: The Ultimate 3D Battle at Sci-Fi City.

Now the story begins: we're told that we'll have to queue for more than two hours to take the 4-minute-ride. All of us didn't believe because it didn't seem to be a super long queue.

When we reached the entrance from the queue outside, we're asked to visit another attractions first instead due to technical issues (again?!?!). Are you kidding me? Alright, but we're freaking not leaving as we took so much time queuing to the entrance.

Luckily about a quarter hour later, we're allowed to enter. Yeepie, but well, there's another long queue inside.

And by the way, I ran into Jared, one of my ME3101 group mates when I was queuing, but he's further ahead of me but just leaving the queue to get his girlfriend something.

Along the queue, there's an ice cream man selling Magnum ice cream at $5.50 each, smart guy.

Tired of queuing already...


We're at the mezzanine connecting to another chamber and look at the queue...

Just when we thought we're almost there, as we entered the chamber, there are more queues, and after reaching the entrance to another chamber, there're even more queues!!! Seriously, how many chambers are there?!?!

In each chamber, there're animations on screen to narrate the story of the ride, but then can you imagine how many time has that animations repeated because the queue was moving way too slow?

And finally... finally we reached the place where we get ourselves the 3D glasses, we knew the ride's finally here.
Besides cheering, we had to admit that we really did have to queue for more than 2 hours (2 hrs 40 mins to be exact).

Phew, the ride was simply AWESOME!!!

Well, I think they used low speed acceleration of the vehicle and some winds to make you feel that you're moving at high velocity, brilliant.

Sadly, my mum closed her eyes for most of the time because she's afraid of such ride, although it's not practically a roller coaster.
We're satisfied and thinking that the ride actually was worth our time queuing.

Next, Monster Rock, a musical show at Hollywood. nice harmony for the songs, but all were English songs (again, all Caucasians) which are not really my jam.
The only one which impressed me was 月亮代表我的心 sung by one of them.

Dinner @ Mel's Drive-In, Hollywood.

My dad, Jonathan and I left first for Madagascar: A Crate Adventure; my sister left with my relatives for other attractions; while my mum took care of her grandnieces.

Opps, didn't know it squirts...

USS closes at 9pm, so my brother and I quickly visited whichever attractions that have the least queue before it is closed, and ended up riding Revenge of the Mummy 4 times for the day. Come to think about it, we found the Book of the Living and we found it and sealed the mummy 4 times. LOL...

It's been a long but meaningful day - some quality family time.

If you happen to visit USS, get someone who's willing to take care of your belongings if possible, because you'll have to keep your stuffs in the expensive lockers when at whichever attractions which you're visiting.

And of course, avoid school holidays or weekends. Have fun!

For more photos, please check out my photo album Universal Studios Singapore on Facebook.