pictures!

ignore the poser-ness of it. this is taken in my room in kuching. this is how i look then.
i like my hair.

few weeks later,still in kch, hair getting longer but still presentable.

and then, it grew alot thicker and i didnt like how i look, as if im wearing a wig :(

so before i left for ireland, i trimmed it. my regular hairdresser was unavailable and since it was last minute (story of my life), i went to another salon.

and i hate how it looks now!(taken in my apartment, ireland) i feel like my head is twice the size as it should be.

i feel like susie derkins. oh well. it will grow.

okayy. enough about me :P

trinity college. taken on the day we 1st landed. and after taking this pic my camera died! great. notice the pretty blue sky. it doesnt last here.

see? all grey and misty. view right out of my window. thats st stephen's green shopping mall. so convenient :D

the rest of the pictures were taken while on my way to another mall in dublin 1.
sorry if its abit blur and little,
was in a hurry to get there since it was cold and the sky was threatening to cry giant tears


along grafton street.flowers! i like!


so empty! usually its packed with people and performers but i was early.

they played good
i snapped this while crossing the road. not bad eh :D

like my heart :P

this pic turned out surprisingly bright and sunshiny. dont let it fool you!

the sun here is useless in radiating heat.

trinity college. the outside of it. notice the brown door? once u go in, its acres of land stretching out with different buildings like the 1st one ive shown you. very beautiful. it feels more like a museum and park kinda place instead of a uni.i mean you can see groups of tourists are brought around and stuff.

bank of ireland. back entrance. front is grander but i had to be at the other far side of the road to take a full view pic with all its statues. next time :)

as you can see, this shot is has a bit of darkish tint but still okay.anything after this shot is destroyed by the blackening sky.very gloomy. like the one below.

or the rest blurry (most of the pics are taken on the move, didnt really stopped much to actually take a proper shot)

my vow;

i MUST fill my camera with beautiful shots of the place to make up for all the mis-opportunes! ah serves me right for being so lazy when the weather was so good.

as bugs bunny would say,' thaaaattts all folks!' :D

loves

To whom it may concern

i choose to ignore hints, not because i'm oblivious.

i do it to avoid addressing the issue.

and you, of all people, should know better.

Terry Fox

Terry Fox was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and raised in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, a community near Vancouver on Canada's west coast.

An active teenager involved in many sports, Terry was only 18 years old when he was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma (bone cancer) and forced to have his right leg amputated 15 centimetres (six inches) above the knee in 1977.

While in hospital, Terry was so overcome by the suffering of other cancer patients, many of them young children, that he decided to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research.
He would call his journey the Marathon of Hope.

After 18 months and running over 5,000 kilometres (3,107 miles) to prepare, Terry started his run in St. John’s, Newfoundland on April 12, 1980 with little fanfare. Although it was difficult to garner attention in the beginning, enthusiasm soon grew, and the money collected along his route began to mount. He ran 42 kilometres (26 miles) a day through Canada's Atlantic provinces, Quebec and Ontario.

It was a journey that Canadians never forgot.

However, on September 1st, after 143 days and 5,373 kilometres (3,339 miles), Terry was forced to stop running outside of Thunder Bay, Ontario because cancer had appeared in his lungs. An entire nation was stunned and saddened. Terry passed away on June 28, 1981 at age 22.

The heroic Canadian was gone, but his legacy was just beginning.

To date, more than $400 million has been raised worldwide for cancer research in Terry's name through the annual Terry Fox Run, held across Canada and around the world

****

Terry’s Letter Requesting Support For His Run

The night before my amputation, my former basketball coach brought me a magazine with an article on an amputee who ran in the New York Marathon. It was then I decided to meet this new challenge head on and not only overcome my disability, but conquer it in such a way that I could never look back and say it disabled me.

But I soon realized that that would only be half my quest, for as I went through the 16 months of the physically and emotionally draining ordeal of chemotherapy, I was rudely awakened by the feelings that surrounded and coursed through the cancer clinic. There were faces with the brave smiles, and the ones who had given up smiling. There were feelings of hopeful denial, and the feelings of despair. My quest would not be a selfish one. I could not leave knowing these faces and feelings would still exist, even though I would be set free from mine. Somewhere the hurting must stop... and I was determined to take myself to the limit for this cause.

From the beginning the going was extremely difficult, and I was facing chronic ailments foreign to runners with two legs in addition to the common physical strains felt by all dedicated athletes.
But these problems are now behind me, as I have either out-persisted or learned to deal with them. I feel strong not only physically, but more important, emotionally. Soon I will be adding one full mile a week, and coupled with weight training I have been doing, by next April I will be ready to achieve something that for me was once only a distant dream reserved for the world of miracles – to run across Canada to raise money for the fight against cancer.

The running I can do, even if I have to crawl every last mile.

We need your help. The people in cancer clinics all over the world need people who believe in miracles.

I am not a dreamer, and I am not saying that this will initiate any kind of definitive answer or cure to cancer. But I believe in miracles. I have to.

Terry Fox, October 1979

taken from http://www.terryfoxrun.org/ read about the marathon of hope there. its so touching. i survived one day of stressing out my limbs just walking for miles in the blasting 60km/hr wind to volunteer for the run and that is just a bare inkling of what its like for this amputee who ran in conditions worse off. hats off to you, terry fox.

party!

Yay! Our birthday surprise did work. Yvonne was totally caught off handed! Its her birthday tomorrow and since we found out she wont be around, we moved the pot luck up yesterday.
Everyone was like in a flurry after friday's class and there was a big confusion over who is actually cooking what. Haha we ended up cooking too much rice and so we had some sort of a fried rice party for dinner just now :P like 3 variations of fried rice? hehe AND even after, theres still leftover rice. so tomorrow is another shot at it.

Everyone gathered in her apartment (she shares with a few others so we gained easy access) at 6.15pm while she was out. So we had everything ready, just waiting for the birthday girl. Her sister came over from ucd and she had with her a brownie cake she baked. OMG it was sooooo good!! our plan to hide in one of the rooms and pounce on her screaming 'SURPRISE!!'. the timing didnt work out but she was still thoroughly shocked :)

Went well. Was really fun. Lovely company, loads of laughter, jokes. Home-cooked good food and about 6 litres of orange soda! :D

i charged my camera! Hallelujah. But the weather today wasnt so good so the pictures i took came out with dark, grey emo sky. Super freezing cold today. well, everyday it is, but today was SUPER super.

time for a nice cup of hot chocolate. brilliant.

random moments

the irish are starting to speak manglish!

michael john: HEY you said 'LAH' !! what does it mean?

we explained saying its a kind of a reinforcement for..ANYTHING, gave examples like 'of course lah, yeslah, nolah, i dont knowlah'

he tried out a few sentences by randomly adding lah into them. looking so serious hahha

another guy: michael, what are you doing??

michael: im working the 'lah' !

:P
__________________________________________________________

Elijah, in deep thought, crossing the road, suddenly turned around to the bunch of us behind him.

'EH, ORANGE GROWS FROM ORANGE TREES AR???'

he was so random, surprised, and his expression made us break into fits of laughter.

someone: 'if not? apple trees ?'

Elijah: 'nolah , maybe they grow from the ground wad'

i love moments like these.

yoooo

what ive been up to the past week.

being soaked.

been rainy quite abit these days.

our seniors are such sweeties. :) they organised a bbq for us on friday but it was super rainy so we settled indoors instead.all in all, very nice. key words to make my life simpler :P : camden hotel. good company. budweisers. magic tricks. fooood. st. bernard. 30 cents

did my garda card the next day! immigration thing so i dont get deported :P i was so happy because i thought it was a one shot thing but then someone told me we have to renew it every year. :( we met up at 530am and started walking in the freezing cold to the immigration office to queue up outside the freakin building. we sacrificed good amounts of sleep because by 6-ish, the queue is all around the building. not bad la considering out seniors went at THREE AM last year! like what?? too much man. might as well camp there.

walking around in single digit temperature is okay, staying motionless for hours in such condition is another matter. so sleep deprived we look like hobos sitting out in a line :P have to go thru that 2 more times. ah, joy.

at night we went for the mini-oktoberfest! the real one is munich so they hold a small one here in dublin! i think its their 1st year doing this? anyway the food on sale was soooooooooo goood. and expensive but what the hell, its only here once a year. and no, i didnt get drunk :) heh no pictures but i think my friends have some. we managed to coerce a woman dressed in those maiden costumes complete with wooden basket to take a pic with us. :D

i hate rain. it makes everything look so gloomy. anatomy is still a bother. even the prosactor today demonstrating on my group cadavers told us that he thinks its not a good idea to shove a whole load of info suddenly down our throats. things which we have no clue and background about. oh well. cardsigning is up on nov 7!!! card signing sounds like...signing greeting cards right? but not here! its when the anatomy profs quizzes you individually on anatomy and the marks add up to your final mark. so scary man.

terry fox run is on this sunday! i dont know if i want to go since its running. something im not very keen or good at :P but its for charity. ild think about it.

just came back from fencing. we get to wear the costume and stuff. pretty cool. had a real match today and really its a good workout. when u watch it on tv, it looks like ah, just stabbing and stuff. but its fast and once youre in it, you really work up a sweat. and its damn tiring. theres a match on sunday but us newbies only had like, one practice? :P

ok better wash up. g'night loves

:)

its 11.44pm and i have good news. MY MSNGER WORKS! still experiencing little kinks in it but however imperfect it is i just feel so much better signed in even if no one is awake. its like as if im connected home.

i have an 8am lecture tomorrow and im dead tired. today's timetable was insane. and even though im tired to the bone, i just cant get to sleep. so here i am typing away to at least feel like i did something productive (nevermind the tons of lecture notes im supposed to go over). i can hear laughter from the streets below my windows.the night is young. ild take pictures soon when i finally charge my camera. :D which would be never. i better make it a point. i missed so many lovely photo opps of the place but im here for quite sometime so no worries!

do you watch scrubs? the comedy series thing? i dont. but if youre familiar with the series, the TODD or robert maschio came to royal for a stand up comedy thing. pretty fun albeit obscene. haha.

if you happen to have the pleasure of chatting with me probably around exams coming about its common to hear me say OMG IM SO DEAD or IM GOINGG TO DIEEE

and in one of the lectures yesterday, the lecturer was going on about people losing blood. all of a sudden he looked across the hall and went,(vaguely and not word for word)

'Anyone from Malaysia?'

a few hands went up

'Are any of you malaysians involved in a street gang in malaysia? Have you killed anyone?'

what the... if we did we wont tell you right? :) so no hands went up

and then he continues

'Okay, so you guys are shy about that so how do you go about killing a malaysian?'

noises from the audience

'Well, normally i would suggest cutting anyone at the throat from behind. that does the trick, i mean, if you stab me in the spleen (he's irish) i would lose a substansial amount of blood but not fatally. malaysians, however, have a high rate of splenomegaly among them where their spleens are enlarged. so stab them in the spleen, they lose a hefty amount of blood and die'

more noises from the audience

and he tops it off with

' if you dont like a certain malaysian classmate of yours, you can try that out'

:P yeah, thanks alot Prof Farrell, for reducing my life expectancy.

NOW YOU KNOW!

okay i better get some sleep before i dose off in embryology lectures in 8 hours time. i only have 2 tomorrow! yay! and then some reading to catch up on. i always tell myself i would, TOMORROW and never happen. the faculty keeps telling us of how people fail because they left their studying to NOVEMBER. wth thats like only one month of slacking =.=' so yeah wish me luck. gonna need loads of it.

Eireann

Hello everyone! Im doing well in Ireland, settling in bit by bit and adjusting to the cold. I wanted to blog earlier on but just couldnt find the time so now, instead of going through my anatomy notes, im here... =.=" so typical right? :P

i arrived last friday and at that time, the weather was awesome! nothing like how everyone describes it and we were starting to get used to it until middle of the week when it started to get colder and colder. now its FREEZING! and its not even winter yet! so i dont want to know how winter would be like.

oh yeah 1st things 1st before i start brambling on and on.

**

HOW TO CONTACT ME. (whoa, its like a manual)
I have my new mobile/landline/address! so if you want it, please e-mail me and ild gladly comply. do NOT instant message me on msn because its not working on this laptop the school gave. some of my friends here found a way to bypass that but i didnt have the time to get it done. so many things to do! i have skype though and im still learning how to use it! i tell you technology hates me but this time i must conquer it! :P and i have a new webcam. yay.

i have to be online basically most of the time (which is not a good idea because see, what am i doing now?) because all my lecture notes, timetable even attendance and everything under the sun to do with sch is on their portal. so if i lose my laptop...heh. and they communicate with us using our student email accounts so ild be checking that practically daily and more often than my hotmail so if you guys are in dire need to contact me (which i doubt would ever come to that) you can always email me there.

**

things are pretty hectic here. and its only the 1st week! after ONE day of orientation, we had lectures the next day. its fresher's week but the activities are held AFTER the long day of lectures. dont know why one week off is such a big deal. anyway im happy to report that people here are amazingly friendly! most of the angmos are pretty good looking! :D no, im not targetting, i'm just SAYING.

oh yeah speaking of which, it has come to my attention that my previous post seem to generate some speculation that its about a certain somebody. and so i exclaim, 'OH PLEASE!' and lets leave it at that. i would like to add on but umm i better not :)

anyway, i have a rant! we had our 1st anatomy class on friday and OMG its so freakin hard. i didnt understand A WORD the lecturer was saying. with all the new medical vocabs like medial to this and lateral to that...ahhhhhhhhh! i guess it would get better when i get use to it but till then, AHHHHHHHHhhhhh. we're starting on the lower limb. i hope i survive. we got to dissect ( is that the right word?) the cadavers. it was so cool! i really admire those who sacrificed their bodies to be right under our scalpels. i mean how many of us would actually do that?

my sch is pretty welcoming. we had the white coat ceremony a few days ago and the speeches were so touching. the together-ness, the reassurance. remind me of times like these when im losing all hope.

i like the atmosphere here. its lively, sometimes too lively but it still has its serene side.dont know how to explain. its just different from what im used to. the people, how theyre so open and sporting and stuff. when we 1st touched down in ireland it was 745am dublin time and immediately our seniors brought us around. the buildings are so lovely. esp the churches! with its gothic look and the beautiful parks. ild have to take out some time and really explore those. i cant study all the time right.

i joined 14 clubs! talk about semangat man. well, it was free so we all just signed up for anything that remotely interests us and then later when we work out our scheldule only really commit to a few.

theres actually so much more things to say but i think i should stop here. its getting so long! and i dont want to bore you :) all in all, im pretty contented at the moment.it got pretty lonely the 1st few days but im coping and making more and more friends. im not sure when i would blog again at the rate things are going but you can always skype me and stuff so we all wont lose touch.

im pretty excited to be really living independantly. im guessing i would hate it 92% of the time but it would build character as calvin's dad from calvin and hobbes would say :P i hope i turn out to be a better person.

ok, im starting to sound like a hallmark thing :) see all of you real soon!

loves.