Visiting Minister

Was at and Indian restaurant, Ashoka Restaurant, located in Itaewon's Hamilton Hotel this evening.

Our Malaysia's Menteri Perdagangan Dalam Negeri dan Hal Ehwal Pengguna, Datuk Shafie Apdalis in Seoul.
As such, the Malaysia Embassy organised a meeting between the minister and student. Due to the number of seats available, only 100 students were chosen, and I was one of the lucky ones.

The meeting was supposed to start at 4pm, but as usual he and his wife were late for about half an hour.They just came right from shopping.

In his speech, he spoke about the recent tsunami issues, that the department donated money to the MERCY team in Aceh. He said that as Indonesia is our close neighbor and that Aceh was one of the main factor that our country diidn't suffer much the tsunami caused by an 8km wide crack on the bottom of the sea. Unfortunate for Aceh but fortunate for us because if Aceh was not in the way the states of Kedah and Pinang would have suffered much etcetra etcetra.
Followed by his speech was the normal questioning session. Among some of the questions were consumer's right, doing business as a student and women's role in our country's economy and politics.

All in all it lasted an hour and ten minutes.

And after that was DINNER. Great food. I liked the fruit custard best.
Ate till our heart's content^^

Grandma's Care

I was coming back from class on Thursday when I saw my neighbor who stays on top of us. And as usual, I greeted her.
So she was like asking me, what panchan ( Korean side dishes like radish, kimchi, spinach, bean sprout, ikan bilis) do we usually eat at home. And I told her that we usually just have one or two main dish without any.
So she says she'll bring us some kimchi and cuttlefish later on.

And when she arrived at our home, she looked around and told us that the way we handle our garbage is wrong should separate the bottles, paper and plastic. And so she began to dug out our garbage one by one and put in into several plastic bags.
Then she opened our fridge and saw that it was dirty, and asked us to clean it, saying that we'll fall sick easily with a dirty fridge. She even kindly "adviced" us how to arrange the items in the fridge.
And finally, seeing that we have barely anything in our fridge to cook, she asked us what do we usually eat? And proceeded to make some kimchi stew with the kimchi that she just brought for us. She even returned to her home and brought some tofu and gave it to us^^

End of Starvation : )

Finally, after bearing for a few weeks we can come out of our starvation :)

Got out allowance today, just when I have no more than RM 3 to spare. Praise be to God.
But we thought we would be getting our January and February allowances at one go, but it seems that February's allowance will come in much later....
Anyway, at least now I don't have to depend on pineapple porridge to survive and six growing youths don't have to share a can of sardine.

Coincidentally, today's my piano teacher's birthday. Having no present prepared in advance and no money to spare, I cracked my head and finally had a great idea of changing a card I made some time ago into a birthday card.

After our lesson, she brought us for dinner. We had some sort of fish stew and kimchi beef stew. And my, after not being able to eat such a decent meal for a week, I wallop up 3 person's portion.

Anyway, it's good to be able to live a normal life again^^

Starvation

Thanks to our scholarship sponsor, JPA, we have the rare chance to experience what starvation is.

We thought that we would receive our January allowance around 18 of January, so we budgeted just enough with hardly any to spare.
BUT according to the information I just received, we'll be getting our January's allowance around the first week of February.

So my housemates and I had the experience of eating oiless fried rice, plain porridge, pineapple porridge, plain rice with chicken-less curry and much more.....

Thanks to that and the cold weather these few days, I'm feeling sick all around. Malnutrition. I'm so tired I slept for 12 hours today and am feeling tired even right now....

If the money doesn't come any sooner I might become a skeleton lying beside the main road....

Salt vs Sea Water

A way to look at things:

Which is saltier: salt or sea water?

Which ever your answer may be, the point here is that some sea water can taste so salty that we chock at it.
But the truth is, even the saltiest Dead Sea contains no more than 8% of Sodium Chloride(table salt).
Such a small amount of salt when dissolved in sea water can produce such amazing result!

We as Christians are the salt of this world. Shouldn't we be able to produce great impact towards the society around us?
Yet according to this, the world percentage of Christian is dropping.....

Wasted Time

I used to like holidays a lot, but now I think that holidays are more of a life wasting than fun thing.

I'm coming to the end of my week-long holiday. I actually had a lot planned before the holidays: revising my Level 2 Korean, doing some preparation for Level 3, finish Odyssey by Homer, wake up early and exercise at the park near the place I'm staying....
But in the end I only manage to learn some basic typing...with a hopeless speed of 60+ per minute. I can type faster using just two fingers.

One week...so much that I could have accomplished....

Incheon: Korea Open Badminton Championships & China Town

Went to Incheon to watch the Daekyo Noonnoppi Korea Open Badminton Open Championships Incheon 2005.
There were all in all about 30 students who went. I, for one, am not so keen about badminton, but just to give support to our own Malaysian players, which we were not able to wait till their turn to show up.
Anyway, we met a Malaysian couch who's couching the Korean national team. He told us that most of the interesting matches with Malaysian players will be on Thursday and asked us to come back again on Thursday.
Still haven't made up my mind whether as to go or not this Thursday, but we'll see.....

So about 3pm, we decided to go to the beach, since we were already at Incheon. The idea was quite tempting, as none of us have been to the sea since our arrival in Korea.
As one of the tourist guide book told us that we could reach the sea at the next station, which is the second last station before Incheon station, we decided to save 800won and walk there instead.
So off we went, and the whole journey to the sea actually took us more than 2 hours, because there were no beach or sea at Tong Incheon station and we had to walk further down to Incheon station.
The view at the seaside was...erm....not bad, BUT the air pollution there is horrible. You can literally fell the dust sticking on your face.
We took a walk around, then went back to China Town, the only China Town in the whole of Korea.
As it was near dinner time, we decided to have our meals there. While the others wanted to try the Ajumma restaurant, those typical Korean food stall,my friend Weng Joe and I insisted that we try some Chinese food since we were in China Town.
So after much debate the rest gave in and we went to a Chinese restaurant. At first we had only Jajang Noodle in mind, which is about 2000won. But after entering the restaurant and looking at the menu, we ordered set dishes for 6-7 people, which cost about 10.000won per head.
And so the 12 of us Chinese celebrated our Chinese New Year's Eve dinner way in advance^^

End of Level 2

Sat for my Level 2 Korean Language test last week and officially ended my Beginner's Level of Korean class.
I dropped slightly on my writing, but improved on my oral, so still got the same result as I did in Level 1, 97%. Glory to God.

So I'll be having a week-long holiday, with lots of stuff to prepare: computer test coming up, Chinese character tests, Korean Language Proficiency Test by the Korean government and so on.

I'll be starting my Intermediate Korean lesson next week, Level 3, which we heard there's a field trip going to Jejudo Island planned for us. Can't wait for it.

But the most depressing thing came up yesterday when I was in church. The preacher was using Psalms 23 as reference, which I knew quite well and thought I'll understand the message easily.
But to my disappointment it was one of the hardest compared to the ones I've heard this year. And considering I just finished LEVEL 2!!

Well, maybe the problem is with me not having enough patience, but it's not easy being the one who sits there blankly when everyone else is laughing like they just heard the funniest joke on earth.

Good Habits

The pastor was preaching about the importance of good habits, quoting from Luke 22 on Sunday. Though I could hardly catch most of what he was talking about, but I believe the 1% that I so happen to understood was the main point: the combination of all the small habits that we have produces our character, thus a person who has lots of good habits will have a good character.

But even after looking into the mirror I went away without doing anything. But I did share some of my thoughts with a friend. And his reply was that he's always had the habit of waking up late and going to class late(something which the pastor touched specifically (Koreans?)), and so the next day he decided to wake up early and start his day doing better stuff.
Well, that's a quality I don not have. The reason is simple, because I think that even if I changed for the coming weeks, I'll eventually fall back to the same situation again.
There are numerous times where I said I want to change but look and me right now. All the New Year resolution down the drain!

But anyway, I took his words as a challenge and decided to do likewise. So since yesterday morning I've manage to wakeup earlier and do my devotion (which is actually part of my New Year's resolution...)
I guess it's in my genes that I need some challenges to move on. I am the type who likes competing with others.

So please do pray for me....

House Warming

Went to the house of a women who's learning piano at the same place where I am last Saturday.
She just moved into this new apartment recently and invited our piano teacher and us 4 Malaysian students over to her place.

The apartment is situated quite near where I'm staying, about 5-7 minutes by bus.
We arrived at her place around 1pm.
As this lady wasn't so used to cooking, she catered some Chinese style Korean food, which includes something like butter prawns, some black sauce (oyster sauce?) noodle, wanton and seafood noodle. Yum! yum!
And after the meals, we had lots of fruits as dessert: bananas, strawberries, kiwi, tangerine, pear and also some tidbits.

That's the best thing I like about house warming, the endless amount of food:)