Weekends...

I love Saturdays. Okay, I love Friday evenings and the whole of Saturdays. Saturday is incidentally the day I was born on. Now tell me who doesn't love Saturdays (aside from those money-crazy morons who're working part-time on Saturdays!). Now, it's been for quite a while now that I look forward towards Friday evenings and Saturdays for every week of school. Funny how I never seem to realise the fun of Friday nights and Saturdays when I was little kid getting my primary education. I guess it's just true that, as you grow older, time passes quicker for you. So the vision of the weekend becomes clearer in your mind while you're at work.

Now for the record, I don't particularly like Sundays. I used to, as a kid. Sunday would be the day that Dad was and is at home. We would get to go out for a walk in the city and eat out. Sundays were also the days when I can get some time off my studies and mum wouldn't sit around poking me at Fractions (she was and still is the strictest teacher I'd ever knew). The only thing I didn't like about Sundays was going to church. It's not that I didn't have God in my heart or anything, it's just that I find going to church to be a real bore. We'd sit and listen for a couple of hours about the Bible and stuff, and then when it was over, that was the time I felt the week was truly over. But Sundays at present are quite mundane. If I was over here in Edinburgh, Sundays mean that it is the time I was supposed to catch up on the tutorials and whatever else it is that I was lagging behind from the lectures. Sunday also means that tomorrow will be the most dreaded day of all human life. Call me Garfield...
Now if I was back in KL, Sundays are just days where we laze around with nothing much to do. Dad no longer takes us out to the city or anything like that anymore, but I guess that's just typical when kids grow up. They don't particularly like to be seen still hanging around their old folks anymore, while parents, inevitably aging, would like nothing more than spending the day wrapped up in the comfort of the house, watching TV or just plain lying in bed. So Sundays are a bore no matter where I am, with the exception of The Premiership of course! Hallelujah thank God for football!

Which just makes Saturdays such a treat! Alright, Friday evening and Saturdays. I guess that's why they've got that eatery chain TGI Friday's! I'm not the only one with that sentiment here. It's the time of the week when you just sit back, dust yourself from all of the worldly matters of the previous 4 1/2 days, and just be lazy. Personally, I'm starting to feel bored going to lectures. I feel bored looking at my classmates. People say kids get bored quickly, but funnily enough I've never felt bored at primary and secondary school, nor have I felt bored seeing my classmates then! I don't know. I hate it when all they talk about is lectures and tutorials, and how so-and-so has found a job at which-and-which insurance company. Like I fucking care! Just because I'm in the same academic course as you does not mean I've got to go down the same life course with you. I've got a job as a life insurance agent. Is that not a job? I've got a job as a recording artiste, as a centre-forward with Man U, as a private businessman, are those not jobs?? Since when has the definition of "job" become as "an actuarial trainee position with Standard Life, Edinburgh" anyway? You could argue that, well, if that's not what you're after, then why are you in this course in the first place? True, but if you put this argument to everyone you meet on the street, you're basically saying that a good (maybe a major!) proportion of humans do not possess the right to breathe. I remember my martial arts instructor once said "Why do people tell these beggars to get a job, since they've got arms and legs? Well, I say begging is a job!" Some truth in that you've gotta agree.

Sorry, getting a bit carried away there. You might think I'm not a particularly focused person. Well, let's just say it's my right-brain at work there. Sometimes I feel my right-brain is so dominant that I'm just not cut out to be a successful actuary. I don't know. Okay let's go back to weekends okay? Right, so now you see how Saturdays provide a solace, a space if you like, for which I so dearly use to "get away from it all". You have it at the back of your mind, okay tomorrow's Sunday, so there's actually the space of a day for which I can deal with my mundane problems, so let's just be a bit lazy today and do whatever I want. It could be watching TV, surfing the Internet, playing games, anything. I've sort of developed this habit from my high school days, of stalling all my pleasure activities until the end of the week, and then indulging in them no-holds-barred from Friday night till the end of Saturday. I'm not sure how far it can take me...

My Japanese in Real Life...

I can speak some Japanese. My standard though, is far from fluent or native. When I left my Japanese class in September 2002, the text book I was using was given a grade of Intermediate 1, after having finished two books graded Beginner 1 and 2. But somehow I don't feel "intermediate". I still feel like a beginner. It's really no fault of my teachers, it's just that I felt the school could probably have given my last text book a grade of Beginner 3 or something. At least I could feel I was just right where I belonged.

I mean I could carry a reasonably good conversation in slow basic Japanese and I know quite a number of very common nouns, verbs, and adjectives. But whoever it is who is speaking to me in Japanese would have to speak slowly, like how my teachers did. I was in fact, the top student in all three of those Japanese modules that I did in the first three quarters of 2002, with an average mark of 95%. Not bad at all you'd say. Yeah, well, not bad for a person of my standard. I don't think it's actually right to say that I can't speak Japanese, because the fact is I can, it's just not up the standard that I would love yet. The thing is, when I watch Japanese programs, be it the news, serials, or animes, most of the time I can't make out a single thing they're saying. The problem is probably I don't know enough words yet, and my brain still needs ample practice regarding the catching of words in a normal, un-slow, Japanese conversation.

Now the funny thing was the conversation between my teachers and us (the students) during those times when we used to go for outings together. We've actually been to the Bon Odori festival, been out for a game of pool, been out to dinner, and even went for a karaoke session together, but the conversation was always very superficial. I've got to say I've always enjoyed these outings though (for some reason!). A typical conversation between the teachers and us students would be something like this.

"Sensei wa Midvalley de poo-ru o shite imashita ka?" (Teacher, have you ever played pool at Midvalley?)
"So, shite imashita yo!"(Yes, I have!)
"Dare to?"(With whom?)
"Tomodachi to."(With a friend.)
"Oooh."(Nod of head).

And that would most probably be end of conversation. I mean if we're as proficient in Japanese as we were in English, we'd most probably have pressed "sensei" for an elaboration, like, is that a friend from work? I mean it's just normal for conversations to go on further from there, isn't it? Another example.

"Sensei, Dou-youbi wa watashi tachi issyouni ban gohan o tabemasen ii desuka?"(Teacher, would you like to go with us for dinner on Saturday?)
"Dou-youbi wa dame yo."(I can't make it on Saturday.)
"Ah, doushite? Isogashii?"(Ah, why? Are you busy?)
"So."(Yeah.)

And that, would most probably be end of conversation. You would have expected us to push on and ask "sensei", well, what is that you'll be doing? Can't you postpone it or something please? Well, we would really have loved to press on, but we're just inadequate.

I guess that's probably the reason why my teacher stopped writing e-mails to me. Because I'm just not proficient enough! My relatively meagre Japanese knowledge just didn't provide me with enough avenues to understand her expressions, and to make it worth her while to continue to reply to me. Much like a goldfish swimming in a small glass bowl. That is all there is that we can write to each other. Our e-mails to each other were never bigger than the size of 2 kilobytes. How're you, what're you doing, where are you now, are you busy...I mean life is much more than just those few questions, isn't it. In other words, she got bored (tsumaranai!).

I guess I'll be happy to see her again. Heck, I'll be happy to see any of my associates from my Japanese class and my Japanese student again. It's been quite a while, coming to 2 years in fact, that I haven't seen any of them. Maybe in the summer...but big maybe.

The Curry Issue...

I was down at the Chinese last night, hoping to catch Match Of The Day there. I've got to say sometimes living in Scotland can be such a pain in the arse, especially if you're a fan of English football. Instead of showing Gary Lineker's presentation of all the day's action that involved some of the best teams in the world (read : Man. U and Arsenal in this case), they had to air the coverage of their rubbish Scottish Cup with all their rubbish teams. As if the SPL itself wasn't crap enough. I even dislike the presenter's (I don't know his name, not that I care) Scottish accent. Maybe I'm just spoilt by Lineker's London tongue, but...whatever.

So instead of watching that crap on BBC1 Scotland I decided to concentrate on my dinner. Nelson had told me that the "Lou Pan" of the take away had sought the help of a Malaysian chef a few days ago to assist him in improving his (Lou Pan) curry. So there he was, offering me a whole bowl of his "new and improved" curry to go with my meal and asking me to try it and tell him what I think of it. It was delicious, no doubt, but then again, it wasn't like it wasn't delicious before this. Lou Pan's issue wasn't whether I find it tasty or not. He probably knew his curry was fine all along. He wanted comments on whether his curry is similar to those we have back home (Malaysia is a great country! At least for food!).

So I tasted it. To be honest, I don't find much difference between his new curry and his old one. Nelson was going on and on about how the new one tastes so much better and all, but I've got to be true to myself...and my tongue. Now I'm no curry expert, but he wanted and asked for my opinion. The problem is how am I going to get my point across without hurting the old guy's feelings. I mean he is a cook after all. Then I finally realised the important difference between how we Malaysians eat our curry and how the people here eat theirs. We don't cook curry just for its gravy and then put it onto the rice. We always cook curry with meat or vegetables. It could be chicken curry, beef curry, mutton, fish, pork, or just the egg-plant and lady's fingers curry that you commonly find in vegetarian shops. Lou Pan was doing the former, cooking curry just for the sake of putting it onto the rice, much like we going to McDonald's and asking for some BBQ or curry sauce from the counter to have it with the fries. And that was the difference! We cook our curry, for example chicken curry, as a dish by itself. You can have it even if there is no rice. It's not a gravy. The curry from the dish is then what we put on the rice.

The other thing is, they seem to think that there is only one type of curry. There is not, is there? You can call beef curry "curry", but you can also call curry "laksa" (gosh I'm making myself hungry here!) "curry"! And these two curries are not the same! You can't possibly have noodles and beehoon with the gravy from your beef curry can you? How my heart aches for my foreign mates to come to KL one day, and then I can promise them they'll know the meaning of good food. I've even told my housemates about "nasi lemak", because I'm very sure they, especially Nelson, will like it. Yeah, we do have the best food here in Malaysia, I'll stand by that till the day I die!