Blog 8: My childhood in the countryside

When I was young, my parents were very busy.  My mother had to commute every day and my father often went out on business.  They were so busy that I was sent to countryside so that my grandparents could look after me.

            I think it is the most wonderful time in my life since I had nothing to worry about.  I spent most of my time there playing with my close friends in the fields and hills.  We often caught fish and all kinds of insects together and we even made praying mantises eat grasshoppers!  We also played many kinds of games such as using a glass ball to knock other glass balls into a hole; using triangle hard paper made by cigarettes’ shell packaging to make others upside down and so on.  We often flew the kite made by ourselves in a big vacant lot on the hill which actually carried our dreams into the sky.  And we used to secretly follow the ox-cart coming from the farmlands which was filled with peanuts to pick up dropping peanuts. 

            There was a time when all of my aunts and uncles gathered together in Spring Festival.  They sat on the Kangtou and chatted together.  My uncles often played mahjong overnight and aunts played cards with me and my cousins.  The meal was well cooked in the caldron and the whole family ate together on Kangtou.   Could you imagine such a warm scene?  As far as me, the most interesting thing was setting off fireworks.  Watching the colorful sparks flying across the night sky, we couldn’t be happier.  In case I set off all fireworks at a time, my grandpa always hid some and gave me a part, telling us there was no more.  However, to our surprise, he could always give us another part the next day.  What a kind grandfather!  He loves his grandson so much that he never blamed us.

            After my grandpa passing away, my parents sold the old house in the countryside and bought a new house for my grandma near my home and hired a nursery maid to look after her.  Every summer vocation, I still went to the countryside—one of my aunts lived there.  I could not forget that place where I spent my happiest time in my life. The temperature was very high in countryside’s summer.  Therefore, my aunt bought many watermelons and other fruits for me and my cousin.  My aunt’s house was villa.  We let the front door and the back door open to let the wind go through, we sat on the second floor, eating the watermelon, overlooking boundless fields, cool and happy.

            In short, I have a happy childhood which I will never forget.  And my dream is to live there again when I was old, happily and relaxed every day…

Blog7.:Reflections of Bejing Love Story

I watched this TV series with my roommates one month ago. The story is mainly about the complex relationships between a group of people in Beijing. The first male protagonist chooses the money and the career then breaks up with his girlfriend. While the second protagonist gives up all he possesses to pursue that woman consistently and finally finds his true love with that woman.       Today, my topic is not about true love. What I want to emphasis is that love needs to be built on the basis of material.  Although "True Love" is always being praised, love should also be based on the material.  Love is something about spiritual level which you can never eat as bread.Lacking material basis is one of the major reason why people divorce. Stress builds up when people don't have money but have bills to pay.  Then quarrels happen as a result of upsets and irritableness.  If this continues over a long period of time, spouses will feel resentful towards each other. They will struggle at most of their time spent together, which might lead to divorce.        Therefore, from my perspective, people should work hard to improve their financial status.(By the way, it is merely my opinion). Best wishes.

Blog 6: It’s time for me to make a change

How time flies! It has been almost one year since the college entrance exam.  Today, I am going to look back over the past year and do self-examination.  Both of my parents graduated from famous universities (my father from Shanghai Jiaotong and my mother from Dalian University).  Fortunately, I inherited their not very low IQ.   While, it only gave me an excuse not to work hard from primary school to senior high school and I still regret nowadays. I think I am a person lacking self-control since I was easily addicted to some interesting things such as computer games. I used to sleep merely three hours every day playing Online cellphone games in a summer vocation. After coming here, I also addicted to some computer games such as SanGuoSha and Starcraft2, which not only did harm to my study but also to my health. As a consequence, I had difficulty in understanding math and C language one time. As you know, I talked a lot about my girlfriends in oral reports. In fact, I did not like to share those private experiences with you. The reason is that I was busy playing games at that time so I did not have times to prepare for oral reports and I also hated to recite something mechanically.

There are many temptations in such a modern world. People must learn how to resist those temptations, otherwise he or she will finally accomplish nothing. I suffered a lot when I was in junior high and senior high schools. In order not to suffer again in college, I make a decision: I will not play or look at any computer or cellphones games any more in my bridging course. I will also try my best to be your reliable friend and be more mature. I really admire those hard working classmates around me so I will be more modest and try to learn as much as I can from them. I know it may seem a little naive and funny to write this kind of thing, but I think it is time to take my study more seriously and it actually give me a motivation to work harder.

 My father's birthday is coming on 14th, April. Dad, happy birthday! Best wishes to you and my mum. And the same to Ms. Lee. We all miss you.

service learning programme

      Having wakened after the alarm went off in today’s early morning, I went to attend a special programme which was really a novel programme for me.  The first novel thing was that this programme was held in the Singapore zoological park where there was a large auditorium. Another novel thing was service programme surprisingly has arranged a learning programme for all of us.  Before the programme begun, I was really curious about which we could learn from this programme.

     After several hours’ programme, I finally realised the importance of this learning programme.  Although, as we all know, action is the essence of service, a service should not only include only these one phase.  Investigation, planning and preparation and reflection, demonstration and celebration are also crucial in the whole process.  If student do not participate in these all phases, we do not get as much out of the precious experience.  Due to the limited time, our group only have finished discussing and deciding the first two phases- investigation and planning and preparation.  We decided our targets we need to and are willing to meet that are helping the children who have the autism to communicate with others and giving happiness to them.  Since it is quite a challenging work, we have to design a survey, conduct interviews, use varied media including books and the Internet, and draw from personal experience and observation.  There are lots of works we need to do before the service.

     By the way, we had a short tour in the Singapore zoological park today for free!

Blog 5: We need enough sleep

I know many people do not have enough sleep. They will not go to bed before midnight. While it is very hamful for us to stay up late. Since we only have one body and we need this body for about more than 80 years, such long time, we need to take good care of ourself. Here I would like to introduce you how harmful it is if we are lacking in sleep.

One of the biggest harm is we might become easier to be down with a fever. Because a lack of sleep can lead to the decrease of our immunity. The risk of being caught by a cold for people who sleep less than 7 hours is three times higher than those who sleep more than 8 hours. Some researchers found out that people are inclined to feel upset without enough sleep. We can rest when we sleep. If we do not have enough sleep, our brain would feel tired and be easier to have negtive feeling. Besides that, people might become stupid due to a short of sleep. You may want to have a hot drink, later you are likely to spill the tea on your clothes. The reason is that people might have their fingers all thumbs after a period of a short of sleep, which is a comman phenomena.

So how many hours of sleep is enough? According to the survey, an adult need at least 7 hours sleep. The time can be longer in autumn or winter . The best time to go to bed is during 9 to 11 o' clock in the morning.

So my dear friends, please give up your bad habit of staying up late. Try go to bed earier, you may find yourselves more dynamic to work or study next day.

Blog 5: Reflections of "There are more dogs than people"

As we all know, Xu Sun, a student with scholarship from China who got into trouble as a result of saying "there are more dogs than people in Singapore."  First, I would like to introduce the origin of this speech to you.  Qingdong Kong, aprofessor of Peking University, used to give critical comments on a video about an incident happened on Hong Kong's subway.  However, the media misinterpreted the speech on purpose in order to attract more attention, which eventually caused a great disturbance.  In fact, he never said that "people who don't speak mandarin are dogs" or "Hong Kong people are all dogs".  I think that the media should not be that irresponsible.  On the other hand, Qingdong Kong had better pay more attention on his words since they may have a very bad influence.  Then Xu Sun quoted the misinterpreted words to complain about something, which also caused a great disturbance in Singapore.  I feel sorry to hear that since I think we should be thankful that we got the scholarship to study in Singapore rather than insult Singaporeans.  Besides this, people should pay attention to their own words especially in this law-governing society.  In conclusion, people should treat the media objectively and be careful of what we say. 

Blog 2 ：Followers of Chinese Style Music

       Recently I have listened many English songs, aiming to improve English and enjoy fair-sounding music at the same time.  English is also great but it reminds me of Chinese style music.  Checking my music list, I found Chinese style music makes up a big part in Chinese songs. And there are three followers of Chinese style music that I like most.

       Jay Chou comes to the first one.  I have been enjoying his music for many years. It’s him that makes me to be fond of Chinese style music.  Jay is also the most famous follower of Chinese style music. Somebody even call this style “Chou style”, though he does not agree.  He regularly fuses traditional Chinese instruments and styles with R&B or rock thereby form a new genre-Chinese style.  His famous opuses of Chinese style includes “Faraway" “Chrysanthemum Terrace” “Rice Fragrance” “East Wind Breaks” “”“Hair Like Snow”and so on.  Jay is the representative of Chinese style music.

       Vae is the second one.  People may be more familiar with his another name—Xu Song.  Indigo blue is extracted from the indigo plant but is bluer than the plant it comes from.  Vae inherits Jay’s style and performs extraordinarily well. His songs, such as “Luzhou Moon” “Rainfall on Tomb-sweeping Day” “Rudimental Snow on the Broken Bridge” “The fated enemy”, are really a hit for us, those who like Chinese style music. He is a competent follower that makes me love this kind of song much more.

       The third one is Hou Xian, whose original name is Deng Wenbin.  Though he is not as famous as the two above, he devotes more time to creating excellent opuses. His songs are almost all of Chinese style.  “West Wing-room” “Tang Song Yuan Ming Qing” “Baby face” are all classical Chinese style songs. He follow this style and created many fair-sounding songs.

              Chinese style music always makes me very comfortable and peaceful from soul. Thanks to these followers, I can frequently enjoy such great songs. Maybe I will also love English songs as well but the feeling will be quite different. I hope more followers can come up and create more fair-sounding songs.

Blog Two: A Surprising E-mail

   For me, today seemed nothing out of the ordinary.  However, something strange came along after I came back to Labrador Lodge.

   As usual, I opened my laptop to check my e-mail as soon as I arrived at my dormitory.  And there were some advertisements for online shopping and newspapers I book everyday sent to my mailbox.  To my surprise, I found there was a letter from my classmate of senior high school who had never sent an e-mail to me since I went to Singapore for future study.  I thought maybe she had lots of things to do in her winter holiday, such as coming back to our hometown, visiting her relatives who she had not seen for a long time and preparing for the Spring Festival.  Since I had never expected her to send a letter to me, I was really shocked when I saw this email from a far-away friend.

   Another thing shocked me was that there was only one sentence in the content of the e-mail.  I really wanted to know whether she had made typing errors when sent the e-mail to me.  Actually I felt a little sad when I saw the only one sentence which conveyed her wish to me. Suddenly, I noticed an attachment was in this e-mail, too!  Since the size of the attachment was much large, it took me a long time to download it.  As soon as I successfully download it, I opened the attachment eagerly and found it’s a video clip……  Twenty minutes later, I finished watching the whole video clip.  I was so excited that my eyes were full of tears.  She had recorded the scenes of great joys as previous classmates were re-united with one another.  In addition, she put our two photos into the ending of the video clip. When the photos were floating on the screen, the caption appeared also which told she would always be my best friend!  The sweet scenes moved me deeply, moreover, the caption she made are not only Chinese but also English!  I laughed happily because of her action at all.  Did she think I cannot understand Chinese while studying in Singapore?  Maybe she just wanted me to use English more often.

Blog One：Happiness

    I have been in Singapore for one month.  Gradually have adapted to all the novel things, I get used to the life there.  Before I came to Singapore, I was afraid that I couldn’t find the sense of belonging. In my opinion, the sense of belonging is the foundation of happiness.  To be honest, my eternal life goal is HAPPINESS.  With time passing, something that makes me gain happiness happened.

    The first thing is smile.  Every morning, we will leave Labrador lodge for NUS CELC by the bus.  When I pass by the entrance guard, she who is an Indian always smiles  at me and says good morning in Chinese.  The friendly smile tells me a sharing, loving person inside. Victor Borge said, “laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”  I can’t agree this viewpoint any more.  The laughter I accept everyday warms my heart thoroughly as if the first light of morning  shines on snow land.

    Besides, the friendship between me and befrienders brings a lot of happiness to me. As I met them at first time, they took me to the university health centre to take our health check.  During the time of waiting for check’s result, we talked a lot and became familiar with one another.  A few weeks later, they organized a unforgettable camp for us.  Even sometimes we didn’t do a good job in “station game”, our leader encouraged us cordially and told us the goal of games is not the success but the happiness we can gain from those.

    Last but not the least, teachers’ care for us gives me a deep impression and their kindness really moves me. One day ,a teacher invited a girl to stand in front of us.   While we were completely baffled  by this strange behaviour, the teacher told us today was her birthday!  We sang a birthday song to her later and I noticed that this lucky girl’s eyes were around with tears.  You can imagine  how deep our  eudemonia is  since teachers can remember our birthday date when we in a unfamiliar country. 

    Well, to put in a nutshell, happiness is just around us if you find it.