Farewell dinner...sorta

As promised, and dedicated to Yieng ;P

Photos of our meal in a Vietnamese restaurant.

the (so-called) fried rice and the appetizers

main dishes

other main dishes, mine's the one in the middle

These were almost what everyone ordered, there were twelve of us so there were a lot of different dishes.

And for dessert:

banana fritters ;P
(I was the one who cut it, of course...to make it look nicer for the photo)

Most of us had fruit fritters...we could choose between banana, pineapple and apple. This made me think of Penang's banana fritters...we were actually laughing about eating goreng pisang in France, but hey, it's different!

This was sort of a farewell dinner for our two seniors, Chen Min and Teik Siang, who are leaving Lyon soon for their practicals. Some of the others took photos of us sitting at the table...we shall see how long it takes before I receive them, huh? ;)

Another microwave adaptation

Well, I'm on holiday for a week, which is why I'm posting a little more often...

I just tried a recipe I found on the internet. Actually I had found a recipe using fresh tuna a few years ago, but never got around to really trying it until recently. (before this I used other fish, and without white wine which was required as well) Then I finally bought fresh tuna and white wine to try it. But the recipe turned out to be slightly disappointing. And since I still had some tuna left, I decided to search for another recipe using tuna. And here it is, this time it's delicious! ;)

before and after cooking; you can see that the colour of the fish has changed

It's called steak de thon caché (hidden tuna steak), I guess it's because of that "topping" hiding the fish (it's mainly breadcrumbs mixed with olive oil, white wine, garlic and herbs) This dish is supposed to be cooked in an oven, so I adapted it to microwave again...5 minutes at half-power. Just have to make sure that the fish is no longer cold when you put it in though...

(the dish should be okay even without white wine...I left out a few other ingredients myself :P)

Sun goes down

David Jordan’s Sun Goes Down. Very catchy.



Here's the chorus:

Start in the morning, through to the evening, dance like you’re the only one around.
Move like you want it,
Groove like you need it,
Dancing, live it up, till the sun goes down.

And here's his debut single, Place In My Heart.



You know what? I'm wondering whether he could turn out as big as Michael Jackson...do you see some resemblance?

Long overdue photos

Here are a few long overdue photos. I wrote about my trip to Paris during the new year, but I didn't have any photos of when we were at the Eiffel Tower. So here are a couple that I got from a friend:

taken by Gavin, so unfortunately he's not in the photo
I don't know the girls very well, they're friends of Alvin and Gavin's, and they were visiting Paris.
The guys are, clockwise from the one in front: Alex, Kai Lun, and Alvin

the fireworks

(Thanks to Alvin for the photos)

I also wanted to share this video: a hand shadow performance! (thanks Philippe!)

Ragda 2008

I can't believe I actually skipped badminton to go and watch some people dance. Okay, well, it wasn't just some people. I already knew that Yu Hang and Thierry were taking part in the performance, which was why I wanted to go. And when I arrived there, I saw that there were two other people I knew as well.

I took a lot of photos and a few videos with my phone, but most of them aren't very clear, especially in full size. So I made a few collages (they look better this way, believe me)

This is the dance Yu Hang was doing, he's the leftmost one wearing white in the back row. (so we can't see him very clearly)

(remember, you can click on the photos to enlarge them)

Then it's Thierry's turn: he's the guy closest to the camera (my camera, I mean!) Melisa was doing the same dance as well, but unfortunately she was in the back so we can hardly see her in the photos. (look for the shortest girl ;P)

Another really nice dance with flaring skirts and all.


There were of course others, but these are the few that I had enough "okay" photos of to post here.

Besides, what was nice about the performance was also the catchy tunes.

Here are a few Youtube videos of the performance (courtesy of Yu Hang):
Killer Queen (that's the one he was in)
Tainted Love (another friend of mine, Gaëtan was in it, he's the one on the right wearing a red shirt)
Candyman

Those videos are of course better than mine...but nothing beats watching it live ;) What's more, I had a seat in the 2nd/3rd rows (I changed seats during the break)

Some photos of my classmates

Today we finished a class early, and the weather was pretty good (see photos) so while waiting for the next class to start, we, uh, took photos! (lol sounds so dumb saying "we took photos" after the "see photos" in brackets :P) Okay, "we" might not be very accurate since I took no part in taking the photos. I arrived just in time to be in the third. (I was talking to one of the ("visiting") teachers after the class)

Everyone was happy after our project presentation in English. :P In fact they got all worked up over it, but they needn't have worried...our class was for 2 hours, and since there are 3 groups for the project, each group was supposed to make a 20-minute presentation and then have about 20 minutes of questions. But the questions took much less time than that, so we finished half an hour early.

I didn't really take part in the presentation, 'cos the others wanted to reserve me for the questions. But since there were very few questions, and a couple were really about what had been said during the presentation itself, those who had talked about that answered them, and I ended up saying almost nothing at all :P
(uh, so maybe this isn't very clear. But I'm too lazy to describe/explain everything properly, especially after last night's lengthy explanation :P Anyway it's not like you have to understand what happened to look at the photos, which is the main reason I'm posting.)

So let's move on to the photos! You shall see all the handsome faces in GE! lol (GE = Génie Electrique = my department) And all the pretty faces too, of course (so as not to make the girls mad at me :P) All the photos were taken on the grassy area in front of the GE building.

from left: Camille, Aurélia, Ivan, Parvan

I'm guessing this was actually a candid shot. :P

standing (or perched on the stone "something"), from left: Valentin, Saad (back), Marion (front), Camille, Xavier, Aurélia, Albin, Camille, and yours truly
in front, from left: Parvan, Ivan
behind the camera: Olivier :P

Note: the whole class wasn't there.

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Wow.

I am so absolutely awed and I just can't wait to blog about this. It is so amazing. (what I can't wait to blog about is in bold purple. I had to write an introduction for it to be comprehensible)

I just came back from an INSA internal table-tennis competition. It's in teams of two, and we have to play singles and doubles. There were 8 pools of three, and then all those who came in first in their pool went on to play in knockout style among them, and the same for those who got second and third place in the pools. (3 knockout tables)

I was a bit hesitant looking for a partner; 'cos I kinda doubted that those whom I'd like to partner would like to partner me, and those who I thought were likely to want to partner me...well, I didn't really want to partner them. (difficult, eh? Had to avoid some people while looking for some others...*sigh*)

Now last week there was a table-tennis competition in Lyon, in teams of three. I was put in a team with Edouard (Manceau) and Maxime (Petit), and in mixed doubles I played with Edouard most of the time.
(last names for future reference)
Note: the competition I'm talking about is the same one I wrote about last year. Here's last year's post, the description of the competition is in the last paragraph.

I found that the mixed doubles went pretty well, so when I arrived at the competition (tonight) and saw that Edouard didn't have a partner yet, I asked him to be my partner. We won in our pool pretty easily, the other two teams were really not good (pardon the lack of tact) I myself found it pretty boring playing with them, so I guess my partner must have felt it worse. In fact, while we were playing doubles, he had a don't care-ish manner and was playing in a lousy style. (high balls, etc) As for me, I wasn't attacking too much, but otherwise played pretty normally, smashing when there was a nice ball (otherwise it'd be even more boring :P)

Our first match in the knockout table was with two guys from 2nd year ASINSA (one from China, the other looked Chinese as well, but I get the impression that he was French-born). And this is what I wanted to talk about. (the highlight of the evening!) I thought we were goners 'cos both of them could beat me really easily. But my partner, besides winning his own two matches against them, brought us to win the doubles match! I am still pretty blur about how he did it. We lost the first set pretty badly, and it seemed clear that they would win. But we came back to win the second set (they were leading but we caught up) and then the 3rd and the 4th. I really don't know how he did it, I was just trying not to make too many mistakes, and get as many balls back on the table as I could.

That's what I call spirit! We were down and he still wanted to keep on going and win, that's exactly what I look for in a partner! Of course, I was the reason we lost, so I'm not sure whether he'd want to partner me again next time...still, all along the 2nd, 3rd and 4th sets where we had a chance to win, he was saying "pas grave" each time we lost a point (actually each time I lost a point, when he lost a point he said "c'est moi" :P)
Note: pas grave = it doesn't matter; c'est moi = it's (it was) me

About losing...well, we lost in the next round. It was against Loïc and Pierre-Marie, the top pair in AS (our association). Still, we managed to win a set against them! (note 1: they were playing quite "kindly", but I don't think they wanted to give us a set; note 2: of course I lost the singles match against Pierre-Marie, and this time Edouard lost as well against Loïc)

Thank you Edouard for the great game. (I don't really know this guy that well, we hadn't even spoken to each other before the match last Thursday, and I don't think that's going to change a lot in the future)

Some word trivia

When two words are combined to form a single word
(e.g., motor + hotel = motel, breakfast + lunch = brunch)
the new word is called a "portmanteau."

I wonder why it's called a portmanteau...a porte-manteau in French is a coat-stand.

The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different
ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-
coated, dough-faced, thoughtful plough man strode through
the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough,
he coughed and hiccoughed."

Now I'm wondering whether I pronounce all those words correctly... :P

It's Mika's turn

As was the case with The Feeling, I’m now a declared fan of Mika! Here’s a song called Happy Ending:

Click here to watch the video, embedding has been disabled :(

When I first heard this song on the radio, I thought it was a woman singing! He’s really got a high voice. Here's another one of his songs, Love Today.



I have already posted a video of Grace Kelly, by him as well.

Chinese New Year weekend

Or should I say big eats weekend? :P

It was Chinese New Year last Thursday. But I (and a few others) was having end-of-semester tests until Friday. So on Wednesday night we had a small reunion dinner at Goh's place, then on Friday we had wantan with two visitors from Grenoble :D We made the wantan from scratch okay?! Mah and Wen Shao went to buy all the necessary ingredients on Thursday, and left them in my room. Since I finished at noon on Friday, I was the one who started off chopping up the ingredients...then the others arrived one by one after their classes to help. We finished chopping and then marinating the ingredients in my room, then moved downstairs to Teik Siang's room to wrap the wantan. (and cook them, of course :P)

After eating, some of us played Monopoly and some played cards. It was the first time I played "cash-less Monopoly"; actually there was no money, only credit cards. There was a credit card machine to add or subtract money from the card. In a way, it was easier because there was no money flying around, but we had to wait for the machine to finish adding/subtracting the money instead of just passing a bill to someone. And it was hard to gauge how much money we had left, especially in the beginning. As the game wore on, we could compare each other's totals to see who was richer.

On Saturday we wanted to go out for nasi beriani (in fact it was Dinie and I who wanted to go, a few weeks earlier we were already planning to go there after our tests) But there were 9 of us and there wasn't enough place in the shop. (the shop's tiny!) So we decided not to wait (it might have been a half-hour wait) and we went to have bagels instead. The bagel shop is pretty small as well, so we decided to take-away and went to eat on a square near the shop. (the weather was fine :) )

That night we went to Chun Tah's place for steamboat. There were leftover wantan so we put those in as well. Afterwards we played cards (in two groups, 'cos there were too many people to play all together) We left at almost 3am.

On Sunday we woke up late, so Pei Xin (who was staying at my place) and I had crêpes for brunch. Then she left to go back to Grenoble. And that night Dinie and I (bo kam muan :P) went for nasi beriani. It wasn't really nasi beriani, it was actually tandoori chicken with a kind of rice that ressembles nasi beriani. So, I guess it's okay to call it Lyon nasi beriani :P

So what do you think? Was it a big-eats weekend or what? lol

Edit: Here's a photo from Saturday night. Guess what they're doing?
Looks like the thing they're looking at is really interesting, huh? :P

Actually they were watching a badminton match. (on youtube, I think) I can't remember who was playing, I only remember that Lin Dan lost because of an umpire's error (ruling out instead of in or the other way around) so he was really unhappy at coming in second.

I just took the photo 'cos I found it pretty funny that they were all grouped there.

The French are strange

The French are strange. They open doors for complete strangers, but when they see a classmate, they act like they're complete strangers.
(in rereading this sentence, I find it a little funny. Guess everyone is a complete stranger, huh?)

Okay, so those who open doors and those who act like strangers aren't the same people. But it's still weird. You'd think that generally accepted etiquette would be about the same.

What got this post started? I was coming back from the supermarket, and as I approached the door of my residence, a guy was just coming out. The front door system is like this: There are 2 doors, and to get in, you have to punch a code and one of the doors unlock (for a few seconds) And when it shuts, it's automatically locked again. The other door can be opened from the inside, but not from the outside. We'd seen each other before because he lives on the floor above mine (there's only one floor above mine) and sometimes he's in the lift when I go down in the morning. And when I was just crossing the street to get to the building, he just stood there holding the door open for me.

So kind!

Too kind, actually. Makes me feel kinda embarrassed 'cos I would never have done that. Usually I will just hold the door open if someone is right behind me (just so that it won't slam into his/her face) And even then, I'd hold it open while walking away. I'm like, I'm not stopping since that person's perfectly capable of opening the door if it closes anyway. I just walk on as usual with my hand stretched behind me, holding the door open, and when my fingertips leave the door, so be it!

(okay, now that I think of it, it might be because I was holding two shopping bags. I might hold the door open for someone carrying heavy stuff, I don't know. It'd depend on how kind I'm feeling at the moment. And how far away that person is :P)

Another thing that's pretty embarrassing is in ping pong. Some of the players just loove saying "sorry". They say sorry whenever they hit the ball and it hits the net or the edge of the table ('cos it's lucky for them that I can't get it) I've gotten quite used to that, even though I seldom say it, except when we're counting points. But what I can't get used to is when they say sorry when I miss the ball and that it was my fault anyway! And especially when it happens often (I mean when they say sorry often, not when I miss the ball often, 'cos that happens and it's quite normal. lol) I guess when they smash and I don't get it, they say sorry for "attacking" me. But when I miss...sometimes the ball is far away, and they might say sorry for putting it so far out of my reach (okay, okay, so I have short arms :P) But sometimes...there's just no reason. So I guess it might be to make me feel better, making me think that it wasn't my fault that I didn't get the ball. But then...I'm not stupid, ya know. Oh well...it's the thought that counts?


Anyway...I'm in pretty good spirits at the moment. Since last Friday, actually. We had a Maths test in the afternoon from 2 to 5pm, and I finished the test in 2 hours. (plus checking and all) So I left early. I was (am!) pretty confident of my answers as well, since there were a few questions re-using the answers (or something like that). So I'm happy-happy ;P Even a slightly lousy session of badminton on Friday night couldn't get me down.

And today we had an Electronics test...it wasn't as easy as the Maths test, but it was not too bad either...so it hasn't got me down either. I'm still in high spirits. Hope this keeps up till Friday, when my tests will be over.

And Chinese New Year is coming! (though it doesn't feel much like it here) Happy Chinese New Year everyone! (I'm not going to write a post just to wish my readers something ;) )

Vive Lyon!

Here's the description of Lyon given on the Monopoly website.

Lyon is the capital of the Rhône-Alpes region and the second-largest city in France.

It was an important Roman capital before becoming a major Christian centre and is rich with religious and historical sites.

Lyon is known as the silk capital of the world and is a centre for fashion.

It is also famous for Guignol, a style of puppet theatre similar to Punch and Judy, which was born there in the early 1800s.

Lyon is also the international headquarters of Interpol and EuroNews.

The Saint-Jean and Croix-Rousse areas, which are noted for their narrow passageways (traboules), were designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1998.

Hehe, I just learnt a few things about Lyon myself. I didn't know it was the silk capital of the world (I just knew that it was pretty important), or that it was the international headquarters of anything. I'm not sure whether I knew about those places being world heritage sites, though. I've probably heard about it before and forgotten.

And this is Paris' description:

Paris is one of the world's leading business and cultural centers.

Its influence on politics, entertainment, media, fashion and the arts all contribute to its status as one of the world's major global cities.

The city is divided into 20 neighborhoods called arrondissements and, as the city of romance, is a top destination for tourists.

The River Seine divides the city between north and south – the famous rive gauche and rive droite (left bank and right bank) romanticized in many novels and films.

Tradition has it that the river’s left bank is the bohemian heart of the city, while the right bank hosts high-priced sophistication and the world's best shopping.

However, both offer a splendid mix of peculiar charm and posh urbanity.

Paris sounds so boring compared to Lyon. kakaka (supposed to be a cackling laugh)

In fact there is going to be a Monopoly World Edition, and you can vote for your favourite cities so that they can make it onto the board. Lyon and Paris are the two French cities that made it into the list, and that's where I got their descriptions. If you want to vote, you'll have to go to the Monopoly site. I haven't voted yet, I might vote later when I have more time to think over which cities I'm going to choose. (Kuala Lumpur's on the list as well! ;) )

(Thanks to Han Ping for the info!)