Motto sekolah

This has got to be the lousiest error I've ever seen. How could they not proofread this?

noticed on my little brother's exercise book

What's more, their "mission" is to have "pencapaian cemerlang dalam bidang kurikulum". Is teaching their students the wrong way to spell "succeed" the way to do that?

And this exercise book comes from my secondary school...I'm not naming it here but some of you know!

My most beautiful scrabble rack ever

I've been playing Scrabble (Scrabulous, to be exact) on Facebook, and I just got this "lovely" rack.


Thankfully it wasn't the starting rack, so I could make use of the consonants already on the board!

The things people do...

...for a contest.



LYRICS:

(Chorus)
Twistin Lickin Dunkin in the milk so sweet, gonna indulge myself in this chocolate cream treat, I can think it I can feel it I can be it I can own it, cuz I know that this is an Oreo moment.

Sittin at home just watchin the telly, I felt like there was something missing in my belly, I got up I looked around for food I was itchin, traipsing through the cupboards and lookin round the kitchen, then in a certain nook there was something I found, that was chocolatey and creamy and crispy and round, yes it caught my eye I thought I'd give it a try, and it tasted so good it almost made me cry.

(Chorus)

Movin along mowin the lawn, in the hot summer heat gotta get the job done, doin hard work my stomach's in debt, buildin up an appetite and working up a sweat, it was time to take a break for goodness sake, I was hungry had a stomach ache, but for filling my belly no more was I a rookie, I knew just what to do I'd eat my favorite kind of cookie.

(Chorus)

(Crazy Guitar Solo)

Cleanin out my ears so my hearin ain't so whack, so I'll hear if my homie's talkin smack behind my back, with a clean ear canal I can clearly hear a mumblin, this rumblin and a grumblin says my stomach is a hungerin, you can go get a chicken you can go get a steak, you can go grill some veggies and then pile em on your plate, there's no need for worry I've a plan of attack, this Oreo cookie is my kinda snack.

(Chorus 2X)



I found out about these two videos from Cheeserland. I really like the rap!

Of sms-es and cups

Recently, I discovered how to skip to a new line while writing sms. Usually I use the predictive input (or T9) of my phone, so that I only press a key once for each character. But the other day I happened to be using "normal" input, and I pressed the zero key once too many (three times) and an arrow appeared on the screen, and the next thing I knew I was on the next line. So...that's interesting :P It means I can now try "drawing" with symbols, something which I couldn't understand how to do before. (I mean, how many spaces do you need to type in before you get to the next line?)

Besides, I have a new cup :D

What the...heart?!

I've been seeing this a lot lately.

"I heart something something"

And I really don't like it!! What's with this using "heart" as a verb? When did it turn into one? My guess is it stemmed from using <3 to symbolise a heart, and to replace the word "love"...and people used "I <3" instead of "I love"...and then some idiot came along and read it "I heart" instead. And then everyone started following the example and made the same mistake. And now it is so darn widely accepted. Gah!

A few things about Lyon

I just learned a few things about Lyon. All thanks to a Facebook quiz. (if you want to take the quiz properly without cheating, go take it before reading any further)

1. Qui est le personnage se trouvant au centre de la place Bellecour ?
Who is the person in the statue?

Louis XIV

2. Qu'est-ce qu'un gone?
What is a gone?
un enfant (a child)

3. Combien y a-t-il de lignes de métro?
How many metro lines are there?
4

4. Qu'est-ce qu'une traboule?
What is a traboule?
un passage entre deux immeubles (a passageway between two buildings)

5. Quel est le surnom du funiculaire qui conduit à la colline de Fourvière?
What's the nickname for the funiculaire to Fourvière?
la ficelle

6. Les canuts étaient...
(sorry, I have no idea how to translate "canuts")
des tisserands

7. Un bouchon lyonnais est...
What is a bouchon lyonnais?
un restaurant

8. Comment s'appelle la place située devant l'hôtel de ville?
What's the name of this square?

Place des Terreaux

9. Si la colline de Fourvière est la colline qui prie, la colline de la Croix-Rousse est celle qui...
(this is a local saying...I think!)
travaille

10. Quand a lieu la fête de la lumière?
When is the Lyon light festival?
le 8 décembre

I scored 100% on this quiz, something I really didn't expect since I guessed half the answers (some were "educated" guesses, others were plain one-in-five chance guesses like the first one; I had no idea who that person was!)

(All translations are only for comprehension purposes, they aren't exact translations.)

So did any of you "Lyonnais" learn anything new? :P

48 hours in Paris

Remember my post about 24 hours in Paris? This time it's 48 hours. But I don't think there'll be a "72 hours" post... :P

I went to Paris on the 29th of June...the Sunday after my exams. Reached the gare de Lyon (Lyon train station, it's in Paris though ;) ) at about 1pm, then met up with Jiqiong for lunch. After eating, (and taking our time too! :P) I went to Mai's place in Cergy...unfortunately there aren't that many buses from the RER station there to her place on Sunday, and I missed the 4pm bus by only 5 minutes, and I had to wait more than an hour for the next bus :/

The next day Mai had an exam, so I went to the embassy with some others who had to go and get their passports (they had to renew it). I had never been there before, and I think I would never have gone there by myself... (I had already renewed my passport in Malaysia) So this gave me (and maybe you as well :P) a chance to see what the embassy was like.

2 bis, rue de Bénouville

Upon going in, we found ourselves in not-very-big but spacious room

The counter, with Firdaus waiting for his passport

doors to other offices
(here you see steps going up, but on the left there were steps going down, and that was the way to the JPA office)

a shelf (and table) with lots of (not very up to date) Malaysian magazines and newspapers

The metro station was Porte Dauphine, at the end the line 2. There were a whole lot of embassies there...not that we went into any other one, though.

We went downstairs and met En. Yusri. It was past 12 o'clock at that time, and at about 1pm we said we'd like to leave (and that we were getting hungry) Then En. Yusri suggested a Japanese restaurant nearby, his treat. Needless to say, we accepted...

All of us ordered the same thing...brochettes de gamba, saumon, thon et noix de Saint-Jacques (seafood satay, to put it simply) After the usual appetizer (Japanese salad and miso soup, which you can see in my other post about a visit to Toya) the prawns arrived first:

The lemon sachet is a wet tissue to clean your fingers after eating the prawns

Then the brochettes came with the rice.

What, only two?

Oh gosh, a third one suddenly popped up!

And a fourth!
So they gave us only two because those two could reproduce?

Okay la, just kidding. After giving us the plate of two brochettes, they came back twice with the other types of brochettes. The first two were salmon, then tuna and scallops. I don't understand why they didn't bring it all at once, though...it would have been logical if we had to wait some time for the other two, but I only had the time to snap one photo each time before the next one arrived (as you can see I hadn't started eating yet) So it didn't really make much sense...they really could just have waited a bit before bringing us the food.

You know, it was a (purely) Japanese restaurant (by purely I mean only Japanese food) but I heard the waiters talking to each other in Mandarin...so how authentic was it? :P

After eating we went walking about in Paris; there were sales going on, and what's more it was the holidays, so there were really a lot of people all over the place. And it was really hot as well, so we had ice-creams. Here's mine!

There were three flavours, one inside, and the two others as "petals". I was so afraid of the petals falling off...especially since the syrup from the fruit ice-cream was already dripping...

The shop was called Amorino (Italian ice-cream). It was really good (Firdaus the Parisian recommended it ;P) but unfortunately there isn't one in Lyon. The waitress there helped us take a photo with Firdaus' camera:

with Firdaus, Ili and Hidayah

In fact, at first we were going to look for Maoz Falafel in Paris (Hidayah and I tried it in Amsterdam, remember?) We called the number on the paper and the person who answered told us that it was at St Michel (the metro station, I mean). We planned to go there for lunch, but then our plans changed when En. Yusri wanted to belanja* us :P

*belanja = treat

The ice-cream shop was near St Michel, so as we walked out we were saying that we should go looking for Maoz Falafel, just to see what it was like, since we had already eaten. And guess what, upon stepping out, Maoz Falafel was just opposite us. Haha, talk about coincidence. Luckily we noticed it before going to look for it everywhere else but there :P

The next day (Tuesday, 1st of July) I took my flight back. From Cergy, there's a bus going straight to the airport, and the good thing is that it's not even a special bus, we can use normal public transport tickets on it! (It took about 1 hour and 15 minutes) In Lyon a student ticket to get to the airport costs 6€50, and I believe a normal ticket costs about 8€ or 9€.

The Paris-KL flight was pretty empty...just look at this photo I took at 12pm:


The plane was supposed to take off at twelve, but then there was an announcement saying that about 20 passengers were still passing through security, and that we'd have to wait a bit. But even after we took off, the seats around me (I was sitting near the back) were only about half filled up. Not that I was complaining, though, I had the two window seats to myself, making it easy to move in and out, and there was less wait for the toilet :P

At KLIA, I had to take my connecting flight to Kuantan. I arrived at 6.40am and after getting my boarding pass, it was a little past seven. (I didn't have to get my luggage because it was checked in all the way to Kuantan) The boarding gate was B9, and I decided to go there right away, seeing as I had nothing else to do anyway. But when I reached B9, the screen said that the gate had been changed to B10. Along the way I also saw that several other flights had changed gates. So I waited at B10, and half an hour before the flight, they changed the gate again, to A2 this time. That was at the other end of the terminal! There were really a whole lot of gate changes that morning, lots of announcements about that...I wonder what was going on.

So now I'm back home in Kuantan till mid-September. I don't have any plans yet though...for starters, it shall be eat-sleep :D

The French-English divide - it's not that wide

Moi aussi, moi non plus...it exists in English!

I never noticed this before while I was learning the rules of how to use these phrases... (in French, I mean)

J'aime le chocolat (par exemple) -> Moi aussi.
Je n'aime pas le chocolat. -> Moi non plus.

And the English equivalent:

I like chocolate. -> Me too. / I like chocolate too.
I don't like chocolate. -> Me neither. / I don't like chocolate either. (and NOT neither!)

This was a "revelation" I got last February...I noted it down for "safekeeping", meaning to write about it on my blog later, and it turns out that "later" is much later! :P

[postdated entry - after all this time, delaying the post for a few more days couldn't hurt!]