Almanac

Nothing beats a simple traditional breakfast at your neighbourhood kopitiam... 2 pieces of toast, 1 egg, and a cup of coffee.... Doing that while I am supposed to be at a lecture in school.

Bingrong was sick, Yibo didn't wake up on time, and I refused to go for lecture. Everyone was thinking of borrowing notes from one another, what could go more wrong.

Coming to the reason why I am having breakfast downstairs at 10am.... cos I slept at 4 and woke up at 9.30. Last night while I was asleep, my dad called me at around 2. His lorry had a punctured tyre and asked me to go down to help him change the tyre. I'm pretty experienced at that... the previous Civic we had did it twice to me... I went down, ready to go...

Next, maybe it's like a series of unfortunate events... my car refused to start... GREAT, a flat battery, without warning, it was absolutely functional 5 hours ago....
took a cab down, helped my dad with the tyre and yippee, it was almost 3...

came back, dismantled the freaking battery from the car and i went to sleep at 4. I left my lights on and slept on the floor, hoping that I would wake up at 7 to catch a bus to school... I did wake up but i gave up cos i know i would just end up sleeping in class. There's still the more Mission Impossible Math Econs 2 at 12... I'd rather catch more sleep and stay awake for that one.

Maybe we should have checked the almanac.... both of us shouldn't be touching cars early morning today. Talk about superstition... but life is always like that, things always go wrong at the least expected time... and when shit happens, it usually flows freely like you're having a diarrhoea...

Infernal Affairs vs Rondo

Apparently the Hong Kong was so successful that the Japanese wanted to get a slice of it. Their answer? A drama series with a similar theme. You might think it would get boring, but I am a sucker for myterious and exciting stuff like the yakuza, detective work and of course spy games.

The major difference is instead of 2 male leads, there's only 1. The undercover cop in the largest crime syndicate in Japan. Played by Takeuchi Yutaka (竹野内豐), it's exciting so far to episode 2. But of course the spy in the police is played by some extra.

The other point which attracts me is that Korean actors and actresses in the show. It's great to see Choi Ji Woo acting someone who's not hopelessly in love and keeps crying the whole day. She's not terminally ill and doesn't have to wait for 10 years to find out if this guy was the guy he was looking for. Great to see a korean actress in a much more exciting Japanese script. The baddie is also a Korean guy, who likes Choi and harresses her every episode, acted by the guy in the "Because I'm a girl" MTV.

Choi has achieved quite a lot of success in Japan despite almost not speaking Japanese... great to see them cooperating...If anyone is interested this show's name is "Rondo" 輪舞曲

Crowded

I look down from my flat and i see an orgy of cars weaving in and out, sounds of car horn can be heard occasionally. And I wonder, what's so special about the NTUC here? Living here has made me so complacent about convenience, that when the ATM shifted about 100m away, i was cursing DBS. Why do they give up a branch at such a good location.



Anyway nobody would disagree that the girl who acted the young Sayuri in the movie "Memoirs of a Geisha" is SOOOO cute. The eyes and the smile...ahhhh....She is like the most suitably casted chracter in the show after Gong Li. I feel like a paedophile... but after looking around her sites in Japan, she is quite a veteran, despite being only 12. 5 movies, 8 dramas. 3 commercials. And i realised that i actually watched the drama that she acted in recently. I didn't realise that till i was reading through her biography...

The winter season of japanese dramas have started again... going through the tough part of watching as many episode 1 as i can before choosing....

Memoirs of A Geisha

Finally finished reading this novel after having the book for almost a month. My initial plan was to finish this book before I go watch the movie. I planned that I would have lots of travelling time in Japan and I could read more than half the book by the time I would be back in Singapore.

In the end, I actually caught the movie in Virgin Toho, Roppongi Hills cinema in Tokyo. Well, Japan and USA had the world premiere, we dudes in Singapore had to wait till January. After watching the show, I'm pretty sure it's going to be a good box office hit in USA and Japan, maybe Singapore too. In any sense, Gong Li's performance was much more convincing than Zhang Ziyi's. And that Zhang Manyu would have been a really much better choice Michelle Yeoh as the role of Mameha. In any case, 3 good actresses from Japan would have pulled off this Hollywood production also.

To make things worse, I ended up reading only 5 chapters while I was in Japan, so when I came back, I wondered if I would even want to finish reading this book. Well, luckily I did.

Usual of movie adapted from a novel, the front and the back are truncated but the movie does follow very closely to the novel. For entertainment value i suppose, so that we don't get bored by the long introduction and the not so happy ending. Some parts were also different from the novel, probably the Hollywood producers couldn't stand more Asian men to be casted...

Finally when I was reading the acknowledgements at the end of the book, I realised that the author did not really interview a geisha as he had written at the start of the novel. It was purely fiction. Sayuri and the interview never existed. Arthur Golden did do extensive research with a few japanese friends who were geishas.

As yogi has mentioned, think this novel is going to be included in the JS module, maybe even in this semester, strike whie the iron is hot yea?

The Barber

I always frequent this barber near my place, and I have done it for the past 10 years. It was a place where old people go, not young people like me, but since the barbers know me, it's not really weird. So as it had been many times before, this old man was sitting next to me, attended by another barber.

He went on chatting with the barber about him studying in an english school, how he learnt his mandarin, how he worked in HDB for the past 30 years blah blah blah...Which kampung he lived in, which part of China his parents were from, and that he's a true blue homegrown 2nd generation Singaporean.

It's just one of those topics that I need to stretch my brain to think, although I could understand every single word of Hokkien in it, some of those road and kampung names just don't make sense to me.

Then I thought, I know all the bloody history about Singapore, Old man Lee, WWII, but then my grandfathers were all but a mystery....

Paternal grandad: born in late 1910s, I know his name, he was born somewhere in the southern part of China in Hokkien province. He was a fishmonger here, and I never knew how he got to marry my grandmother. He had 8 kids, one of them my dad of course. Most memorable phrase, according to my dad, " Ai tak du tak, mai tak du ga wa buey he" which literally translates to "You want to study then study, don't want then you come sell fish with me." He died of lung cancer, ironically after he quit smoking, but he was already way past 90, so he actually lived a longer life than an average singaporean.

Maternal grandad: sad to say, I don't know a thing. I only know he came from Hainan island, and that he died when I was a toddler.

So after getting brainswashed of the magnificent history of the Lee family, I suggest that you get to know more of your own family history, and it would be interesting, i think. Go up to your grandad and literally ask for a "grandfather story"