This is a daily chronicle of my trip to Taiwan from 9th to 24th May 2006 with Ronghua and partially Boon Liang. I am trying to blog about all 15 days, so it takes time..sorry.. If you wanna read all that have been posted, pls click on Taiwan Adventure category here, or on the left sidebar.

And so we were supposed to wake up by 8am, explore the area to the west of Tainan before coming back by lunch and making our way down to Kenting right at the southernmost tip of Taiwan.

Key phrase: Supposed to

Sleeping in a room that has no windows after a totally boring evening resulted in us sleeping till noon. Yes, wasted half a day. Hurriedly stuffed things back into our packs before going over to the train station to catch the next train to Kaohsiung, which took about an hour or so. We decided to give the city a miss since both of us have been here before and there’s nothing extraordinary here seriously. The bus ride to Kenting cost us like NT$350 each, cheapo us took the 3 hr bus ride as opposed to the 2 hr one since we could save almost NT$100.

Reaching Kenting at about 3pm, we stopped for lunch @ KFC before emerging out onto the main street to get pestered by hotel operators, before eventually settling for a hotel with a fanciful name 旅游之家, ran by this old man. He added in a scooter rental for 24 hrs, and we got a slight discount.

There is a hot spring in the town of Sichongxi 四重溪, 15km away from Kenting and we went to find it. Riding is 2nd nature to me but still it took abit of time getting used to riding on the wrong side of the road, toodling along @ an average speed of 60km/h (Upslopes would mean 30km/h while downslopes meant 90km/h). Of course i have to give ronghua a shock by doing a tight turn which nearly resulted in the 2nd accident of my riding career..but yea close shave..

The cheapo streak resulted in us skipping the hot spring resort and heading straight to the FOC public bathhouse..

No pics inside obviously, there were 2 separate sections, one for guys and the other for ladies, and both are nude baths. There is however no incentive to sneak into the the ladies section after we realised that most of the ppl coming here are the villagers who use this place to bathe. The men’s section had a lot of old men and young kids, and you’re supposed to shower @ the side 1st, scrubbing urself clean before going into the bath. Ronghua and me obviously camed unprepared w/o showering accessories, so we just tried our best to make ourselves clean (read: wayang). The water was hot, but not excessively and it was damn shiok. We didn’t stay for long, after becoming lightheaded after 20 mins and not wanting to ride so long in the dark.

Dinner was beef noodles at this huge restaurant that had more empty seats than filled ones, probably owing to the fact that it was a Thursday night after all. Pretty good stuff..

I always like the effect of long exposure shots, and i placed my camera on the concrete wall along the coast at Nanwan 南湾 when we stopped for a while after dinner to take in abit of the breeze.

You can make out the domes of the nuclear power plant across the bay

The main street of Kenting transformed into a night market with many games stalls, including mini pachinko machines for kids, talk about starting from young. There was of course the games arcade which was 90% filled with basketball machines and toy-grabbing machines, the current rage all over taiwan.

“Good morning Dean, professors (including the smirk face 阿宝, probably counting his mahjong winnings while sitting on stage). Not forgetting family and friends who have managed to drag themselves here on a Sunday morning after watching Germany knock the socks off Portugal at 3am last night, thank you for attending this commencement ceremony.

The 3-year journey in NUS is coming to an end for me and my friends. What can i say? It has been a journey of ups and downs, of pure happiness and outright disgust. I still ask myself sometimes when i’m feeling low: Should I have just stayed at NTU Computer Engineering?

In a way, I guess I got a bad start to NUS when the admin claimed that I didn’t submit my assorted forms, and they called me when I was at my firing range in army. I told them that i did, and even if there’s any problem, i cannot be on the phone when i’m at the range. The lady obviously didn’t believe me, until i placed the phone next to my M16 and fired away at Figures 12 and 15. Later the forms were found, probably due to the encouragement from my wife.

God knows what made me sign up for orientation camps, probably from missing the so-called “fun” from jc orientation. Probably also due to the fact that there are vegetables to be seen. The initial unity with my sci camp OG didn’t last for long, in fact not even till the last day of the camp. Different perspectives in lives, different ideas of fun resulted in the eventual split, which isnt that big a loss come to think of it.

I think a large part of my undergraduate days was spent indulging in the Indian Affair. An initial YEP to Bangalore in Dec 2003 was the initial date, before arrangements were made for a short date in June 2004 to check out a new site where I eventually led a team to visit in Dec 2004 for 2 days. The trips resulted in friendships that were definitely closer than the surface friendships that were established during orientation camps. Clubbing in DXO during science camp vs drinking indian beer directly from big bottles on the rooftop of our houses, take your pick. I chose the latter.

The sacrifices made for the 2004 trip stretched across a huge front. Less time with family and other friends, less time for academic endeavours etc. The latter was a killer when i flunked my Quantum Mechanics 1 module in Sem 1 2004. No doubt that Prof Dagomir made it a very tough module, and no less than 6 persons failed the module, but it was still a matter of putting in enough time and effort to understand the content and attempt to do better. I failed to do so in the 1st instance, and paid the penalty for it. 2nd time round, I think we managed to put in much more effort for the module and passed it. To me, it was the most impt module that i have taken in NUS, not that it taught me ALOT of things or I managed to ace it. It taught me how impt it is to put in effort and how I would be rewarded for sufficient effort put in. It threw me off the 1st time round, only for me, teck and kenny to come back much stronger.

In essence, alot of the physics modules are like this. Without sufficient effort, it is definitely possible to flunk a module. We struggled thru alot of stuff together, yet we managed to have fun in many areas, especially in the lab. I can still vividly remember our 1st lab session in year 1, which was supposed to be from 2pm to 5pm. We eventually got chased out of the lab at 6.45pm even though we could not finish the data collection, and hence kickstarted our career in data-creation. The 2nd lab next week involved heating water up to boiling point in a long and big glass tube, before tracking its cooldown to close to melting point. Dropping from 100deg to room temperature was pretty fast, and in order to cool it further, we had to put ice into the surrounding water bath, which was very inefficient. Learning from the prev. week’s experience, we put crushed ice between a folded piece of cloth and used that to rub up and down the glass tube.

Year 2, our Commanding Officer, LTC Yilin led us in starting the lab like 1.5 months before the start of semester. Year 2 lab eventually became the gathering place of all the yr 2 physics majors, with myself a regular occupier of the new couch where u often see me in a horizontal position.

Year 3 lab was stricter but we still got our way somehow, despite the constant naggings by Prof Tok who said that we weren’t professional enuff when we wore berms to lab, traded and played mp3s, ate ice kacang in lab (Joe took the lead from us and assumed that we could eat in lab, and he brought in a full meal, only to kena fucked).

Of course the final test of a physics degree lies in QM2 which is a die-die-oso-must-pass module by Prof Englert. It’s fucking tough, not to mention handwritten notes that had 200 odd pages. I think everyone steeled up for this module, die die oso must get D at least, if not stay in nus for another yr. No honour still not enuff, still must stay 1 more yr to get a pass or merit. The good thing is that englert rewards effort as well: as long as he knows that u have made a good attempt to understand the syllabus, he most probably wun fail you. We all passed

My fellow ushers at UCC deserve a special mention as well, for it is working at this hall which helped me to discover the people skills that i have when handling patrons. These guys have brought so much fun and laughter into my life over the past 2 years, and i hope that i have certainly done the same for them..

A university education, I realised is not just about fighting for that piece of paper which is only issued once and can never be replaced. It is about the ppl whom u fight on the same front with, the fellow warriors whom you battled together in order to pass a stupid module. Results are seen in the form of a single alphabetical letter with a positive or negative sign, but one should never let them dictate his or her life. The journey is more impt than the end result, for it is where we pick up the learning points and try to improve ourselves in the next journey. I hereby leave you with 2 quotes from one of the forefathers of physics, Sir Issac Newton and wish you all well for the remainder of your life’s journey:

If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.