So classes at Stanford start tomorrow, and I am SUPER DUPER EXCITED because this is the first time in 9 months that I am touching my books again, and oh god it feels sooo goood just to be running my fingers over pages and touching fresh foolscap paper and colour coding my subjects in my file... Okay that sounds a leeeetle creepy, but what the heck man. No one's gonna judge me here because Stanford is a safe space for me to be myself and bloom intellectually like a thousand flowers in spring (I got that from the Singaporeans @ Stanford handbook lol)

Anyway I was preparing for my first Math 51 lecture (on linear algebra) by reading my old linear algebra textbook. It felt strange and yet familiar - I'd forgotten half the definitions, or I thought I'd forgotten them, because when I read them they seemed to awaken some old memory, and trying to understand linear span wasn't quite as tough this time around as it was last time. And the little notes in the margins were so cute.

4. Let V3 = { (1, a) | a ∈ ℝ} ⊆ ℝ2. V3 is not a subspace of R2. Note that (0, 0) ∉ V3, which violates theorem 3.2.5.1.
"Let's see if its a subspace."
"It's not la. Don't waste time."

It's a little ironic perhaps that it is only when I am so many miles away from my NSF boyfriend that I am actually starting to empathize with him - when he talks about route marches and his bunkmates and missing home. I could sympathize, and I felt sad when he was sad, but now this sadness is a kind of feeling that bubbles up from within rather than as a response to his.

Every morning, when I drag myself onto the long walk to the Main Quad (as everyone else cycles past), I tell myself that this is simple, compared to fast marches. And then my legs start to carrying me a little faster, and before I know it, I am there. When I groggily rub sleep from my eyes at 7am (an unholy hour for college folk) to check my phone for text messages and try my best to reply coherently, I think of how my phone buzzes at 2pm Stanford time, meaning that somewhere out there on the other side of the world, there is someone waking up at 5am.

Pandang kekiri - eyes left and head tilted upwards, which also makes for an excellent moon viewing position.

Kids say the weirdest things sometimes. For my first few days in USA, we stayed with my mum's friends, who have a four and a half year old daughter who likes to talk a lot. Here are just some of the things she did that I had the opportunity to observe, which are creepy and yet cute in a certain way.

Kid: *upon getting a new pony soft toy* "I got a new pony! I love it and I sleep with it and I take naps with it alllll the time."
Her mum: "You don't often take naps."
Kid: "Yes I do! I nap with my pony alllll the time."

And then she promptly decided to "take a nap" that day, and lay down whispering to her pony for 15 minutes that her parents had to escape from the room to get some peace and quiet.

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Kid: "Is your mummy good at driving? My daddy's very good at driving. He can drive with one hand, and pick his nose with the other."

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Kid: *upon listening to me talk about a boy in my class* "Is he your boyfriend?"
Me: "No, he's not my boyfriend!"
Kid: "Is he a girl then?"
Me: "Um, no, he's a boy..."
Kid: "Then he must be your boyfriend."

Haha, the kid said it, not me!

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Kid: "Does your boyfriend come to your house and trash the place and leave it for you to clean up?"

Hahahahaha completely without context! I wonder where she got that from actually.

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Oh dear I think when I have kids in future, I will be obsessively tweeting their every words. Adorbz.

In USA, there are so many strange things - people eat portions the size of my family's combined meals... with appetizers and room for dessert. My mum and I were at the Olive Garden today for lunch, and we were delighted to discover that we actually could finish a pasta dish (which came with a soup and unlimited delicious breadsticks) between the two of us. I later discovered that Olive Garden has been receiving some bad press for having tiny portions. So.

And on one hand, you have people who are total health freaks: everything has to be organic and hand-grown and free trade and gluten free and enhanced with vitamins. There are tons of little grocery stores all over the place selling "special" food like that, but of course it's expensive and I'm always rather suspicious of things that look too healthy. All I want is, yknow, Waffle Crisp, not organic premium rolled oats.

Then on the other hand, you have McDonalds, which sells you 10 McNuggets for $4.39, and 20 McNuggets for $4.99. Yup - the next 10 McNuggets go for 60c, which is so cheap that you just end up getting 20 McNuggets in total. It's the same concept as ionization energy for transition metals, I swear, and now I have a much deeper appreciation of that concept. Except between my mum and I, we could only finish 8 McNuggets before surrendering, and the remaining 12 are chucked in our fridge for the next meal(s). Sigh, it's lucky we have a fridge. If not, we would probably be throwing out enough food to feed a small army.

Anyway, we've moved to Stanford now, and the weather is warmer (though chilly, when the wind blows!). The sun, however, is EXTREMELY GLARING, and I am burning up even though I'm remaining cool and all. It's a very weird sensation really. There is also literally not a single cloud in the sky, and oh my god it's just a gorgeous blue. Pics are on Facebook, if you wanna stalk. Stanford (what little I've explored!) is amazing too; it's got the same sort of laid-back feel as Cambridge does, and the same SMELL. It's like, Eau de Academic Old Buildings, I dunno. But yeah, the palm trees are cute too! I'm not entirely sure if they're palms though, because they have some kind of thing that looks like a pineapple beneath their leaves.

Hi guys I'm on the other side of the world (um, only if you're in Singapore and its surrounding areas) now, and the weather is excellent! It's cool - by Singapore standards at least - and sunny and there is so much WIDE OPEN SPACE.

And my mum's friend, who is currently hosting us before we traipse over to Stanford, is really super nice! Their house is nice and big, and would probably cost at least a few million if bought in Singapore, but houses like these are apparently the norm here. They have 2 cars cos apparently cars and petrol is cheap, and so they brought us all around the Redwood City area today shopping for supplies. I got my bedsheets and stuff (hooray for Labour Day Macy's sales!), and we explored some of the supermarkets nearby including an Asian supermarket and an organic supermarket called Whole Foods.

The Asian supermarket is the stuff of dreams. It has EVERYTHING - an entire aisle is dedicated to soy sauces and chilli pastes and fish sauces and satay sauces... not to mention condiments and ingredients for almost every other Asian cuisine imaginable. There are also Asian crackers and biscuits, and they even have Khong Guan biscuits! I also grabbed a huge bottle of Calpis, which I have been craving ever since a holiday to Japan many years ago. They even have mango and strawberry flavours, and it's not ridiculously expensive like it would be in Singapore.

Whole Foods has lots of organic food and other kitschy stuff. It's like paradise for fussy eaters, cos they have all sorts of exotic things like gluten-free stuff, and a hundred varieties of mac and cheese (permutations of the macaroni type, and also the cheese type - do you like four cheese, aged cheddar, white cheddar...). And my mum's friend has a "fruit and vegetable scrub" next to the kitchen sink, which made me a little confused at first because I thought it was a body scrub scented with fruit and veg, and only realised after awhile that it was literally a scrub FOR fruits and vegetables. Like wow. Okay.

The neighbourhood I'm in is really quiet at night. I can honestly feel my ears humming with the weight of silence - it feels a little weird and sometimes I think I'm hearing something in the background, like perhaps running water, and then after a little while I start being less sure whether I'm still hearing it or if it's just my ears ringing with an echo.

Okay that's all for now. I'm moving to Stanford tomorrow (to live on campus - move in day is Sept 14 so I still have no idea where I'm living, what my address is, who my roommate is, how much I have to pack, which kinda sucks. But the wifi will be better, hooray.

Apologies I have been really errant in posting because I have been trying to cram my life into a 30" suitcase for the last week! Yeah it's my last week here in Singapore, and though I'd finished most of my meetups by the previous week, there was still hell lot of stuff to do which involved running all over quite a lot of Singapore.

And my dad has been forcing intensive cycling lessons on me, which have, more often than not, ended in injury and tears. I scraped my knee, ankle, leg, and ended up with a hugeass bruise on my chest that prevents me from wearing any low-cut shirts. Darn. So it's kinda fortuitous that SF isn't particularly hot at this time of the year.

I shall miss Singapore greatly, though. I wonder how it shall have changed when I'm back at the end of 3 months :,)

But ok, enough maudliness and tears for a day!!!! I shall be happy and excited and think of the, as Jie puts it, the sunny yet comfortable weather at Stanford.