A Sunday In The Life

I wake up at 8.30am and swear at my alarm clock. I lie in bed. Church starts at 9. I briefly consider going back to sleep and skipping church but I kill that thought immediately, out of reflex. I go to the common bathroom to brush my teeth. It’s raining outside. I consider going back to sleep again – the skies are grey and the weather is cold and the thought of chasing down buses and huddling under bus-stops isn’t an appealing one. I kill that thought a second time. I don’t know why I do so. I’m probably going to be late anyway.

The walk to the bus stop is nasty. I make the mistake of wearing new sneakers (bought for running, and white) because right away I am presented with the basketball court: a no-man’s-land of little rivulets and sploshy yellow puddles. It’s still raining. I hop from one dry spot to another, clutching at my umbrella like a grandma, and then I reach the gravel path, which is dryer, but slippery. I slow down. The rain is doing that funny thing it does when there’s lots of wind and you’re walking exposed and your umbrella is too small: your head and shoulders remain dry but everything below your waist is obliterated. I feel water trickling down my feet and into my socks. I try not to think about my white shoes.

The bus arrives at the stop a few seconds after I do and I get in – possibly the only good thing to have happened so far – and I sit under the air-conditioning with the vain hopes of getting dry. There are no old people in the bus. Thank God. On normal Sundays there are so many old people entering and leaving I cannot sit for fear of offending them. But then I reconsider: nobody in their right mind would take my seat anyway - I’m wet, and my seat’s probably damp if and when I leave it.

I get off the bus at the Clementi MRT station and board a train. The wait is 2 minutes. I take out my earbuds and listen to Grizzly Bear. The train arrives and we hop in. I like the sound of the doors opening: it’s like the pneumatic hiss one’d imagine on space shuttles and the like, spoilt only by the annoying female voice telling us to ‘please mind the platform gap!’ in an equally annoying angmoh accent. There are four people reading bibles on the train: three Christian and one Stockmarket. The aunty nearest to me (Christian) has her bible up and directly in front of her face, and her lips are moving soundlessly as she reads. She looks funny, but not as funny as the uncle opposite and a little further away: he’s sleeping head bowed, body slouched, with the bible open on his chest. You’ve got to wonder what he’ll do at the sermon later.

I see nobody my age, and proceed to stare out the window.

I arrive at City Hall MRT station 10 stops later and enter St Andrew’s Cathedral via the underground exit. The praise and worship session is over. I am, however, in time for the sermon … which starts a few minutes after I sit down and turns out – 10 minutes in – to be about death.
I sigh and try not to think about the trip back.

After service (there is no communion) I eat a couple of miniscule burgers at the church Welcome Centre and I head for Suntec City Mall. There is an Epicentre store there and I need to buy an Apple keyboard. (I spent the whole of yesterday programming, and decided then and there that my aunt was right – 4 hours of being hunched over the laptop = not good for neck and back). I make my way via the City Link underpass (which is in reality yet another mall) and I spend the next 20 minutes or so navigating the mass of shops in Suntec. The bottom floor is uninteresting: Topshop and Rubi Shoes^[1] and New Urban Male^[2], and finally I find the store and I go in and I ask for the keyboard and I make my purchase.

I eat my lunch at Food Republic. They have Lui Cha, and I miss Lui Cha like I miss Kuching. Food Republic calls it Thunder Tea Rice, though, and I find this so funny that I have to stop to take a picture with my phone and I think of other funny and suspiciously lame jokes on the naming of food before I queue and order a bowl. S$4.00. The soup is very green and not very bitter. Kuching’s is infinitely better. Oh well.

I make my way back via City Link, because the sky is still grey and unhappy and the puddles don’t look very agreeable to me and my shoes. There are many skinny girls with DSLRs wrapped around their bony arms.^[3] Two Singaporean kids press their faces at a glass display, and two white kids stare back from the other side, their parents busy in conversation with the sales assistant. HMV is playing Zee Avi's Kantoi. One store, selling slippers and big furry plushies, have their SAs lined up and they're all hugging one plushie each, for God knows what reason. There are no customers in that store.

I finally arrive at the City Hall MRT station and I take a train back to HarbourFront and another bus back to campus and I hop through the basketball courts again and into my room and I study mathematics and now I am typing.

Hello. Hello. Goodbye.



^1. Slogan: ‘Shoes make me happy. I’m superficial. Whatever.’ ↩

^2. NUM’s logo is a swimming sperm, and their HIRING/SALES-ASSISTANT-WANTED ads ask potential employees: SHOULD COWS WEAR BRAS???? Their bags are printed with the NUM logo, sperm-head upwards, and are rather funny: if you are female and you hold the bag between your legs (which girls occasionally do, in trains) you look like you have a sperm swimming up your - nevermind. ↩

^3. Their not-so-skinny boyfriends are the ones carrying the bulky and rather unhip camera bag for them. Poor things. ↩

Thoughts on NUS

As of press time I have one major math chapter to revise (being already lost, despite it being only the 3rd week of school) and a programming assignment to complete, and so I really shouldn't be sitting down with my mind switched on write and my browser opened to Blogger. But no matter. I'm setting aside Friday nights as writing time, and the weather is cool and the skies are grey this evening (plus there's the small matter of having just woken from a fantastic 1 hour nap) and so write I shall. The following are a collection of my thoughts on NUS.

The National University of Singapore, placed 30th in the world and home to a combined student population of about 29,305 (with the international student body at 34%, or 9880) is old and new and beautiful and scattered atop what feels like the hilliest bloody place on the whole island-nation of Singapore.^[1] The Engineering faculty, for instance, is built on a slope, and apart from the rising greens and the shady trees that lead up to its buildings (of which that green rise is admittedly beautiful and possibly the only good thing about aforementioned slope) suffers from the chronic idiosyncrasy of having different floors on different blocks that are linked to each other via suspended walkways, and so - as Tay describes it: ".. bloody confusing wan! When you call somebody and they say they're on the seventh floor, you have to ask them which block they're in, because the sixth floor on some block is the seventh floor on another block ..." and so when people from other faculties so dare to venture into the engineering department they very often get lost.



But NUS is itself old, and the buildings themselves come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. I would be hard-pressed to find a unifying word to describe the whole of campus: Hodgepodge, perhaps. Or Stoned. The newer buildings are fantastic glass and steel structures of modern design and build (i.e: the University Hall, the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music), but the older ones look like a slightly brighter more academic version of Civic Centre/Hopoh (read: nostalgic, or old or, less kind, this: ugly), with small, glazed-white tiles on the walls and brown slats underfoot and dusty metal-framed picture windows that you see only in half-empty barbershops in Old Kuching. The gardens are beautiful. The sculptures are breathtaking and clever and mostly relevant to whichever faculty or portion of campus you find them in ^[2], and the trees are large and shady and inviting, like you have to sit under them and read a book, or have a picnic, or something.



The student body in NUS is diverse, and I have met more people from more places around the world in the past one month then I have in all my life in Kuching. We have Mauritians and Indians, Koreans and PRC Chinese, the Vietnamese and the Burmese and Scottish and German and Dutch, and they all mostly stick to their own skin profiles i.e.: the Whites stick together and go out clubbing on weekends, the Indians move around in groups (always in groups) and the PRC Chinese walk around in twos and threes, like they're sick of close-proximity groupthink or something. And so it's quite weird to see a Chinese boy sitting with a group of Indians during dinner - which is what I do, and they all bombard me with questions like "what is the meaning of la?" and share with me their stories of home - "the place where I'm from in India is known for two things: tea and terrorists" - and we share with each other the best places to go for Indian food and whether it's authentic or not and how the briyani here is nothing like as compared to back home in wherever.

I've come to realize, though, that friendship in University isn't so much built around your class or where you sit in class as it is around what co-curricular activities you do, or what modules you take for a particular semester. I don't have a close circle of friends; what I do have at the moment more resembles a network than anything else: Hoang, who is a Vietnamese and explains to me complex math concepts in CS1231; Valentino, who is Indonesian and loves lit and sits with me in theatre; Keng Wee and Woong Yong, who are Singaporeans and fellow orientation-group members in 0-week and who now only see each other (and me) on Friday, for 1105, and Shiv and Shailendra and Sudanshu and Chinab and Godham and Sriharsha and countless others who are Indians and are friends because we all love to talk.^[3]

Then there are the friends that I feel most comfortable with, like curling up with a loved book by the fire, and these are mostly the ones I've met in Kuching during sec school. There's Tay and Joash, and Ameline and Val, and Zakil ... and it's meeting Zakil on campus that I find most amazing and cool and compelling a story to relate to you here: It was in the afternoon. I was tired. I was on the NUS internal shuttle bus, and I had my face against the cold relief of the glass windows, eyes shut, when I heard Zakil's voice. Now I've known Zakil since Form 2 - we went to tuition together - and the imagined reality of hearing an old friend's voice while on the bus back to my room in NUS is like finding a snowflake in Indonesia while on the way to milk your cows. Zakil is here for Medicine, and we've explored vast portions of NUS together already ... finding - amongst other things - military labs and aquariums filled with exotic fish and viral research centres tucked away deep in the bowels of the university campus.



Studying in NUS is again quite different from what you'd expect it to be. Disregard the top-30 world ranking and understand that NUS is a research hub ... and academicians actually flock here for the funding and support provided by the Singaporean government. The one condition that they have is that they are forced to teach. This means that while you have access to what are arguably the top minds in this part of the world (and beyond, even), you more often than not have men and women who are better suited for research than they are for teaching. I can't confirm this: all my teachers this first semester are wonderful. My seniors in the School of Computing, however, complain that their modules are dry and boring, and that - while professionally excellent - their professors are far from the ideal teachers they might've asked for. This is a small issue: save America and Oxbridge, I don't think teaching excellence and world class research can be found in that many universities in this part of the world, though not for reasons that I pretend to understand. ^[4]

But it's a curious fact that rankings and meta-critical thought about rankings disappear when you're finally here and attending lectures in the university itself: nobody really cares what NUS is ranked as on the world stage, and Singaporeans never really pay lip-service to this fact. To the average Singaporean, NUS is where you go to if you're bright but you can't afford Oxford/Cambridge/Harvard/MIT, and the well-to-do Singaporean's attitude towards local universities bear a certain shadowy resemblance to the way upper-middle-class Malaysians treat our own local public universities. I can only guess at this: I suppose when you take for granted what is readily available to you, you begin to look at bigger things at the expense of local education: like Cambridge Massachusetts, for instance. But I shall not pretend to understand everything about this.

One other thing that I won't pretend to care about: to tell you that all this argument and thought about university ranking actually matters to me, because it does not: university life is oddly fulfilling and challenging and tough, but unlike anything else I've ever experienced before. A bunch of us were lounging around in the cluster corridor a couple of hours ago and the one thing we agreed upon - definitively, that is - was that Form 6 is nothing compared to the first sem of university - or, at least, the first sem of university in NUS. The myth that it is is just that - a myth.

More on that some other day.



^1. An Indian friend of mine, in Engineering, tells me that NUS is aptly named: the National University of Stairs. He isn't kidding. ↩

^2. Except one outside the School of Design and Environment, which looks like a collection of stony spires set out on a small patch of lawn, some of which are collapsed and sad-looking and lying like dead logs on the grass. ↩

^3. Shiv I met in debate, and he's on scholarship in Engineering and very bright and a real pleasure to debate with. ↩

^4. Take all this with a pinch of salt: I don't believe university rankings are the be-all and the end-all of tertiary education, and I don't recommend you do too. For instance, an education in a unranked liberal-arts college in America followed by a professional postgraduate degree is still arguably better than professional training in the best ranked university in Asia. ↩