Flu + Winter = Torture

Im down with flu. Arggh. BAd throat, bad nose, bad head. JS has been nice taking care of me and helping me to look for medicine and herbal tea. He even got hold of a wrapper of this herbal tea thingie, and he actually intends to go look for it. Touched! Doesnt matter if he manage to find it but the fact that he was willing to keep a wrapper and take the trouble to go look for herbal medicine for me does make me feel well taken care of. And yes. Thank you. Cos you have been taking care of me, big or small issues.

Temperature these days are still around 0 ~ 14 deg. The wind is the killer part. It is still bearable for now but i know moving forward, it will be worst.

Hmm...

No more nonsense from tom onwards. I have been busy settling some work from SG office while im here. Trying to get some stuff started here. So tom is the onset of the real challenge that Im here for. Im glad it is moving in action. He was so busy he didnt have time for me. Finally today after dinner, we sat down and spoke for 3 hours. Always a motivator and a mentor. Very grateful to be in his team.

And I just found another mentor. JS is my best buddy now. Joke, laugh, talk rubbish, bitch, talk serious work, and he even mentors me on accounting stuff, which i havent been really much attention during uni days and somehow when he put it across to me, I could absorb it better.

These days the training that i attend with the trainees are getting technical also, all the science stuff i studied 18 years of my life came into use once again.

Anyway, I wanna talk about CHINESE culture here man. Jia lat. Im going to touch on the ugly side of things. Look, im not sure if it was the culture, the one-child policy or the upbringing of some of these chinese that makes people behave this way. They are mostly pretty self- centred and like it or not, they talk damn loudly. They like to get drunk in the restaurants and my last trip here, I witnessed right in front of me, how a guy got drunk while eating steamboat. Guess what, when i looked at the table, he had beer, and the chinese white wine, like two bottles. So in his drunken stupor, he started breaking glasses and since he couldnt stand properly, he lost his balance and guess what? He dipped his hand into the steamboat pot for a good 3 seconds and I saw it. I doubt he felt much pain there and then. It is ok if he was drunk and he is a quiet drunken soul. But he wasnt and it is a norm to see people getting drunk after meals because they like to drink BAI JIU (traditional chinese wine with alcohol content from 40% to 70%). They get real rowdy and violent. Scares me pretty much sometimes.

Today is the worst man. We were having dinner halfway then suddenly across the table a woman was screaming and crying. Woah, just when i turned my head to look at that table, the guy gave a RESOUNDING SLAP Across the cheeks of that woman and started pushing her and shouting at her. MY GOD! I dun think it matters what happened because if I were her, I would just pack and immediately go to the police I swear. Apparently according to my colleagues, tom morning the woman will ask for forgiveness from the man. What the hell. Why are woman leading this kind of life? He is just a plain bastard for doing what he did in public. Cannot stand men who lays his hand on a woman. For whatever reason. We were all pretty stunned. And then the couple who was eating with the woman and the man, helped the woman walk out of the restaurant. She looked pretty drunk cos she could hardly walk, but i wasnt sure if it was because she was too shocked or that she was drunk cos she was sobbing away.

Civiliation and culture comes a long way man.

Its also pretty scary when couples quarrel on the streets cos they simple yell at each other like nobody's business. These are the crude and uncivilised ones, definitely look very spoilt brat. Guess what, you can already see kids shouting and screaming their way through in public. I guess the one child policy, together with the increasing wealth of the chinese family are breeding generations and generations of spoilt brats that is a little beyond control.

One last bit of my complaint which i HATE! The public toilets. ARGGGHHH. It is a torture man. And it is certainly a shame to have nice shopping centres with shitty toilets. I do not understand. Anyway, the pizza hut has the best toilet in that area. BEST!!! I will make sure that i use the toilet at pizza hut whenever i can just so that i can avoid having to use the rest.

Long way to go my dear China.

BUt of course, this is not the case for ALL chinese but it is pretty common to see the above happening.