Sides of me.

We signed up for a group tour to Beijing, which was about the worst thing we could do. We already told ourselves not to be fooled by cheap deals again.

Anyway, I can tell you right now that I won’t ever think about living in Beijing. It’s highly likely that I will fall sick right within the 1st week being here. It’s because the air quality in Beijing is so so so terrible. The city is always submerged in a very thick layer of smoke or fog or dust cloud or whatever it is. Most of the cars here look dusty :| 

According to Wiki, the air pollution comes from surrounding cities and provinces, not from Beijing itself. Within itself, Beijing is actually quite green with lots of trees. People have always praised Singapore for being a “garden city”, but I think Beijing’s trees are much more diverse, and much prettier with lots of willow trees (very romantic), pine trees (very ancient), and lots of very colorful flowers. 

Beijing is also green in the sense that they have a lot of bicycles (i’m sure a lot of you have got that info from Katie Melua: 9 million bicycles in Beijing). Here and there they have separate paths for bicycles as well. The upgrade from the normal bicycles are the electronic bicycles, which are also very popular here. I couldn’t see lots of motorbikes here though. Beijing has more bicycles than Vietnam, and also more cars than Vietnam. I could see lots of expensive cars here (Audi seems to be rather popular).

Anyway, many places in Beijing are still able to keep its “traditional” look, with the distinctive roof patterns and the grey brick walls. However, coming from a Asian countries, we didn’t find it too impressive though. Chinese architecture has influenced other Asian countries so much that we could find the resemblance almost everywhere. 

If you are going to visit Beijing, what I can advise is that: 1. don’t follow group tour. You should plan your own trips. Maybe you can find an independent local tour guide who can accommodate your itinerary, since there won’t be lots of description or explanation in English. 2. do your research before visiting any attraction. It might help you to avoid the crowd (no guarantee thou, you know, with 1.8 billion of ppl in the country…), and help you to plan your trip better. 3. Visit more parks. The parks here are awesome.

Oh China China, here I am, sitting in this grand huge country with 4000 years of history.

What I need the most right now is some sort of confirmation. You know, like that stupid venue.

After all, maybe nothing is really important. Just don’t make me hate the day already. Maybe I already start hating it a little bit. You know how grumpy I could be when I have to be somewhere I don’t want to be.

So please, if you can, help me. If you can’t, vague and irrelevant advice and worries are something I don’t really need right now. Actually they are something I would never need ever. 

You press me too much, I will just skip everything. 

Am super annoyed right now and have to vent here :-<

I don’t know. Is it important to you or not? If it is, then show it. If it’s not, can we just not do anything at all?

1. Install Adobe Illustrator and start playing around. Seriously, I’ve been away from Photoshop for so long and already forgot how painful it is to deal with vector on Photoshop. It was fantastic for painting-like effects though. The watercolor brushes are not bad.

2. Post the rest of the pictures of the London-Paris trip. Been delaying it for so so so long, just because I wanted to post proper description/caption for each photo :-<

3. Exercise. Wushu.

4. (to be continued)

Recently I’ve become much more impatient with the world.

Just ask those narrow minded, those petty, those snobbish, and those who ask before actually trying ANYTHING. I mean, what, I already crafted the whole email for you, and yet in the end you still tell me “I don’t know what to write for the email subject”.

Wow. 

1. So, somewhere along the road, life happens. My life has taken several new twists recently. 

Again, I don’t feel very sure about the future. Why would the future be so difficult to predict? 

Anyway, things are falling into place, time wise. 

2. It was THE most difficult test I’ve ever passed, no doubt, no contest. It was tough, especially during the few last minutes when I was preparing for the presentation in desperation. And yet somehow I passed, with good feedback. I liked the people, and they liked me, and we had interesting discussions. 

Yet I still couldn’t get it. Is it fate or what? Maybe I’m just not supposed to be there. 

Thanks Jessica. Sometimes unexpected things happen. 

I just made a decision. Now is time to move on and live with it. 

3. I could see that the office is going through a lot of changes, especially my team. I could feel that I was much more productive these days than in the past. People were much nicer to me, and I was valued. I became experienced, and my opinions get listened to.

Too bad it was too late. Too late. 

4. One more week, and it will be my trip to China. The offer came just in time, just in time.

After that, I will be jumping in a new world. Scary, but isn’t it something I’ve done before?