darn funny =)

it simply rawks (the anime, not clorox).

how else could i finish watching 63 eps in 4 days? =) good thing i reached the filler arc, else i don't think i'd be stopping my marathons haha.

if only studying was as interesting as this..

haha just received this storm warning from the malaysian society's email.. this warning was issued by the malaysian student dept in london and the public service dept of msia (aka jpa)

"Assalamualaikum dan Salam Sejahtera.

Sila ambil perhatian akan keselamatan diri saudara/saudari kerana angin ribut yang kini sedang melanda United Kingdom. Sehingga petang ini, tiga kematian orang awam telah dilaporkan iaitu satu di Manchester, satu di Birmingham dan satu di Reading. Oleh hal yang demikian, sila pastikan keselamatan saudara/saudari. Cuba elakkan dari menggunakan jalan/tempat yang mempunyai pokok besar.

Terima kasih."

i'll attempt to translate this into english:

please keep an eye out for your own safety, as the UK is currently experiencing storm winds. till this evening, there were three deaths reported - one in manchester, one in birmingham and one in reading - so please take note of your own safety. please avoid using roads/places that has big trees (lined along it).

i quite like the last sentence. hahaha.

ucpa les glaciers, the place we stayed in. building was old, but facilities was fantastic. we hung out most often at the playstation room, which had 2 ps2s for us to play =)

the green dining room. we had buffet meals everyday - probably the reason why we're all smiling in contentment =)

the gang + me, with our ski instructor, jean-michel. cool dude with "yahoo!" as his favourite english exclamation haha.

place we skiied the most - le tour. we were lucky cos there actually was snow here - read from the news that many ski resorts face the lack of snow over this abnormally warm winter.

me and my skiing gear =) the coldest weather we met was about -2 deg C, so i couldn't really tell what was the coldest temp i could stand in my skiing gear.

skiing's actually a sport that isn't very tiring, as it's just controlled falling - the three modes of transport up slopes are, from the slowest:

a button lift. you had to put a rod in between your thighs, and when the lifts pull you over rather steep inclines, there would be a sharp pull at the groin area, which is especially uncomfortable to half of the button lift users.

a chair lift - you would be sitting in one with your skis / snowboard on.

a cable car - there were special slots for our skis just outside the sliding doors.

pic of my favourite ski piste (piste = trail) called caisets (vertical height 365m, length of 1578m). it's a red trail (ski pistes are colour-coded - the easiest pistes are green, then blue, red and black). the piste brings one down from the restaurant / cable car station to le tour, and it's my fave cos at the end, there is a steep slope followed by a long near horizontal track, so i could attain wind-whistles-beside-ear speeds while having enough time to decelerate properly.

this is what happens when you attain wind-whistles-beside-ear speeds without decelerating properly - you fall! =) this is one of my worst falls, the foreground being the ski that fell off my foot, and in the background - notice a black speck on the right - it's me.

pic i took when i was on one of the chair lifts - think i attempted this slope before. this wasn't the steepest i've done - the steepest i encountered were in brevent, and it's a miracle i didn't piss in my pants when i attempted the 60-70 degree incline. scary.

love skiing, love the snow, love the place i stayed in.. what more can i ask for, besides for this trip to be free? =)



ps shawn, chris and sn, thanks for the pics i shamelessly kopped from you =P

it was really really good.. but tiring. i never remembered a week where i diligently slept around 11pm (helped tremendously by exhaustion) and woke up at 7.30am everyday (bun wakes up at 7am everyday without an alarm clock, and shuffles in the room with creaky floorboards just loud enough to wake me after a while =)

we stayed in a rather old building that belonged to a non-profit organisation called ucpa (the website's in french though haha), and that's probably why the cost of this skiing trip is relatively low. non-profit doesn't mean we don't get great service - on the contrary. not only we get to borrow skis from the centre, we had buffet meals EVERYDAY. breakfast and dinner were buffet-style; lunches on weekends were buffets, while on weekdays we get to pack our own lunch - making our own baguettes and kopping tons of small snacks from the bar counter.

the instructor in charge of our group was cool too =) he worked at the centre for the past 10+ years already, and his current looks were markedly more mature than that which was placed on a noticeboard along with other staff pictures. i have to say that his english was very much better than other instructors i met later during the week - the majority of the skiers there were french-speaking, hence most instructors didn't get to use english much. when chris and i progressed far enough to join a more advanced group, the instructors we met blasted us more with rapid-fire french than english.. which made us learn through imitation of the instructor's actions. haih.

what's skiing without falling down? =) i had a few spectacular falls, one of which was somersaulting (after not managing to decelerate properly) and then tumbling down an incline of about 50m. good thing i was well padded - clothing and my natural adipose layer - thus my injuries were limited to a few bruises. i sprained my left thumb on a separate injury, while i have no idea when my right thumb was sprained. oh well, since i can still type and write, i can say that the injuries are no big deal lah =)

will post pics when i get them from my friends' cameras, lazy to upload mine also haha.

day 5: eger (9/12)

after a quick, unplanned trip to the police museum in budapest, we took a train to eger, a town in east hungary reputed for its wine and women (seriously, those were the descriptions used by most travel guides and pamphlets we had).

train which we traveled in.

traveling took quite some time, and after we reached eger we had the additional task of finding accommodation cos we weren't able to find any online.

it wasn't easy to find accommodation, as we were VERY cost conscious - we skipped a few pretty decent accommodation simply because of its price.. after an hour or two of searching, we finally settled on a rather imaginatively named motel called the "tourist motel". the rooms were cheap, with the only downside that we had to share toilets.. it didn't matter in the end as we were the only occupants of our particular floor haha.

the room in the motel - my bed was at the corner of the room, from which i took this photo. the room isn't big, but it's comfortable nonetheless.

after exploring town with whatever sunlight hours we still had, and finally deciding to skip soaking in a bath as we forgot to bring our swimming trunks (it's really expensive to buy a pair there), we decided to treat ourselves to a nice dinner.

the highlight of the day has got to be the dinner - we went to the restaurant of a 3 star hotel, which happens to house quite a number of stuff made out of sugar..

.. like this grandfather clock, which we were told stopped functioning only a couple of weeks before we came. it's all made of sugar, except for the clock parts.

.. and this painting, which is certified by the guinness world record committee to be the largest in the world. the painter's a guy from eger, explains why the painting is found in the town i guess.

i had trout with white wine (called kiralyleanyka, fantastic stuff), and ate it the way the waiter recommended it - sip the wine while munching on the trout. the trout was really fresh, and the waiter went into a discourse about how the fish were caught from this bluish waterfall north of eger.. etcetc. he was really friendly, and part of the reason why the dinner was so enjoyable =) one of the things he told us was that the winter this year was abnormally warm, "which is not what God intended it to be", in his words.

the hotel where we ate (pic was taken next morning).

went back to the motel with a full stomach, talked crap and slept amidst SHE's vocals =)

day 6: eger (10/12)

we spent our morning exploring the castle of eger - most parts were cordoned off, but nonetheless it provided us ample opportunities to take aerial photos of the town =)

the town of eger, the tallest structures around usually belonged to churches.

after visiting the basilica in eger, we walked to szepasszonyvolgy - the valley of beautiful women. maybe it was too early, or we were unlucky, but we didn't really meet women of outstanding beauty. what we managed to get from there was a rather full lunch and great wine.

in eger there are quite a number of wine cellars, in which great wine are served cheaply in these cellars all day.

this was the cellar we went to. i'm proud to say that i tasted 4 types of wine listed on the shopfront - rose (pronounced roh-ze, a type of red wine), leanyka (meaning white wine), bikaver (a type of red wine called bull's blood), and muskotaly (pronounced mus-ko-ta-ii, a white wine).

the shopowner pouring wine into our cups using something like giant pipettes - probably to aerate those wines? not all wines were poured this way though.

the lady who owns this shop, elizabeth, spoke perfect english cos she migrated from south africa. we naturally fell into conversation with her, as she was one of the rare people in hungary who could communicate with us without any problems. she could guess that we were either from malaysia or singapore - according to her, we're the only bunch of chinese pple who will speak english amongst ourselves (btw, that was the only language common to the 4 of us). she's been in business for 6 years already, and according to her the winter months are the quieter months. we spent quite a lot of time in her shop, ordering glass after glass of wine and eating cheese with it. a glass of wine cost only about 100-200 forints (30-60 pence)!

we even bought this from her shop, costed us 600 forints only. it's fantastic!

we walked, as straight as we could, out of the shop and back to catch the train to our next destination - kosice, the second biggest city in slovakia. as eger was a small town, we had to change trains twice to get to kosice. our longest wait was in miskolc, the second biggest city in hungary, so we took a tram through the city to burn some time.

when we crossed the border, border guards came up and stamped our passports - this is cos both countries hasn't joined the EU yet. hungary's probably joining it this year, if everything goes well.

after reaching kosice, it was about 10pm already. we found our hostel (it was a hotel, actually, but i think it's lucky to get its 2 stars) with some difficulty, and didn't do anything much besides talking that night.