beginning of exchange

thus begins the virgin post of this blog and the start of the (hopefully) comprehensive documentation of my exchange trip.

truth be told since the end of jc, my ang-moh has deteriorated considerably after being in army (where my knowledge of acronyms and vulgarities have increased exponentially) and chemical engineering in NUS (where i became very familiar with greek symbols). hopefully the critical thinking and writing module will retard my ang-moh atrophy.

so i arrived at changi airport T3 at around 830pm, roughly 3 hours before the departure time, to check in my luggage. fortunately i went early and i'll elaborate more on that later on. as expected, my luggage weight exceeded the allowance i was given by about 5.5kg. what was not expected however, was the counter staff's initial quote of the excess baggage charges and how much i had to pay for excess baggage, because i was under the impression they would be more lenient and close an eye (or two) for students (given the amount of shit we had to bring over). knowing that $70 per kg of excess baggage could be better used on other stuff such as weed in amsterdam or yong tau hoo at the arts canteen, i decided to repack my stuff (i.e. transfer the weight to my carry-on luggage) and fortunately for me the counter staff closed an eye after my token effort of reducing my check-in baggage weight by about 1 kg.

so my family and i went to popeyes in B2 to eat. when i went up to the departure level after an hour to meet my aunt, the place was flooded with people. it seemed like the whole world and their mother (and for some people their father as well) were taking the same flight as me to london. good thing i went early. i hate crowds.

closer to departure time some of my friends came. after chit-chatting with them for a while, i decided to start taking photos with my pink (albeit a manly shade of pink) digital camera.

family

colleagues at SRC

NUS chem eng friends (and one of their spouse)

milo-sao and sherning

many thanks to those who came down to send me off. if any of you are reading this, that will probably be the last time i'll see you in person for the next 9 months or so.

after the cam-whoring, i crossed the immigration checkpoint, the baggage scan and the boarding gates into the swanky new A380.

and thus my exchange trip to london begins.