A quick update

Hello there everybody, greetings from the US---sorry I have not been able to have the chance and/or mood to type anything new here, but rest assured, I still do remember this place and here I am back on action!

I don’t have any pictures for the blog today---not that I didn’t take any, I took a number of photos (as I always do!)---but I don’t have them handy now, they’re at home, so be prepared, this is just gonna be words and hopefully not so boring, :)

I’m doing fine over here, although some little issues cropped up, we will get them fixed eventually---they have to be.

I’ve started work, settling in a new environment, and driving out our new car. I share a house with another 5 colleagues/friends, and I think you are guessing, is the car shared too? And yes! Haha…We bought a used-car @ USD5000+, so if you calculate, we pay about USD850/pax, and so we got our car! Isn’t that cool?

In US, unless you’re in NYC or Boston or so, you can’t actually live without a car. There’s practically no public transport in the place where I live---hardly see a taxi around, some rare bus stop standing lonely along the rare roads, no MRTs (only NYC and Boston and some other big big cities have MRT—which is their subway), and the most common ‘public’ transport I see here is the school bus…so, ya, we have to drive.

So you may wanna ask, does Venus drive? Oh yes, I drive, and I’m surprisingly one of the better drivers among our group. It’s a little weird at first to drive from the other side of the road---but I merely took a few days to adapt, it’s not so hard really. The driver seat is at the left hand side of the car, so you have to change your gear with your right hand, and put on signal lights with your left hand. On day one I always missed the signal lights coz I was using my right hand and realized there’s nothing over there, haha. But thereafter I’m fine. And then when you drive, you drive on the right lane of the road. So it’s like totally different from the British-colonized countries, as in M’sia and Singapore…but it so far is kinda fun.

We’ve had our very first road trip already, and it’s cool~ We’ll be driving some more in the coming weeks as we’re expecting a long weekend around the corner, so we’ll probably be driving somewhere far…:)

I think…I will be writing separately, probably in Chinese, a more detailed description of buying/renting/driving a car in US…I now have all of these three experiences to share, haha!

Move on to the next topic, weather maybe? It’s getting colder, but still not so cold yet, around 10-18C I would say…In US they use Fahrenheit to measure temperature, that’s one of the things I haven’t really been adapting to yet, you know, to convert from Fahrenheit to Celcius there’s this not-so-straightforward formula…:S

Ya, they measure everything in the non-metric system. Lengths in inch (not cm), speed in miles per hour (not kilometers per hour), weight in pounds/ounce (not kg/g---get a little troubled when you have to buy food from supermarket), temperature in Fahrenheit and so on…they’re just odd, aren’t they…everybody else is using the standard system, why aren’t they?...hmmm

Almost a month here now, we’ve been to several places for sightseeing---I really have many photos to share, give me some time to sort them out, the scenery are just fantastic!

Well, before it gets too long, I’d better wrap up…

Oh ya, to sadhu (I reply here coz I’m a bit lazy to reply your comment one by one):

1) I didn’t take the photos of the hotel food in the hotel room, that’s the restaurant table---they don’t look like they are?
2) For the insurance, you can just go to http://income.com.sg/insurance/travel/ It’s the travel insurance by NTUC income, very easy to buy, you can do it online, just a few clicks away…
3) What else…oh ya and thanks for your compliments on my photo skills…I know you take way much better photos than I do…:)
4) oh last but not least, I DO care about my weight, but when you first started in a new environment, you just wanna get yourself full, not hungry that's it, and you don't have much choices when you're new. As I'm here about a month now, I am already starting to go back to my old track---watch diet, eat moderately, and I wanna gym! Haha...

OK folks, stay tuned and I’ll be back, ;)




Venus