Summer is here!

I guess it's been a while since I have wrote a post on my blog so I figured it would be a good time to recap my Spring!

Since I haven't been registered in classes this past term and the weather isn't so nice in Vancouver, I decided to travel to Asia for 3 months. I landed in Hong Kong just before Chinese New Year and I was a little surprised that it was quite cold in HK! Well, actually, it felt quite normal on the streets but without any heat at home, it was quite chilly especially when I'm sitting on the couch and not moving. It was super nice to see my Grandma, cousins and relatives as I haven't been back to HK in 12 years. The last time I was in HK, my two little cousins, Lok Tin and Lok Yee weren't even born! They are two, 6 and 7 years old kids that are super active in playing various activities. For example, we went for ice skating, basketball, flying kites and biking.

I made quite a few trips during my time in HK. In February, I made a week long trip to Taiwan where I visited TaiChung and Taipei. I met two Hong Kong exchange students in Mabel and Ah Do in TaiChung and went to visit Tunghai University and Feng Chia Night market together. Taiwan night markets are amazing, however, they were also the most unhealthy part of my Asia trip. The night market food usually consisted of eating some fried food and then drinking bubble tea afterwards. Holy calories! I headed back to Taipei afterwards and met Aaron whom I met back in our Backbone (BC Provincial Jr team - 2007 national champion team) days. He's been teaching English in South Korea for the last bit so I haven't seen him in a while! We went to most of the usuals such as the Taiwan National Museum, Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial, Sun Yat-sen memorial, Taipei 101, and National Palace Museum. The jaded cabbage was totally overrated in my opinion but I might have felt that way due to the fact that my feet were killing me after walking around that museum for 3+ hours... :) We also went to the outdoor hot spring in Xinbeitou and hot springs museum. I totally recommend hitting up the hot spring but do remember to stay hydrated! I went to Ximending to have dinner with the friends I've met in Tai Chung along with Debby (from Vancouver), Yung Yung (who could speak Korean, Cantonese, Russian and English!) and this other guy from Macau. We went strolling around Ximengding only to run into Aaron again when our group was trying to take stupid group selfie! :P Not much happened after that, I went to see the Taipei Zoo with Aaron for almost the entire day and saw the Canadian Women's hockey team win gold after a crazy comeback in the finals. I headed back to HK shortly after.

4 days after I came back to HK, I took off to Singapore this time. In hindsight, I felt that I should have taken a bigger gap in between because I was exhausted from Taiwan. I followed Aaron and bought the same flight to Singapore on Scoot airline and in hindsight, it was a stupid choice. The departure time was 630 am and so I ended up sleeping overnight at the HK international airport which really meant no sleep and I was freezing in the middle of the night. The flight itself was awesome on a really nice Boeing 777 and I landed 4 hours later. Having been frozen in Taiwan and HK for the past 10 days, Singapore was unsurprisingly hot! Like 30 degrees and I got sunburnt on my second day. I was scheduled to be staying in a hostel but my awesome high school friend, Cheryl picked me up and let me stay at her place! It was so nice to catch up with her after haven't seen her since 2007 and met her husband, Denis! It was totally the highlight of my time in Singapore. I'm not going to talk about too much about Singapore other than I did the usuals in seeing the Singapore Museum, Marina Bay, Sentosa Island (luge was so fun btw!) etc... My last night in Singapore, I went to this night market thing with Cheryl and Denis and got to try all these SE Asia type of food. It was super good! After that, I flew to Kuala Lumpur on a short 30 minute flight. I don't much to say about KL other than the fact that I didn't really enjoy my time there. I only stayed two days and I went to the usual stuff such as KLCC (I bumped into Aaron randomly with his friend Evan), Malaysia Musuem (nearly died having to cross 3 highways by foot), Chinatown etc... I headed back to Singapore for the night and had more Toast Box before flying back to HK.

Two weeks laters, I went on another trip. This time, it was to Boracay, Philippines to play beach ultimate at the Boracay Open. In total, there were about 40 people from the HKUPA (Hong Kong Ultimate Players Association) so it was insanely fun to have a bunch of friends escaping to a tropical beach. I'm only going to recap shortly because what happens in Boracay should really stay there. The tournament itself was really well organized and I had a great time playing against the Boracay dragons and other teams that have spent a lot of time playing on the beach. I was playing for one of the two HK pickup teams and while we started off strongly and nearly beat the Doracay Bragons and played well against the eventual champions, Boracay Dragons, we sucked in the middle of the tournament. Thankfully, we finished strong and played well to beat the Toronto Max Power team to end the tournament. I didn't realize they kept stats and somehow I won the top female defender award in the top division and won myself a pair of Haivianas. I also didn't realize they were having a post game ceremony and so I missed my 10 seconds of glory, haha. The beach parties were amazing and I really enjoyed the cheap mango shakes! Other fun (or stupid) things include sunset cruise (where Kat and Michael Ying won't stop splashing water at Felix and I), my inability to swim, eating crabs, the Spider Cove.

I made lots of small day trips in HK which include the peak, Lam Tsuen Wishing Trees, various museums but one of my absolute favourite parts of this HK trip was that I met a huge group of friendly people through the Hong Kong Ultimate Players Association (HKUPA). When I first arrived, I went to play pickup and then afterwards, there were club practices and league. I spent a lot of time practising and mentoring the club team Blaze and it was a very interesting experience working with various number of players. I have too many great memories of playing mahjong, flipping table arcade game, board games, eating out, decorating easter eggs etc... I definitely want to be back for more!

This post is getting insanely long, and perhaps I should put a stop here for now. I'm going to write more next time!

Finished School!

Woohoo! After 5.5 years, I have finally finished all my classes at UBC. This past term, I only took two classes in a Philosophy class about logic and an introduction class to Computer Security. It was an overall easy and relaxing term and ended up with a 90% average. Not a bad way to finish off! I have wait till May for covocation and then I'll be officially done with my undergrad. While my ugrad GPA is not extremely high, I'm proud of the fact that I did better and better each term after second year and ended up with the last 4 academic terms with straight A's. One thing I wished I knew earlier, at least before the start of my undergrad, is that GPAs don't bother all that much. I'm not saying to tank the grades but there wasn't a need to repeatedly stress over that midterm or final exam of having to do really well. The general idea of doing well in school is that it would lead to successful careers and to earn a solid salary. Quite honestly, having a good GPA does not lead to a better career in many cases (most of my employers have not seen my transcript) and heck, even getting a solid income does not lead to happiness. I find it amusing that many of my fellow friends almost live life to earn money in order to buy physical goods that will be rendered useless in a short period of time.

Enough of my rambling. I have been picking up Badminton in the past 2 months and it's been a fun experience. Why do I say that? I played a bit back when I was in high school but I was atrocious. I was bad not because I wasn't trying but it was due to the fact that I had no one to learn from and I wasn't going to improve without any proper coaching. On top of that, I didn't have proper shoes or anything better than a $20 racquet and I was literally going nowhere. I decided to focus on ultimate back then. However, now that I am quite free with lots of time and my sister has nicely let me use her Badminton equipment, I decided to enrol myself into Badminton lessons. I have only taken 8 classes and it has made an extreme difference. It's a fun sport but at the rate I'm going, I think I would peak soon by not finding enough competition unless I want to keep playing mixed doubles which I find quite uninteresting. This lead me to realize how awesome club ultimate is due to the fact that it's a team sport with a proper structured season and 'something' to actually compete for. Well, technically badminton has that too except you'll probably need to pay $30k and be extremely good.

What's next? I'm first heading to Hong Kong next week. It's been a good 12 years since I've been back and so I am very excited. I'll be back in April and I don't have too much planned then! :)