Visited IMCB. I understand what Dave means when he said they have a real lab. It's crazily cluttered. I don't see any exposed bench space at all. They allocate funding according to the size of the labs so they cram as many pple as needed into the space. Even their workstations are so much more packed than ours. And fruitflies stink. E.coli smells much better.

AS outing yesterday. Went Thai Express and terrorised this really nice waitress. What was our problem? Anyway everything's so hilarious with xiaohui, christine, bao and beef around.. Guess none of us gets to go crazy in the week, so everyone goes nuts during AS outings.. Haha. So we went to Thai Express and queued for 1 minute before we started complaining that we queued for very long and the nice waitress, Wendy is her name by the way, isn't she so honoured to be the subject of my blog entry? Sorry, off track.. we queued for 1 min and complained and Wendy started apologising, yes yes, long queue today.

So we were waiting for a table and Wendy gave us the menu. After scrutinising the menu for a min or so, we Bao and xh started bugging Wendy with ridiculous questions like "Why u all have yellow curry with potatoes but not green curry with potatoes?" and of course "How much do you earn?"..

After we got a table, we decided that we were being too mean to Wendy and decided to write her a letter. It's a great letter by the way, with a elephant letter head and typewriter handwriting. Professional. Of course, it's a ridiculous letter..

To our dearest Wendy,
You are the light of Thai Express (this is the best line)
*actually, i'll censor off the rest, cos it's quite malu-ating, we were just trying to linked all the food that we ate with her, so u can imagine the effect*

We were decent enough to write a few decent lines thanking her. Then we folded it, paid, left it on the table and siaamed, however u spell it. This girl bussing our table saw the letter, gave a "this is so ridiculous" look and gave the letter to Wendy. I didn't see her face but heard that she rushed out to look for us, but we ran away. Haha

Went Pulau Ubin today with Sunny, a Dutch couple and a guide. Didn't manage to go to Chek Jawa as usual. Really should sign up one day with NPB to visit there. Haven't been to Changi Village and Ubin for more than a year. It has changed, a lot. There's now a beautiful jetty on changi Village and there are resorts on Ubin. There's a fence around most of the coastline to prevent illegal immigrants and elephants from swimming in. It's good to go with a guide in a small group. You get to learn about the different trees, birds, whatever.. Saw lots of crabs, they spotted an octopus which I nv saw, spotted mudskippers and crabs in this muddy stream of water. I wish I was in a fitter condition though, had to push my bike up most of the slopes cos I'm too tired to cycle up. Hee. Ow, my butt hurts.

About the Dutch couple. The lady is a cat-lover. She really loves cats. She's a protector of cats. She actually goes to AVA to complain about AVA's killing of cats, apparently they do it every time someone complains about cats in the neighbourhood. Talked about political freedom in Singapore, on how pple who works for the government never give answers but just repeat statements, which I find absolutely true. Read the papers, every time someone asks the government something, they reply by repeating what they have said many times before. Makes you wonder what they hire all those brilliant people in Singapore for. Same with Astar, I would say, their efficiency stinks, even though they are friendly people. I still haven't got a reply from the scholarship officer, don't think she plans to reply me.. Anyway, about political freedom, the guide was saying that young people nowadays express their disapproval of the govt through blogs, emails, blah, basically through means the govt can't control or monitor, hence govt has to encourage public feedback to them to let them know how we feel.