I guess everybody has been enjoying winter holidays, traveling to new places, going home, just chilling, anything that's different from the normal school life. Holidays are always good. If there's a time to try something different, this is the time. Ed was telling a freshman yesterday to try different jobs and see what he likes, I wonder what I'll be doing if I'm on FMS. Would I travel around at all? I would definitely get a lab assistant job, even if it's tail-cutting or dish-washing. Would I be doing internships? Exchanges? Take up things that are unrelated to my major?

California trip. I've said this many many times, it's really the people that make a trip good or bad, and the Cali company was just fantastic. It's a group of people that I don't have trouble communicating with and for this trip, I didn't even need to use my brain much, to navigate, or plan or anything. Complete relaxation.

San Francisco. Chinatown's just great. Cheap good food, extreme speedy service, (we think the waitors are on crack haha) though i still think that the place where we stayed at, which was just off Chinatown, was quite scary at night. Half-drunken and very high people hanging on the streets. Back to food. Great food. Great dim sum under $10, bubble tea for less than a dollar, dinner for slightly more than $5, exotic ice-cream, simply amazing. Oakland chinatown is equally good, supermarkets selling everything chinese, and lovely bakeries =). Otherwise, SF is just another big city, traffic, people.. I like the convenience of cities, and the bustling life, but sometimes it gets a little too hectic for my liking. It's like what Locke says about the formation of societies, you have to give up your natural rights to do whatever you want for the benefits that society can give you, so in this case, i have to give up my longing for peace and quiet for the convenience of a big city. New Year countdown was ok, people were very high, typical Californians, the clock was not accurate and misled many of us, fireworks were pretty good, there were smiley faces. :)

Yosemite. I love Yosemite. It's so pretty. Especially since we went AFTER heavy snow. Snow was dripping from tree branches, so pretty. If I have a chance, I'll definitely go there again. Keira says I'm a nature freak. I just like to see the nature, I'm not really fit enough to enjoy much hiking. Climbing up the waterfall was fun.

Berkeley. Such a liberal town. It's filled with shops and stalls selling strange things like anti-govt slogans, weirdo cds, and all kinds of junk. We spent forever in this poster shop buying posters. If I lived in Berkeley, I'll definitely be influenced by this extreme left-wing-ism..

San Diego. Experience could be much more enhanced if I could drive and had a car. Sorry peeps. Taking buses is just tiresome here, especially if you live nowhere close to downtown SD. But I think La Jolla cove is still the prettiest place in San Diego.

New Year. Resolutions: I didn't really think about them. Shall make some.

School. I like my development class, this is a field where I have not touched much before, unless you count my 8 weeks of lab meetings in a stem cells lab, think it'll be a fun class. I'm really sick of huge classes, like my molecular bio class with 350 people. Man, I really don't like to go into class 5min before class starts and still can't get a good seat. Computer music is as expected filled with comp geeks who have attempted pd before, I havn't even heard of PD till last quarter. Well hopefully they're lazy bums who don't do homework, then I'll still have a chance at getting an A. But this is expected to be a fun class, though might get quite challenging along the way. Hum, will complain about it later when I have papers to write. Lab, first day I went back, I felt so sian, why is bio research so time-consuming, so many steps, so much time and effort to do one experiment. Grow cells for almost a week to do a 2h experiment, and then spend at least another day working on the stuff that's been extracted from the cells, then analyse results. I can understand why Aristotle and Descartes want science to be sit-there-and-derive-formulas kind, rather than go do experiments. But after I start pipetting again, I felt less sian, wonder why.

Holiday tomorrow. Yay.