Weather Here and There

Weather forecast for Singapore and Almaty, Kazakhstan, for the week.

I love the little snowflakes on the Almaty one.

=)

Sunday and Monday

Sunday.

Monday.

Amazing how quick everything has become covered in snow. It has been snowing nonstop since Sunday midnight. It is now 1.20am on Tuesday morning and it is still snowing like mad outside.

WHEEEEEE!

(Get a glimpse of my new boots!)

Photos: Jingzhong and Jing Liang with Jingzhong’s camera

Fluffy and White

Several things that made me day today!

1. Waking up to see the entire Almaty covered with a blanket of snow. It was A LOT. So Hyun said that it only snows like that in Seoul once every 2 to 3 years, and on the first day of snow in Kazakhstan, it has managed to snow so much!

2. Shaking snow covered trees so that the snow floomps down on you and you are all white.

3. Walking out of your last class of the day to find your boyfriend waiting for you with your father’s leather gloves and his fat winter jacket. He helps you put them on as he tells you that the rest of our friends are waiting for my class to end so that we can go make a snowman and play in the snow!

4. Playing with the fluffiest, puffiest, powderiest snow!

We tried to make a snowman but we got too tired trying to gather enough snow to make a huge snowman. We made a baby one. There was a huge layer of snow, I could get down on my knees and scoop up loads of snow. Like say, as much as a big backpack that you would carry to school. Hahha I can’t think of anything else right now to liken the size or amount to.

We made snow angels.

I got rolled around in the snow.

We had a snow fight. Because snowballs would be painful! And the snow was quite hard to pack together, it was too dry or cold and wouldn’t stick together easily.

And it has been snowing ALL DAY ever since midnight yesterday.

Sigh so beautiful.

=)

Photo: Jingzhong

Bam Bam Hey!

Many of our Korean friends started the Denmark diet some time ago. Subsequently, our meal gatherings were reduced to Jingzhong, Jing Liang and me, the three Singaporean pigs who just loved eating too much to diet.

It was a sad time.

Then one day, we got the good news the Myung Rae couldn’t take it and decided to quit. WHOOOHOOOOO. And where did we find ourselves that night?

At Princess, the yummy Chinese restaurant. Ha Neul, who had also quit the diet came along too!

They provide tambourines teehee.

After that, we went to a Korean karaoke lounge. It was SO fun. They have ALL kinds of songs – Korean of course, English, Chinese and many others. We sang Jay Chou, Stephanie Sun and lots of English songs. LIVIN’ ON A PRAYER!

Our Korean friends sang many Korean songs. We’d sing the English parts of the songs, or whatever they told us to. Some songs have repeated Korean letters so we just go ‘yi yi yi yi yi’ or something like that. Jumped on the sofas and sang and sang.

Kyung Min sang this song that had this part that goes

Tiger is in the presence bam bam (HEY!) Upon the raggae is bam bam (HEY!)
Tiger is in the presence bam bam (HEY!) Upon the raggae is bam bam (HEY!)

Which does not make ANY sense at all but we just had fun screaming HEY! after he raps each line. Hahaha.

Oh and the cool part is that you can fastforward through the musical parts of the song so you can just get to the word parts to sing. You can make the music have a samba, hip hop or whatever feel. You can speed up the tempo of the song. It’s great when you don’t want to sing songs that are too slow and spoil the hyped up mood. Everything is fast, fast, FAST! There is no waiting, not even for the musical parts of the song to end.

I’ve never been to karaoke in Singapore.. So I don’t know if you can do all that in Singapore karaoke places.

It was a fun, fun night.

~ of dress

This is a picture of the train station in Samarkand. I’m only putting it here because I don’t have one of the Tashkent train station.

Uzbekistan is 1 hour behind Kazakhstan. We were supposed to meet the rest at the Tashkent train station at 6am, Uzbekistan time. Hence, we were going to wake up at 5am at our hotels to give us plenty of time to get there. We didn’t know what might go wrong. Oh, how right we were to think that!

Jing Liang set his alarm and woke up at 5am. He woke Myung Rae up, then me. I look at my phone’s clock and ask in half-awake, half-asleep-ness, “Is it 5am Kazakhstan time or 5am Uzbekistan time?”

It’s 5am Kazakhstan time.

Myung Rae exclaims, “Why wake me up?!” (or something like that), huffs and immediately goes back to bed. I’m already back in bed too. Jing Liang just walks over to switch off the light and goes back to his bed. Jingzhong sleeps on, oblivious.

This whole exchange only took a few minutes with very few words exchanged because we were so tired. It was an unanimous decision that we would go back to bed, reached without words.

We woke up again later, at 5.55am. UZBEKISTAN TIME. We were supposed to be at the train station to meet the rest at 6am, UZBEKISTAN TIME. Talk about jumping out of bed!!!

There’s no time to think, no time to wash our faces, brush our teeth or empty our bladders. We stuff everything into our bags and load on the layers because it is FREEZING COLD, even when we are in our room.

Jing Liang and Myung Rae are ready first (I think because I need more layers and also the more layers I wear, the less mobility I have, so I take longer to wear each layer) so they run down and grab our breakfast and run out to try and flag down a cab.

Jingzhong and I thunder down the steps and join them. We walk to the main road, freezing cold, and get a cab.

Oh, and the adventure starts.

We realized we don’t know the Russian word for ‘train’. We try to tell the driver that we want to get to the train station. Jingzhong takes out our Russian-English dictionary and says there is no word for ‘train’ there.

I say, “How can that be?” and take the dictionary from him. It’s true. The only train noun is ~ of dress. There is no train train. The rest are all verbs. We are soooooo dead.

So we try to do it by eliminating everything else. We say it’s not a bus, it’s not a plane, it’s not a taxi. We hope there are no other vehicles they have except trains. This whole time, we’re still driving around.

He drives us somewhere that looks like a train station. We want to get out but he seems to think that this is not the place. He looks at our map again and drives on somemore.

We’re worried because half an hour has passed. We’re late and we don’t want to miss the train. We’re frustrated because we don’t know how to say train. I don’t care for the train of a dress! And we don’t know if there’s more than one train station in Tashkent. What if we go to the wrong one? Oh and our Kazakh numbers don’t work in Uzbekistan, haha.

We’re worrying, he’s driving.

He stops at a station and yes, it looks like we’re finally there. We thank the dude, he was yet another nice taxi driver who didn’t ask for more money. We gave him a bit more, to thank him.

We get into the train station and yay, all our friends are there. We didn’t miss the train!

But the icing on the cake?

Train of dress IS train train.

Now seriously, how were we supposed to know that?!!! The dictionary never said so and just because train of dress = train train in English doesn’t mean it is so in Russian! Hello, there are four different words for love in Greek! Who’s to say there aren’t 5 different words for train in Russian?

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

Stupid train of dress.

Photo: Jingzhong