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This winter , it has snowed several times already but it was too little to be worth mentioning. However, yesterday’s snow was quite heavy for Shanghai. I say that it’s quite heavy snow for Shanghai because it doesn’t snow much here in winter. The only other time I experienced such snow here in Shanghai was on Dec. 30th and 31st 2004. (Old post & pics about it here) Yesterday’s snow was heavier. Perhaps it felt that way because I was outside in the snow longer than in 2004.
I went to meet some of my Mauritian friends at 2 p.m to go to Hong Kong plaza and despite carrying an umbrella, my jeans, boots and bag were all covered with snow because of the wind. Being from a country where winter is around 15 °C and hence never snows, we were all happy that it was snowing. The only problem is that in Shanghai, the snow melts too quickly, which is probably why I’m down with a cold now. My clothes got a bit wet yesterday.
Two pics that I took yesterday:

The snow stopped after a few hours yesterday but it snowed again early this morning. I didn’t go out this morning but Desmond, who went to drop off a French guy at the Hongkou stadium at 5:30 a.m came back and showed me the snowball that he made. He also told me that the road was very slippery. The taxi driver wasn’t happy at all.

Desmond holding the snowball

He could have made a much bigger one but he wanted to go back inside the building asap.

Sushi was fascinated by the snowball. She was a bit scared of it at first but once it started melting a bit (or rather,a lot. The ball became much smaller by the time Sushi was willing to get near it.), she started licking the ball but stopped once the cold got to her.

She pounced on the ball and then ran away from the ball. She did that a few times before we finally threw away the ball.

It has been quite cold today. It doesn’t feel cold when it snows but after the snow, when the snow starts to melt or has finished melting, it feels very cold. I looked out of the window just now. All the snow has melted already and the ground is wet. Brrrrrrrrrrrrr ………… It feels very cold. Now I’m trying to decide whether to brave the cold, go out to have dinner or stay home and cook noodles or something. I’m definitely not a winter person. (unless if it’s the winter in Mauritius!! hehe) According to weather.com, right now ” it is 1°C but it feels like -3°C ” . It doesn’t sound like much to people who are from countries where winter is below 0 °C but for me, it’s COLD.

-edited to add the following-
I didn’t go out so dinner was noodles indeed.
Looks good huh? It tasted great! Prepared by…… Desmond. Yeah, not me. Those who know me personally won’t find it surprising.

BUT…. I fried the fish!
It didn’t look appetizing at first so I used the leftover lamb curry (cooked by Desmond yesterday) to pour on the fried fish. Hence, the fish tasted like lamb but it was still good.
ta daaaa!

I went to the IKEA in Shanghai for the first time today. I’ve always wanted to go there. I asked someone about IKEA in the past. That person told me that it’s very troublesome to go there from Tongji University ,must take taxi, it’s far..bla bla bla….. Recently, one of my classmates told me that she accompanied a friend to IKEA. Out of curiousity, I asked her how she went there. It turns out that it’s quite easy to get there after all!

Kailash, Desmond and I went there today. We bought a few things but what I liked most was the food in the restaurant inside IKEA. This explains why I only took pics of the food.
I love the Swedish meat balls! hehe . We bought a large portion. I think it was like 25.50 yuan for 20 meatballs and some fries. The salmon dish that we had was okay too but I prefer the meat balls! hehe

The yummy Swedish meat balls!!

The Salmon dish. I don’t remember the exact name.

We made the ‘mistake’ of buying two small bottles of mineral water (330ml) there at 3 yuan each, only to find out that there’s also soft drinks and coffee. We just need to tell the cashier that we want a glass of pepsi (or any other soft drinks). She’ll add it to the bill and give you an empty glass. If we want coffee, then we’ll get a coffee cup instead. After paying, we can go to the self-service drinks section and choose what we want. The soft drinks are 5 yuan and the coffee is 6 yuan, unlimited refills.
I don’t know when I’ll go there again. We spent about 4 hours there today and it was tiring.

Ah… and Happy winter hols to me! I’m on hols since the 16th. I was so tired from sleeping 3-4 hours every day during the exam week and the week before that I mainly stayed home to sleep during the past few days. I slept until 7pm the other day. Euh, don’t ask me how I did that.

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*edited this post to add*

How to get to IKEA from Tongji University (main campus) :
Take bus 115 or 515 (The bus stop is on Chifeng Road, near the xinjiang restaurant) and get off on the 2nd stop. Walk a few mins to Chifeng Road Metro Station. Take Line 3 to Caoxi Road. Get out of the station (we chose Exit 3), walk a bit, cross the road and that’s it. IKEA.
Taking a taxi to go there is another option for those people who don’t mind spending some extra money.

IKEA (Shanghai) address: No.126 CaoXi road

I got tagged by Gladys.
It’s been so long since I last did one of those tag things… Lazy? Feel free to tag me. I might just do it.
This one is not accurate but I did it anyway.

My name is…

A :Gorgeous
L :BEST SMILE
I :Loves to laugh
N :Sexy
E :deeply in love with her bf

Name Meaning Here:
A: Gorgeous
B: Loves people
C: Really easy to fall in love with
D: Is great in bed
E: deeply in love with his/her gf/bf
F: People wild and crazy adore you
G: Never let people tell you what to do
H:Freakin’ beautiful eyes
I: Loves to laugh
J: Makes people laugh
K: Really silly
L: BEST SMILE
M: Makes dating fun
N: Sexy
O: Has one of the best personalities ever
P: Popular with all types of people
Q: A hypocrite
R: Good bf/gf
S: Lives life for fun
T: Great kisser
U: Gets blamed for everything
V: Not judgmental
W: Very broad minded
X: Never let people tell you what to do
Y: Loved by everyone
Z: Lives life for fun

Like I said in one of my older entries, I don’t mind being tagged but I don’t like tagging people.
I’m not going to tag anyone this time because some people don’t like it. Who likes to be tagged/don’t mind being tagged? Let me know.

My camera went kaput again. I think it’s because of the cold weather. I will update after I’m done with my exams. A couple more days… I have been very busy with my studies. Arghhh .

After my previous upgrade to wordpress 2.2.1, I didn’t upgrade my wordpress again.
This was what I saw each time I tried to access my blog or blog admin page during the past few days:

500 Internal Server Error

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@a-l-i-n-e.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/2.2.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.7a mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.5 Server at www.a-l-i-n-e.com Port 80

I didn’t do anything at first because I was quite busy with my thesis but when I saw James online a few days later, I told him about the error. He told me that he would look into the matter and when I got back home yesterday, I saw the message he left for me on MSN.

(Quoted from our MSN conversation)
James said:
Regarding your WordPress installation, please have it upgraded. It stopped working because we upgraded to PHP5.

Indeed, after upgrading to the latest wordpress (version 2.3.2), my blog is now working fine. There are a few changes which I want to make here but I’ll leave that for next week when I’m done with my exams.

What did I learn from this?
Always upgrade when there’s a new version out.