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Did you think that I was disappearing again? Those who follow me on Twitter or who are friends with me on Facebook probably know that I went back to Mauritius.

Everything happened too fast. On Christmas eve, all job-related procedures were completed (medical check-up, work visa etc) and I phoned my youngest sis. She bought my plane tickets on that same day & emailed me the e-tickets. I packed my small suitcase with some clothes, filled my big suitcase with things for my sisters, went shopping and on Christmas day, I took a cab to Changi airport at 10 p.m. I took the 1:20 am flight on 26th December. It was my first time flying Singapore-Dubai-Mauritius. I couldn’t get a seat on Air Mauritius and that’s why I flew on Emirates instead. I don’t want to criticise Air Mauritius but I’m seriously considering flying on Emirates again if I need to go back to Mauritius in the future & of course if I’m not in a hurry.
Singapore to Dubai took about 7 hours and I had to wait at Dubai airport for 4 to 5 hours (didn’t feel long because I was in the duty free shops) before the Dubai to Mauritius flight. Dubai to Mauritius took another 6 ¹/₂ hours. The tickets are more expensive than for Singapore to Mauritius on Air Mauritius but the food was better, the service was better. Enough said.

Something I noticed when disembarking from the Singapore to Dubai flight was that the plane was quite clean. I was impressed. Were most passengers Singaporeans? I couldn’t help wondering. In Singapore, people usually don’t litter because they risk getting fined heavily. On the other hand, I noticed that the plane for the Dubai to Mauritius flight wasn’t that clean when I got off the plane. The passengers were mostly Indians, French and Mauritians.

After I reached Mauritius, it took me a few minutes to get used to hearing most people around me speak Creole or French again and I smiled. This is home. I love that feeling of being back home, back to our sunny little island. :love: Well it wasn’t really sunny because it rained for a few days but my stay was still enjoyable.

I went to the beach once, went to Shout & Shotz once (but didn’t enjoy myself much because of cigarette smoke. I don’t have anything against smokers but I have breathing difficulties on and off. FYI, people aren’t allowed to smoke in bars/clubs in Singapore), met up with a few friends for lunch or dinner but I’ve been spending most of my time with my family. I didn’t have time to meet all my friends but hopefully, I’ll be able to see them next time. My parents weren’t keen on letting me go out at night and I had to stay at friends’ places instead of going back home after midnight because they reckon that our neighbourhood isn’t as safe as it used to be years ago. Mauritius is said to be an ideal destination for tourists but how do the local people rate Mauritius when it comes to safety, esp. when it’s not in the city centre? I’ve heard a few stories about people driving back home after clubbing , seeing bricks/crates/barrels on the road, getting out of the car to move them and then getting attacked & robbed? Something like that. Can anyone confirm those stories? To my non-Mauritian friends, please don’t get a bad impression of Mauritius. No country is 100% safe. I love Mauritius. (note: 2009 report about Crime and Safety in Mauritius. )

Staying in Mauritius from 26 December 2009 to 7th January 2010 was NOT ENOUGH. The last time I went back home was 2 ¹/₂ years ago and I had stayed for about 1 ¹/₂ months.

The good thing is that I’m back to Singapore with a clearer mind and feeling better than the last couple of months. Hopefully, 2010 will be a better year for me. :flowers:

I will write about my stay in Mauritius soon and of course, I’ll upload some photos.
I want to enjoy my Saturday lazying around at home after this long, tiring week.

As mentioned before, I went on a trip to Hong Kong and mainland China with my youngest sis for ten days.

I was too busy to take photos during my trip. The only photos I took with my camera were on the plane and on the train.

On the plane to Hong Kong:


I didn’t have time to eat at home and had to buy the food on the plane. Jetstar is a budget airline. The plane tickets are cheap but meals aren’t included and have to be bought during the flight. I chose the Hainanese Chicken Rice meal. It was expensive and didn’t taste nice. >.< Next time, I will eat at home or even at the airport.

After I finished eating, I put on the N95 mask that Lisa got for me. Almost everyone was wearing a mask. Mine looked a tad funny but that’s all I had. I found it a bit hard to breathe when wearing the mask. I also had to fill in a health declaration form on the plane. Seeing so many people wearing masks on the plane made me worry a bit.
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I have reached Singapore since a few days now and I’m loving the weather here. It’s not as hot as Shanghai and I feel like I can tan without getting sunburnt. :cloud9: I’m already a bit tanned by now. I am staying at Hillview with Lisa, a Mauritian friend who was studying at NUS and who is now working in Singapore. I haven’t seen her since 2004. We were both in the majorette team back in secondary & high school. She’s like a little sister to me. Staying at her place reminds me of the times when I used to go and stay over at her house back in Mauritius.
Lisa is at work right now and I am currently at Desmond’s place to upload some of the photos and blog a bit.
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I didn’t take a direct flight from Shanghai to Singapore. I went to Guangzhou first and then took Tigerair from there. Due to the rain, the plane was delayed by 2 hours.
I took a ‘Hot meal of the day’ and it was surprisingly good. A little tip: Pay in SGD. When paid in RMB, the prices were ridiculously higher. (On Tigerair, people have to pay for the meals and drinks because they weren’t included in the plane ticket. )

A typo mistake.

Yummy chicken egg noodles. My first time having a meal on the plane when it hasn’t taken off. We were all bored and hungry and the stewardess had to start serving food and drinks.

Doodles. We were bored.

Our handphones and the handphone chains that we bought at the airport. Desmond’s phone is the gold one, mine is the white one. I wanted to buy the red Olympic mascot handphone chain but it was sold out.

-_- Desmond did that. The one standing is his.

View of Malaysia from the plane.

Photo of Pulao Tekong,an island off the north-eastern coast of Singapore. If I remember correctly, Desmond said that it is a military training area.

View of Singapore from the plane. Desmond helped me snap this photo and then the plane was landing already.

This is the first photo that I took in Singapore.

I’m posting this photo because I just went to see The Dark Knight yesterday at Westmall.

I have been to only a couple of places in Singapore so far but what I can say for sure is that I love the food here. :love: More photos soon. I went to Sentosa and Chinatown already. I’ll go to the zoo and the night safari this weekend. I have to check online about interesting places to visit here. I need to do some shopping too. I didn’t bring much luggage. Too bad I missed the July sales.

OUF!! I finally have time for myself now. My graduation ceremony was around a month ago and I have been super busy ever since. My sisters came to Shanghai for my graduation and afterwards, I was busy taking them around to buy goods for their new store. They left Shanghai last week to go to Hong Kong and now, they are back to Mauritius already.

My 2 little sisters. I took this photo when we were out shopping at Wujiaochang.

Evre since they left, I’ve been busy packing my things. I have to leave the International students dorm in a couple of days. I ‘have to leave’ because I’ve finished my studies. I’m on scholarship and the 4-year scholarship officially ends on the 31st of July. So it will be bye-bye dorm, no more monthly stipend from the government, no more studying, no more free books,no more free medical facilities, etc. I’ve almost finished packing my things by now and I still can’t get over the fact that I have so many stuffs. I’m going to move my things to my bf’s place tomorrow.

AND….. I’ll be going to Singapore for a month . ( and Malaysia too of course) I hope to be able to get a China tourist visa once in Singapore and then come back to Shanghai in September to ship my things to Mauritius etc. I still have no idea what I’ll be doing exactly. Job-hunting in China doesn’t seem likely. Not that I don’t want to but with all this Olympics thing going on, it’s hard to get a work visa now. Applying for other visas isn’t as easy as before. I know many people who have left China already. I love Shanghai but unless I somehow manage to get a job or an internship here(well anything that gets me a visa), I won’t be able to stay here. Anyway, I’ll see when I get back to Shanghai. Right now, I’m pretty excited about my trip to Singapore. I have been planning to go to Singapore since so long already and now I am finally going! hehe . I have bought my tickets already. Leaving in a couple of days. :flowers:

As for my graduation photos… Well, my camera chose that particular time to go kaput again. Therefore, no photos taken from my camera. I will have to email my classmates to ask them to send me some photos that their friends or relatives took. My sisters took a few pics with their own camera but they left Shanghai without transferring the photos to my computer. I will have to ask them to email me the photos when they get back to Mauritius. I managed to get a few pics taken by the other Mauritians in my university and a couple of pics taken by Desmond. I’ll upload more photos soon.

With my 2 little sisters.(who are younger than me in terms of age but they are both taller than me,especially when I’m not wearing high heels.) Snif snif
In the first pic is Karine who is 2 years younger than me and in the second pic is Celine who is 4 years younger than me. Somehow when I introduce my little sisters to my teachers and friends,most of them ask me if they are my ‘real’ sisters. :faint:
ah…and the flowers are from all the other Mauritians in my university. :flowers:

With Kailash and Vricksha.

With Karina and JN.

With Desmond.

With Deenoo.

Photo with some of my classmates.

I finally got around to writing the second part to my entry 厦门 part 1. I still have pics from my Yangzhou trip but they’ll have to wait. I realize that I also have pics from my 2005 trip to Meixian but I never posted them. I’ll do it… one day… There are so many things I’d like to write about and share with others but they will have to wait. My exams have just started today and even if I don’t really need to study for them, I am busy with homework. I’d rather start doing them early and avoid having them accumulate like last time.
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After Nanputuo temple, we went to Hulishan.

Hulishan(胡里山) Fortress

By now, I’ve forgotten many things I learned about Xiamen. I’ve never been good at geography and history. At least I have some pics.
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I came back from Yangzhou (扬州) on Friday evening but was too tired to resize the pics. I didn’t take many photos there. I will post the part 2 to my Xiamen trip some other time. Today, I’ll post some food pics.
We had lunch and dinner at the hotel restaurant on the first day and lunch on the last day. The food looked pretty much the same all 3 times.

We had fish each time but they were cooked in different ways.
The fish dish on our last day:

Jin duixun from South Korea and Willman from Cuba, the only two guys sitting at our table. They are both very funny. hehe
There were around 10 dishes on the round table with a huge platter of rice in the middle.

This pork dish reminded me of a dish which my mum usually cooks. It doesn’t look exactly the same but tasted quite the same because of the sauce and the vegetables. I forgot the hakka name of the dish but Rosemary tells me that it’s moychoi niouk. I’ll ask my sis to ask my mum next time I chat with her.

At home, I usually just eat the vegetables but this time, I decided to try the pork too. It was surprisingly quite good and seemed to melt in my mouth. That kinda makes me regret all those years during which I didn’t eat the pork in that pork dish my mum cooked. :laughing:

On Thursday night, nearly 5 hours after dinner (which was at around 5:30 pm… Chinese people eat dinner quite early.:shock:) , my friends and I went to Mcdonald. I’m used to having dinner after 8:30 pm in Mauritius. The food was alright but we ate too early and went shopping after dinner.

I should have written about this since the end of January.
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My friends and I (we were ten in all) went to Xiamen (Xiamen 厦门,located in the southern part of Fujian province) for a few days at the end of January. We had gone to Hongqiao airport very early but still, we nearly missed the plane. There were too many people queuing up to check in. It was so chaotic, so badly organized. My friends and I ran all the way to the boarding gate and made it in time. phew. Fortunately, I was wearing trainers instead of my usual boots and I had a backpack instead of a small suitcase as hand luggage. Spring Airlines is horrible but then again, I was not surprised. After all, Spring Airlines is Shanghai’s first low-cost(budget) private airline and it was launched only last year in July. We were only given bottled mineral water. No meals on the flight.

We reached Xiamen after about two hours. It was such a sunny day. :cloud9: The weather was perfect. (compared to Shanghai!!)

Gancho, James and me at the airport

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After those few days spent in Guangzhou, I learned that tea drinking is a big thing over there.
Native Guangzhou people are known in China for their love for tea. Drinking tea is like a symbol of their everyday life and it has to be in teahouses. :flowers: Drinking tea at home simply doesn’t count.
It’s not surprising that the number of teahouses in Guangzhou is the largest in China.

On my first morning in Guangzhou, Rosemary’s cousin said: ‘Let’s have tea’. I thought that she meant let’s drink tea in her house but she went to change and put on her shoes. Rosemary and I did the same and followed her out. She took us to a teahouse near her place.

There were many people there, having tea and eating dimsum. It was more like some kind of social occasion. Rosemary’s cousin said that the Cantonese call it yam cha which literally means to drink tea. However, it also includes the dim sum. From what I understood, drinking tea without having dim sum is not yam cha. Dim sum are savoury little snacks, usually steamed, deep fried, or boiled.
More definitions of dim sum here.

Rosemary and I didn’t know what to order so we asked her cousin to do it.

The waitress filled our tea cups and then took the order.

The food didn’t take long to arrive and Rosemary’s cousin told us to dig in. I didn’t eat immediately. I took out my camera and took pics. Rosemary’s cousin seemed amused by that.

I’m not very adventurous when it comes to food so I was a bit wary when I saw the waitress bring the chicken feet. I tentatively took a bite and it was surprisingly good. Okay let’s dig in. :laugh:

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