MyBOOKreview: 11/22/63 by Stephen King

THIS IS MY FIRST TIME DOING A BOOK REVIEW. I read a lot and during these days I try to force myself to read not that because I’ve not become interested with books anymore  but the fact is college life is very demanding, sometimes when you have no assignments or that you’ve finished doing them, it doesn’t mean that you’re as free as a bird. You would still have to prepare for the next class and sometimes readings for classes can consume much of your time. Now, I kind of get it when I recall the statistic about college students reading only an average of one book per year. But still, I do not want to make this as an excuse, hence I try to motivate myself to read at least one book per month.

     Just about a week ago, I finished reading another novel by Stephen King called 11/22/63. Yup, you got it right, the date is the title (or the title is a date, just to add to the confusion :P). It’s so troubling that whenever someone asked me what book was I reading, I would have to say out the date as in, “November twenty-second of sixty-three”. Phew! Anyway, so far I have only read three novels from Stephen King and I would say that the first novel that I read, Full Dark, No Stars is by far the best one. Well, actually it’s not really a novel, it’s actually a collection of short stories but what I really love about it is that there was not one story that I didn’t like! Now continuing to the novel here…

The novel really has a nice and smart cover. This is the 'first page' of the front cover, a newspaper page reporting the assassination of JFK

Now, the second page of the front cover, is a newspaper page reporting that JFK and his wife, Jackie saved from the near-death incident. Pretty neat, huh?

SUMMARY

The theme of the book is time travelling. It tells a story of a guy named Jacob “Jake” Epping who was entrusted by a dying man named Al Templeton - who first found the rabbit-hole which brought anyone who passes through it to the year of 1958 from the current year of 2011- to stop the assassination of John. F Kennedy (35^th President of the United States). Al Templeton himself had tried to get the job done but his mission was blocked when he found out that he was diagnosed with cancer. However, there’s a twist to this time travelling adventure, every time that someone goes through the rabbit hole, it means a reset to what that person or other person before him had done when he went to the past. Pretty confusing, no? So apparently, if you happen to follow the story of the president’s assassination, you would know that a man named Lee James Oswald had become the suspect for the crime, but because he was killed before he could do any confessions/denials at all, the mystery remains of who was/were the responsible one/ones. So the story mostly features Jake making a follow up to Lee Oswald until the day he is going to shoot the president.

CHARACTERS

There are a few interesting characters that I would like to highlight here. The first one is Al Templeton. Apparently, he was the guy who started all the plot of stopping the assassination of JFK. Before he even came up with this idea, he had been going back and forth to the year of 1958, to get meat supplies for his business. But soon after, he realizes that with this miracle he had found, he could actually do something that could change the world which then leads to the whole JFK idea. Next, there’s of course Jake Epping, the main character of the story. He is a high school English teacher, and somewhat is in his 30s. Personally, I would regard him as a random guy that Al Templeton chose to carry out the plan for him, as Jake Epping to me was just a normal everyday guy and had no deep attachment to the assassination of JFK. Anyhow, he is a really focused man and his bravery to take over the whole incident should be highly praised. He only went to the past three times; the first one to experiment with Harry Dunning’s family, the second and longest one to stop the assassination and the last one to reset the whole thing. A year or two before the assassination was to take place; he met Sadie, a new librarian at the high school he was teaching in the past, who then became the love of his life (or more accurately, the love of his life in the past). Both of these characters were married to somebody else and happened to be having conflicts in their marriages, Jake with his alcoholic wife and Sadie with her OCD inflicted husband. Sadie actually plays a very important part in the JFK plan, because she was the person who helped Jake to stop Lee James Oswald, but unfortunately she was killed by Lee instead. Lastly, Lee James Oswald, the antagonist is also portrayed as a very interesting character in the novel. Despite of him being the mastermind to murder the president (in the novel), he also had a soft spot for his family especially to his daughter June. He occasionally had fights with his Russian wife, Marina, but he was also shown to treat Marina and Jun with love and affection. The whole plot of assassinating JFK to me was because of his concern of the political corruption in the United States at that time.

WHAT I LIKE

• First experience of reading a time travelling novel, which is not bad
• Stephen King did a thorough or at least to me a convincible research of the settings involved and the background of Lee James Oswald
• It brought suspense at the end of the novel, just when I thought that the novel was going to end with some typical or unimportant things at the end, apparently the last 20-30 pages were the most intense part. The last part is kind of disturbing too
• Delicious twist
• The use of metaphors such as “the past harmonizes itself”, “the past is obdurate” and “the butterfly effects” to portray how the past acts to stop anything that wants to change it
• The fact that JFK is one of my favourite presidents adds to the anticipation, although the novel doesn't tell much about the president

WHAT I DON’T LIKE

• Some scenes always jump to the XX scene or pound cake as they (Sadie and Jake) call it which got my eyes rolling every time.
• At the end, after the whole thing, Jake was torn between his love for Sadie and his supposed duty to save the world.

All in all, I would give this novel 3.5 out of 5 stars!

My 2013 resolution

I know it's kind of late to post something like this as we have already passed the mid of January. But never mind, I just want to share my this year's resolution to the viewers. Never in my life before had I come up with some kind of list of what I want to accomplish of that certain year, but anyhow I feel that this year could be the beginning of it. Also because of the fact that I'm now in college, I should take my life much more seriously but at the same time not missing the excitement of life. I challenge myself to post this on public, thinking that if somehow anyone who happens to read this asks me anytime later in this year about this, at least I will get reminded. So here they are:

1. Take the black belt test. (I have procrastinated too much!)
2. Keep track of my schedule and money
3. Join a marathon/long run
4. Accomplish at least 5 things everyday
5. Read Quran at least once a day
6. Get at least A for every classes
7. Work out 4-5 times a week
8. Lose weight at least 7-10 kg
9. Learn how to bake
10. Go to an event/meeting/class 10 minutes earlier

PERMATApintar: From the inside

A lot of my friends from this program would probably agree with me: when someone asks us which school are we from, it’s the beginning of a hard-to-explain effort. I personally would have just answered, "Some school in Bangi". Only when they start to ask further would I explain into details that I study in the PERMATApintar program, and our school is literally located in the UKM. The responses would usually be either of these two : “Program PERMATApintar tu macam mana, eh?” or the total opposite of it “Owh, PERMATApintar, mesti pelajar pintar ni kan?”. It is exhaustive - I have to admit - that as the pioneers of this program, we carry such a big responsibility trying to keep up with other people's expectation. Since PERMATApintar is such a new and young program, I figured that I could give a hint to the public based on my personal experience being in this program. Just to be clear, I won’t be bragging about the program's history and its background as I’m pretty sure that you could obtain these from PERMATA official website. What I'll be sharing is some insight from how the program were for me to how it had shaped me to where I am so far. Here we go.

HOW DID I GET INVOLVED?

It started out when I was in Form 3 (in 2010), when out of the blue, our teacher told us that we were going to sit for some online test. I didn’t know what it was for, nor had I ever heard of PERMATApintar program before, so I just gave it a go because well, firstly it was compulsory for all of us and because this online test sounded really interesting. About a month or two later, a handful of students including me was told that we had passed the first test and that we would be taking a subsequent test. We were told further that if we were to pass this test, we would be offered a chance to attend the holiday camp, or officially known as the Program Perkhemahan Cuti Sekolah PERMATApintar. As an addition, the Form 3 students would also be invited to a 3 days camp before the beginning of the holiday camp called Perkhemahan Khas Sains dan Matematik, a stage where you will be further evaluated in order for your admission to the newly established PERMATApintar school which was named Program Pendidikan PERMATApintar.

PROGRAM PENDIDIKAN PERMATApintar

As a very very short summary to what happened in the following month, I managed to get into the holiday camp and hence the math and science camp (since I was in Form 3) and soon I was offered for a place at the school. I was such in a huge dilemma to decide between staying at my current school at that time which was already a top notch school (it was MRSM Langkawi) or pursuing this program that was only beginning and risking my own future? Following my quick instinct, I ended up choosing to go to this new school, hoping that I might gain better and improvised education catered more suitably for me as it had promised. I swear the feeling that I had was like being a kamikaze throwing herself into a huge uncertainty.

THE CURRICULUM

This table below is a full summary to how our curriculum was. Keep in mind that this was used for the duration that I was there which was between 2011-2012 so the curriculum might change for the succeeding students.

Academic component

1. Core curriculum: SPM -  Our core syllabus was based on the syllabus provided by the Ministry of Education (MOE, or KPM) with ALL THREE science subjects; Chemistry, Physics and Biology and the rest; Bahasa Melayu,Bahasa Inggeris, Sejarah, Pendidikan Agama Islam/Moral, Modern Mathematics and Additional Mathematics. So how does this make it different from the other schools? The two next items will tell you why.
2. Accelerated curriculum : Advanced Placement (AP), O level, A level, Standard Aptitude Test (SAT) - When we first learned Biology and Chemistry, we were learning according to the Advanced Placement syllabus which basically means that the materials that we learned were more in depth and advanced comparing to the SPM syllabus. These two syllabi roughly have the same topics but as I said, the AP syllabus is more accelerated. If I were to tell you more about the AP it would have been kind of dragging and misleading from our main point here, so I would highly recommend you to feed your curiosity by yourself (i.e. Google). Anyway, we didn’t touch the O level and A level contents because I’m pretty sure that they also have different curriculum structures. We stopped learning the AP syllabus after a few months when suddenly the school started to stick with the SPM realizing that all of us would have to take the SPM anyway. If you're thinking that this might be another plan gone wrong, let me remind you that this school had just begun and it still needs a whole lot of adjustments before it can finally settle down with one final curriculum. Maybe the school would start again with the AP or maybe they would even extract the A level courses, yet again these will all take time
3. First year college courses - During my time, the students were only offered two mathematics courses from the Science and Technology Faculty of UKM which are Linear Algebra and Calculus. For my batch, we had to learn Calculus during the second semester of our first year and Linear Algebra on the first semester of our second year. We were taught by the lecturers from the faculty and personally, I think the courses were very challenging yet they were also very exciting.

Foreign language: We also had to take foreign language classes which again were taught by the linguistic lecturers from the university. So far, the languages that we had to learn are Japanese and French with the learning duration of about one semester per language, pretty much similar to mathematics courses above.

Scientific Project/Research: At first, I bet most of my friends would agree with me if I say that this component is the one that we mostly feared of. But after the end of the whole thing, I personally admit that this is actually the best part of the whole program. So apparently here is how this research component works like: Each students would be assigned with a research mentor (a professor or lecturer from the university) to work on a scientific project. (A group of my friends had Datuk Dr. Sheikh Muszaphar as their mentor, what the heck!) The students will be divided according to their field of interest and some would have to work in groups or pairs or for some people like me, individually. We had to consistently keep up with the meetings with these mentors to plan and design our projects. It all literally depends on what you and your mentor have decided for the project and the time length for a project from another would then differ. At the end of the whole research, you would then have to write a thesis and do a presentation at a convention that would be held near the end of your study. I recalled when I first held my printed thesis that I felt like my newborn child, I almost shed a tear out of the feeling of triumph and satisfaction (sorry for the emotional interruption)

Portfolio Evaluation: You would also have to submit a portfolio of yourself to the counsellors at the end of the study to be evaluated and counted for the total point.

Co-curriculum: We were lucky enough to have the chance to reside on the campus as we had the opportunity to be offered with art and cultural classes from Pusat Kebudayaan UKM. Some of us got to do theatre, dance, gamelan, angklung, orchestra, choir etc. We also had sports and uniform bodies such as bowling, Police Cadet, Red Crescent Society, golf, horse-riding (I know), basketball, tennis and some others. Another form of co-curriculum that we got to do is by participating in competitions. A few of my very fortunate friends were chosen to participate at the international level based on their projects and academic achievement and went to places like Dubai, Jeju Island of Korea and Johns Hopkins University in the United States. Sadly, I’m not one of them but never mind, not my luck maybe. We also had the opportunity to compete with other schools through language festivals like pantun and public speaking. The most interesting part about this is that, instead of relying to the teachers to choose students to represent the school, you mostly could sign yourself up for any events that might interest you. Screening tests might be held, but your chance of participation is very high (since you're the one who come up with the idea)

Identity development: This is actually the lightest component of all to my opinion. We basically would have to attend a session of identity development for every week where we would have guest speakers coming to the school to share their knowledge and experience on certain fields to give us insights and ideas on how we should prepare ourselves for the future. Once, for a few weeks, we had grooming sessions by a professional teaching us how to present ourselves by the way we dress and communicate. Ain’t we all love that? For this component, we also were sent to boot camps where we would have to not only experience psychological but physical trainings. We had two camps, one for each year, I really like them both; they felt like a brief getaway from the heftiness of the school life.

A picture from the first camp

I'm totally going to do cave trekking again after this

And that my friends, is the end of the brief story that I could share regarding the program. Sure there’s MUCH MUCH more to tell, but after all of these, I pretty much can assure you that you would already have the basic knowledge of how it is like. Just to add to the excitement, I would also love to conclude my personal recounts after about one year and 8 months of being in Program Pendidikan PERMATApintar.

Having to bring phone and laptop to school. It may sound a little childish to be so excited over this thing but I have to tell you that it is really convenient and helpful to have these tools to aid our learning (and also communication). After all, it is also a good practice for us to learn to cope with having to bring technology to school, because we learn to control ourselves and know what to expect of when we become too carried away by them e.g. not getting to finish the assignment, lack of sleep, doesn’t have enough time to study.

This is not a kindergarten, really. And ignore the pictures on my laptop screen, I was just checking out some cars, apparently.

MY GOOD FRIENDS! For the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to mingle with friends that come not only from different races but also states as far as Sabah, Sarawak and Kelantan. Just by naming these states, I could imagine the faces already. We had such good memory and time together, of offending each other mostly (haha, that’s what friends do all the time). I got to learn a lot from their culture and was at times left in awe by their courage and capabilities and cuteness (yes, I’m talking about you Avra). I had such an awesome roommate, I think the most awesome that I’d ever had up until now hahaha.

My awesome classmates.

Friends coming over to my house

     
My research project. Thinking about this gets me emotional again, after months of hard work in the lab, I finally get the research done by myself and of course with the strong support of my mentor and her research assistant and also credit to the instructors who without fail had been willing to take me almost every day to the lab. I got to carry out my research project by using one of the labs at the Engineering Faculty in UKM, working alone for my project alongside a PhD and a graduate student. At times when I couldn’t get to understand one of the processes that I have to carry out, I was fortunate to have them working in the lab too as I can easily ask them for guidance. Although I didn’t get to present my project at the convention as I had to leave to United States earlier before, I thanked Allah for giving me the courage to carry out the assignment successfully.

One of the set ups that I have to work with.

Sometimes when there was no other people working in the lab,  I got to have the lab on my own! Is this awesome or what?

Fast track program. Out of my surprise, after the first semester of our first year in the school, a group of students were called out for a meeting and informed that we were offered for a fast track program. The idea of this program is that we would have to prepare for the university applications only for the United States to pursue our majors in pure science or mathematics. If we are accepted to any colleges, and passed the interview for our scholarships, we get to dismiss ourselves from SPM. So this means yay! you would think, but yay! comes with a price, a really heavy one. Again, I was hit with dilemma because I’ve always prefer to study in the United Kingdom over the States. But I made up my mind, and probably again became a kamikaze, because I felt that it was a chance of a lifetime. Over the next three months, the lives of 15 of us, were being thrown upside down, juggling between the school life (final exams, assignments and research projects) and the preparation for TOEFL, SAT, SPM (for BM only) and university application. Alhamdulillah, to cut the long story short, I was offered for admission to the University of California, Davis to major in Chemistry so as the rest of 14 others in some other prominent colleges in the United States.

Who are those people sharing the stage with TUN DR MAHATHIR? Wait, the left one to Tun Dr M is familiar, hahaha it was me! (astaghfirullahalazim..) This is truly the most unforgettable moment that I will treasure for my lifetime. The chance to not only meet Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammad but also having the opportunity to interview him in a talk program. I was so overly excited when we were informed that Tun Dr. Mahathir would be visiting our school and that he would also be giving a talk to all of us during the event, but when I was told to become the moderator, I died of happiness. InsyaAllah I will try to make a post regarding my experience of interviewing him directly (since I’ve already started blogging)

Here's an up close picture. If you think that I'm showing off, well, I am.

Finally, another favourite event of mine is when I was selected to become one of the panelists alongside Kevin (my BFF haha!) and Asyraf as the moderator in a forum with a Nobel Laureate, Prof Muhd Yunus, who came to visit our school. We were discussing over a topic of “How to make the world a better place?” (pretty much like that) and I got to talk about the topic that I love the most which is the environment!

It was truly amazing getting to meet him. You should learn the story about this humble yet extraordinary man.

It is definitely a difficult task to compile all of my experiences in the program in this one post but I hope if you happen to read up until this point, you had gained slightly more information about this program. It had totally changed my life in such an enormous way, and I am thankful and thankful to Allah for directing me to the decision to choose this program at the beginning. Maybe I’m still very inexperienced and naïve but at least I’ve become much clearer of the duty that I have for my own country. This seems like a very big task- it is - but InsyaAllah I will give my all to make this happen!

THE TRIP TO NEW YORK

DIDN'T SEE THIS COMING... 

Out of my expectation, during my winter break, I joined my good PERMATA friends at Rutgers University in New Jersey for a few days trip to New York. Why is this to my surprise? Well, I wasn't expecting myself to be as far to the east coast of the States during the last college break as my initial plan was to go to Los Angeles. What I had in my mind was, I should tackle the near places first e.g. LA, San Diego, San Francisco first before going anywhere further, but oh well, New York is even a much better idea than LA :p So here are some of the recollections from my totally fun trip!

THE FIRST DAY

I didn't go to New York yet during my first day of staying with my friends. Elena and Jah alongside Afi (or should I say, KAK Afi, haha) brought me for a tour around their campus. As deserted as my campus in Davis (most likely because everyone had gone back home for Christmas), it was as if we owned the place! (no, I'm just exaggerating). Anyway, I like the buildings and the roads on the campus, the roads somehow reminded me of the ones in Putrajaya. Unfortunately, since it was days before Christmas, most of the shops were closed so you could barely see a living, i mean people. The campus is composed of a few areas and to get from one to another, fear not they have buses going back and forth, well of course. I know this is somewhat misleading, but the most exciting thing they showed me was this...

MISS SANDY what had you done?! Look at how the ground were being pulled together with the root  of the tumbling tree...

Apparently, this is the aftermath of the Hurricane Sandy which hit the Northeastern part of the States last year during the late October. My poor friends here in New Jersey had to be evacuated from their dorms to avoid any mishaps a.k.a being whipped away by the hurricane.

NOW OFF TO NEW YORK

I'm very lucky enough to not have to find a place to stay in New York as instead I could just stay with my friends in New Jersey. On our first day of the trip, we took a bus from the campus and arrived in NY in about one hour. From the time length you could tell how close is NJ from NY. Moving forward, we were all going for the trip under an agency called CityPASS. I forgot whose idea this was, but it was totally brilliant. Let me tell you real quick about how this CityPASS works like. So apparently, instead of touring to New York, having to pay to the famous attractions singly when you're entering the sites, CityPASS allows you to enter a number of attractions according to the city that you choose by paying a single amount of fee. The fee pretty much total up the amount of fees that you have to pay for the sites, but the good news is the prices are cut down and you get to save a lot! CityPASS is also offered for a number of other selected cities e.g. LA, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia. Once you pay for the CityPASS online, you can get the card to be sent to your home or you can also pick it up at the selected pick up points of that particular city. Simply, present the card at the selected attractions, and you'll get access. Here's the link if you're interested to check it out...

http://www.citypass.com

I also happen to find out about another program that works pretty much the same as the CityPASS called Smart Destinations,

http://www.smartdestinations.com

Okay, this is truly misleading, I should get moving now. So the first spot that we hit was the Empire State Building.

Luckily, since it was on the weekday, the visitors weren't as much as I had expected. The view from above could almost give you the bird-eye view of Manhattan. And yet, the day was so windy I swear I almost got blown away by the wind. Out of the madness, I'm grateful that I'm studying in California where the weather is simply just nice ;). Next, we headed to the Rockefeller Centre. But hey, on the way there, why don't we stop at the Museum of Sex? 

Museum of Sex - We know what you really want. Nah, not me.

Apparently, this is the only picture that I could barely take from the museum. Not that camera is not allowed inside, but simply because the pictures are too inappropriate and left me a little traumatized haha. The gift shop was interesting though, I'd seen stuff I'd heard a lot before which is pretty educative, I guess. Okay now let's really move to the Rockefeller Centre. Unfortunately, I didn't have any pictures taken there as my phone a.k.a my camera died (you can tell it's a smartphone) but what I can tell you about it is that we pretty much experienced the same thing that we did at the Empire State Building but this time it was during the night which gave us a different view of the city. It was truly mesmerizing I should say, we could even see the Empire State just across the building, and yet again the wind *sigh.

For the last trip of the day, we when to Ripley's exhibition which was not that much exciting for me as I had already been to almost the same one a year ago in Genting Highland. But still it was fun, having to spend time with my friends, definitely a good time.

The entrance to Rockefeller Centre 

Oh, and I forgot to add, we also visited the St. Patrick's Cathedral which we happened to come across. I didn't get to fully enjoy the architecture, as the church was currently renovated and there was a lot of people visiting. Counting from my visit to Vietnam, this is my second time of visiting a church in my life time. I hope one day perhaps, I could visit the famous ones in France.

Inside the St. Patrick's Cathedral

THE NEXT DAY

Jumping to the second day of the trip, we all went to the Harry Potter Exhibition near the Broadway avenue. Cameras are not allowed inside, which totally makes sense as (1) The exhibits are really precious and (2) To avoid long lines or large crowds wanting to take pictures of/with the exhibits. To be honest, I've never been an eager fan of the Harry Potter series. I might have watched some of the movies (but not all) and probably read (not entirely) one of the novels by J.K. Rowling but the truth is I've never fancied the show that much most probably because it is too mainstream :P (what am I turning into a hipster now?) Anyway, it was definitely a well put exhibition of the show with the stories of each one of the characters, I think the most exciting part was that I got to see up close to the sets and clothing used by the characters. They are made with such delicacy and you could definitely feel the wizard-y feeling in the air. 

Up next, we headed to another famous attraction that I believe many of us had heard so much before which is the Madame Tussauds. Now, I personally think that this is the best part of the trip not only because I got to 'meet' some of the prominent figures that I truly adore but the size of the crowd is fairly tolerable too. So here are a few of the pictures that I'd taken...

JOHNY DEPP - There's not one of his acting that I don't like. Super talented!

OPRAH WINFREY - I regard her as a part of my teenage life because I watched her a lot when I was in high school before she ended her show.

ANDERSON COOPER - He broke my (and many other  people) heart . I'm not judging but simply because he 's gay :(

PRINCE WILLIAM AND KATE MIDDLETON - Kate definitely brings envy to so many women because she's living kind of a fairy tale life by marrying a prince. But I ain't feel jealous :P

The Kennedys - JFK is one of my three favourite presidents of the U.S.

BILL CLINTON - My other favourite president. Not just him, his wife  Hillary Clinton is also politically active.

THE OBAMAS - Barack Obama, the other president that I favor.

Judging from the line of the figures exhibited, I think there is still a lot more others that were not in the list. But we were informed that the figures would be changed every three months and to be fair enough if they were to put all of them, they would need much bigger space and of course the tickets would be more pricey. The last place that we went to was for the NBC tour at its studio which is also at the Rockefeller Centre. Again, for privacy purposes, we were not allowed to take pictures inside. Along the tour, we were brought to a few studios that featured some well known shows by NBC like the Dr. Oz Show, Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Honestly, these shows are not much into my favor but anyhow the tour was fairly informative.

All in all, the trip was very exhaustive but at the same time because I got to visit these amazing places, I could feel the effect less. Here are some of the things that I truly feel grateful of from my trip to NJ/NY:

1. Reunion with my fellow PERMATA friends. Well, even though not all of them were there, but we definitely had such a great time insulting each other after a long time haha!
2. I got to meet these wonderful new friends from Rutgers. Credit to Wei Jie for becoming the head of the tour. Thanks to Afi, Aishah and Zaty for the stay.
3. I had my first snow experience here in New Jersey. I didn't go out to play with the snow though because I wasn't feeling well on the day it was snowing. But anyway the view was so captivating. I recalled during that day I was thinking, "What is this a miracle?" hahahahaha
4. I went to NY alone on the other day. My parents would freak out if they knew this, but this is totally a different story. I was actually supposed to meet my friend from Davis who also happened to be in the city but for some technical (for real) purposes, we ended up not meeting with each other. Honestly, I've always enjoyed travelling by myself despite of my parents being concern of by safety. Here's why. First, you get to go anywhere that you want without having to consider what your travelling partner/partners think of and second, you get to experience things out of your own curiosity. How blissful is this?
5. And of course, I got to experience the vibrant of the city of NY. It totally had the opposite environment from my place here in Davis. I couldn't imagine how it is like to be living or working or studying in the city. But somehow, if I happen to have the chance, I won't give up the opportunity to experience how a real city life is.

Here are some of the new friends that I met; Veronica, Dale and Wei Jie.

Only for a short moment.

We have such a HEALTHY FRIENDSHIP! (with a little sarcasm)