Sports Day & BBQ

We had another Chinese Culture lecture today after a long time but today the Dean of the Foreign Language School gave us the lecture. He talked about the history of China. Here’s what I learnt today:

1.      The Yellow River & Yangtze River are known as the Mother river of China as China’s life and culture started from there.

2.      Feudalism occurs when the king or emperor has dictatorship.

3.      Emperor Qin Shi Huang proclaimed himself the first emperor of China.

4.      The terracotta soldiers are from the Qin dynasty.

5.      Empress Wu Zetian was the first and only empress in Chinese history.

6.      China has the longest feudalist system.

7.      Countries that are greatly influenced by Confucius: Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Vietnam & China

8.      Mao Zedong was against Confucius.

9.      Confucius looked down on females.

10.  Legalist used strict rules to rule people as done by most rulers in China’s past.

11.  The Qin presided over brutal silencing of the political opposition, including the event known as ‘The Burning and Burying of Scholars’.

After IS lecture, we rushed off to have lunch as Irfanah, Tricia and myself along with Kristin, Jovine and Kenneth who are the student leaders were supposed to buy food as we were having a Sports Day and BBQ later in the day with the local students. We had to buy meat and the equipment such as satay sticks and paper plates and seasoning for the meat. At the supermarket I noticed that they don’t sell rice by the pre-packaged bags but instead the consumers get to measure out the amount of rice they want by weight like how it’s done with fruits. After we bought all the food, we headed to a park area beside our school to have our Sports Day. So we were broken up into 2 groups. We had to appoint a team leader, assistant leader, think up of a team name, team slogan, team logo and team song. We appointed Kenneth our leader and Asaph our assistant leader. Our team logo was a fire mascot and we decided to make our team slogan: Always that Something Xtra, the same as Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s slogan. I think we had trouble coming up with a name and song. We ended up naming ourselves: Rou-Lee Mijit. Rou-Lee as in the couple name of Dr Tan and Mr Lee and Mijit, which kind of sounds like midget, as in the couple name of Dr Sujit and Ms. Mikia and we ended up making our team song according to the tune of the Korean song Roly Poly by the group T-ara. First, we played this card game where the cards have picture on them and we have to guess the number on them and put them in order of ascending numbers. The problem was that it was all related to the Chinese language and I couldn’t help out at all. Then we went rock climbing!! It was really fun but the only problem was that it had just rained so the wall was really slippery and all of us had trouble climbing. I only managed to climb a quarter of the wall cause I kept slipping. I think only one person made it to the top and it was Wen Kai. The next game we played was called the 150 seconds game and here’s what we have to do: We as a whole group have to bounce a ball on a giant drum 8 times, lead a tennis ball down half pipes for a distance of between 5-8 metres and balance a rod with only our hand and move from one to another without the pipe falling. The ball and drum one was slightly tricky as the height the ball bounces has to be half an arm’s length and if you bounce the ball too hard you can lose control of it. Then we split into 2 groups of 10 and my group did the tennis ball one. So what we have to do is the ball will start rolling and we have to form sort of a runway for it so as soon as the  ball leaves your half pipe, you have to run to the end and keep forming a runway for the ball until it reaches the bucket. We didn’t manage to finish the task within 150 seconds but we did have fun though. Later we set up for the BBQ and the local students were there too. Some of the school staff started up the fire and some of us started to help out. The food tasted weird though. At first bite, you can immediately taste the kerosene. We left the BBQ early as we have a common test tomorrow. Since we weren’t full, some of us bought street food. I bought egg and sausage fried rice from one of the stalls. The portion size was really big and it was only 6 yuan!!! I could barely make a dent in it but Wei Seng had already enaten half of the bowl!!! Oh god….

Photos:

The Dean of the Foreign Language School teaching us about the history of China

Dr Sujit getting ready to rock climb

Dr Sujit climbing

The food for the BBQ

Me rock climbing

The instructor teaching us how to play 150 seconds

We were just waiting around so we decided to take a group photo

Rachel and Tricia helping out

The fire getting started up.

My first street food meal!!! Egg and chicken fried rice