Real Snow

10 Feb 2011, 7.12am

I was woken up by some noise akin to workers shoveling sand in a construction site. Today's the eighth day of the lunar new year, and the sky was still dark, what could it be?

I drew the curtains and peeked out of the window...

Weee!!!! It's white, the whole city has turned white. It had finally snowed last night! We have waited all winter for snow, but none fell till today. I couldn't contain my excitement and SMS-ed Vincent who's in Singapore right away...

Snow on the windowsill..

Look and feel... hmm.... it's like ice kachang!! ^^

Looking out from the window, five men were working hard to clear the snow from the walking path before the residents start their day. I was impressed with the condo management's efforts to clear the snow from the pathway....

Someone has gotten up earlier than me to express her love for her idols, Wu Zun (吴尊 - cute guy from Farenheit） and Zhang Yi Shan （张一山- i've never heard of this guy）. ;)

Following Yi's advice, "今天很美，赶快穿美美照相留念哟!" I charged my camera and dashed downstairs for some photos.

In the garden, kids would first collect snow in their arms, announce in

a loud voice "下雪了！" (translate: It's snowing!), and scatter them onto the floor.

The older girls were competing to see who could
throw snow higher in the "下雪了!" game...

The youngest child followed suit and squealed with delight 

when the older ones scattered snow onto her.

 

 The girl in pink theorized that the tree must be covered with snow,

so everyone helped to put snow onto the lower part of the tree.

A quiet moment - the girls found sticks and tried to draw in the snow.

Perfect snowflakes! (^___^) b

 

"今天很美，赶快穿美美照相留念哟!" ~ Yi

Yahoo Weather and BBC Weather were both right about today's snow. So, we shall be expecting snow in Beijing again on Sunday morning. ^^

Going to school - Miscellaneous

These are things that Ah Min finds interesting cos these seemed to be commonplace in BJ.

Old-fashioned Vacuum Flask
The Chinese like to drink hot water, even on very very hot summer days.

Top Model Student
This guy cleans the chalkboard EVERY SINGLE DAY during breaks. He also takes vacuum flasks (photo above) for topup at a nearby block EVERY SINGLE DAY. (*__*) wow!

Nice Volunteers
Trying to concentrate on a sunny mid-summer day in a 36 degree room is unimaginable. How could anyone survive..... (@__@)
Finally, the white chiffon curtains arrived one week after class started and the tallest guy in the class and his buddy volunteered to climb onto a desk to hang them up.

Guy with Tired Leg
This guy had been putting his foot on the back of the previous row of chairs for more than an hour. He might had finished a marathon the day before. Hee hee... (^__^)

More Tired Classmates
Too tired or too comfortable? After we moved to the air-conditioned classroom on Week 3, more and more people fell asleep during class.

Commoner's market

I was admiring the lovely white and lilac-coloured wild flowers outside the market entrance when I noticed the slogan "此大便者戒" (direct translation: people who poop here, stop doing that) painted in red on the fence. *faint*rolls eyes* hahahaha...

Vincent was unwilling to take the photo for me at first, but I sat there and refused to move till he did. After he took the shot, he gave me a sneaky smile (hokkien: arm-cheo) and said the shot was perfect because my fingers were pointing exactly to the slogans. LOL... XDDDDD.....

















Saturday (15/5) was the first time I went to check out a commoner's market. The market was extremely clean, cleaner than Singapore's dry market. Vegetables there were fresher and cheaper than the supermarket too. Haiz... silly me, I had been buying unfresh and uncheap vegetables from the supermarket for the past month... ><

Men outside IKEA

I had to go IKEA several times to get stuff for the new house. Everytime I alight from the cab, I see these stern-looking Men in Black (MIB) standing along the drop-off point. They don't look like they were there to welcome us (the customers). Neither were they there to protect the store against people stealing their goods as they are standing so far away from the store entrance. So what are they doing, standing there the whole day???


Finally, I picked up my courage to talk to one of the lesser fierce-looking guy.


AhMin: Big Brother*, why are so many of you standing here?
MIB gave me this expression (-___-*!)
MIB's answer: We are here to tackle those people behind you.

* I learnt that this respectful yet intimate way to address the Chinese would solicit a better response from them. Cos normally people will give I DUNNO as an answer.

















In this picture, there are seven MIBs back facing the camera, and 2-3 metres across the road another three men facing the camera. The men facing the camera are the people that IKEA MIBs are trying to "TACKLE".

Reason I can guess is the men on the other side of the road operate a private delivery service and are poaching the IKEA delivery business, so, in order to protect IKEA's business interest, they hired a bunch of guards to 'tackle' the problem.

End note, in my short 20 minute observation, no customer had been successfully poached by those men and no words or actions had been exchanged between the men standing on both sides of the road. So I'm wondering if it makes any business sense for these private delivery people to stand there waiting for customers the whole day, knowing that they will be stopped by the store's guards? Cos obviously, the money that IKEA earns is sufficient to hire those extra men to stand outside their store.