keep it rollin

over here.

and so it is…

once again i’m in Singapore, probably the single city/country that i get to visit on a regular basis for the past three or four years, and hopefully for the next three or four years again. it’s just absolutely wonderful here, that really, I can live here. well I would still have to get used to understanding SingLish, but seeing as I’ve managed to survive almost flawlessly in France with what little French I knew, i don’t see how SingLish could be any worse. so yes, i’m out of France, obviously. the question now is, should i retain this username, seeing as Nicole is no longer in France?

well that, and a couple more other things i have to figure out. i wouldn’t say things are a mess right now, because really, they’re not, but there are just some stuff that i think i need to sort out. as for the username/wordpress account dilemma, i’m most likely moving some place else, once i find the right username/domain name, which usually is the main issue for me.

have a pleasant week-in-between-Christmas-and-New-Year. excuse me while I eat some more Hainanese Chicken Rice and drink some more Milk Tea.

Joyeux Noël!

So it’s been said,
many times, many ways,
Merry Christmas to you.

Have a great Christmas, everyone!

Manila, Manila

well, this is not exactly the ending i hoped for the great trip back home. I imagined struggling going down on that ramp at NAIA Arrivals Extension, heading over to where the D-E-F sign is at, and smiling widely and wildly as I see my sister and my parents going down the van. It’s how it usually is when we pick up our relatives who come from the US or Canada, or even my brother when he comes from Singapore. I remember years ago, when we would be waiting at the airport some two hours before the scheduled arrival of whoever was coming. It was almost some ritual, but ours wasn’t that crazy yet, as I see groups of people who come in jeepneys full of relatives, with some baon (usually adobo and rice) and they have a little picnic in NAIA’s parking lot, while waiting for that tito or tita or lolo or lola who’s coming from abroad. I never really did the picnicking stuff, but I’ve been to the airport to pick up people enough number of times to know that such a “phenomenon” happens whenever somebody comes back from abroad. It’s always a party, and relatives are willing to wait six hours in NAIA’s parking lots.

some reason, I am stuck waiting here at arrivals main in NAIA, because for some crappy turn of events, all roads leading to NAIA is deathly clogged up with traffic, and my welcoming delegation, i.e. Mom, Dad, and Ate are all stuck in Metro Manila traffic. And probably it’s not just Manila traffic. It’s MANILA + CHRISTMAS traffic, so just imagine the intensity of that. Well well, look what we have here — I guess with that fact, I really am back in Manila.

The travel back wasn’t as stressful as I’d expected. Thank goodness they weren’t strict with the weight limits, otherwise I would probably have had to either lose some stuff or pay up an amount that could very well buy me a good perfume. The most stressful part would have to be the walk from the flat to the metro station, which was excruciating, considering on one arm and hand I was pulling a 30 kilogram luggage and on the other a 10 kilogram carry-on bag and a 5 kilogram personal tote.

Commercial: I’m seriously hungry. A few minutes ago I was thinking JOLLIBEE won’t be my first meal back, but seeing as my parents are taking longer than I expected, I think a Chickenjoy meal might seem suddenly all too appetizing. and at the moment that I’m writing this, it’s 8 AM in Rennes, and I’d usually be still sleeping at this time.

It wasn’t the best gameplan ever, and had I known that a cab from the flat to the train station was only 10 Euros, I would’ve totally ditched the Sandwiche Americain I got at gare and just paid for the cabfare with that same amount of money. But what’s done’s done, and well, my arms lived through pulling all that weight. Charge to experience, as we called it.

The long haul ride was okay. I drank two glasses of red wine during dinner in hopes of falling asleep, which I did actually, but only for roughly two out of the twelve hours we spent on the Paris to Singapore haul. I ended up watching four movies, Coco Avant Chanel (French), La Habitaction de Fermat (Spanish), and Generazione 1000 Euro (Italian), and Mary and Max (Australian). I have to hand it to Singapore Airlines’ entertainment system. It’s AMAZING. They have an extensive selection of EVERYTHING and I didn’t even need my netbook and iPod at any point because there was always something interesting. i was even reading summaries of leadership/etc books like Blink and Goal!, both of which I’ve been intending to read ever since but never really got around to it.

Okay, I’m stalling and rambling. Forgive me. But then again you must be really bored as well because you’ve managed to read through all the rambling I did. My parents still haven’t called, and I just hope they’re near alraedy as I’m deathly hungry at the moment, and I swear a Jollibee Chickenjoy meal would be super good right about now.

So yes, my iPod just died and my parents just texted me. I’ll probably head down that ramp and head over under the D-E-F sign and just wait. haaay, I’m back in Manille! Well, this isn’t exactly the back-in-Manille entry I imagined, but I guess it has its own charm. I’ll overcontemplate next time, or maybe never.

So, did you miss me, Manille? Coz I sure did miss you.

p.s. on the radio in the car while going home, the song Manila came on, and it was c’est parfait!

Manila // Eraserheads version

Manila, Manila

I keep coming back to Manila

Simply no place like Manila

Manila, I’m coming home

…

Miss you like hell, Manila

so kiss me and smile for me

last night wasn’t the way i wanted my last night in Rennes to be. i imagined it to be insanely chill, with me just whiffing every last bit of Rennes that I can handle on that final night. That just wasn’t the case, as I’ve underestimated the number of stuff I’ve bought, which honestly makes me hypocritical in almost every sense. Trivia: All the stuff that made me go a wee bit overweight, i bought within the last two days. Go figure how I did that. Thankfully, dinner with everyone was extremely delightful, and the light show at Place de la Mairie was more than breathtaking, that when I look back to last night, I guess my packing stresses were pretty much offset by them.

but yes. in all its cliched sense, let me quote:

I’m leaving on a jetplane, I don’t know when I’ll be back again.

thank you John Denver for that wonderful wonderful song (and Chantal Kreviazuk’s version which I just love), which has probably been the soundtrack to the lives of the many. Honestly, i could think of many ways to directly related all the lines of that song to me leaving this place I’ve come to love and called home for almost four months, but I guess those two lines will just have to suffice for now. Succinct, and straight to the point.

thank you, Rennes. au revoir, et a bientot!

packing life

so how do you make four months fit in a 30kg-limit luggage which you incidentally have to lug around on metro stations, train stations, and airports?

i honestly don’t know, and i’m not even being poetic about this right now. i miss mom, i miss dad, i miss having someone guide me while i do this. i miss home. doing this makes me miss home so much that it makes me want to just get this all over with quickly so i could get home already.

home in four days! killmenow, but why does it almost feel like a crime being excited to go home? i was assuming that i’d have to literally be dragged out of France just to get back.

i’ll bring you the poetic/bordering on overcontemplative entry sometime soon. wish me luck in packing — cheers to not reaching the 30-kg limit (what with all the perfume i got, i could bathe myself in ‘em already)! *crosses fingers*

kitchen adventures

if there’s one thing that made me ultimately amazed with myself, that would have to be the fact that I’ve actually been cooking, and exploring with cooking, something I wasn’t doing AT ALL prior to leaving for France. If you backtrack a little bit with my entries, you’d see how I stalled learning how to make sunny-side eggs until the very last day before leaving for France.

i think it all started with breakfast food, which pretty much meant cooking eggs and some saussice to go with it. My sunny side ups still fail, as I ended up breaking the yolk when I cooked some this morning, but my scrambled eggs are just amazing . I do end up putting whatever random cheese I get from the supermarket on the omelet, and it may be that which is making the omelet amazing.

During the first few weeks of my exploration with cooking, I always took the liberty of taking pictures of almost every dish (and almost every step that went along with making it) I cook. It was a little souvenir of every productive cooking adventure that I embark on, thankfully with Bless being usually more than willing to tag along my adventures. I forgot to take note of all the food I’ve managed to cook, and honestly, had I known that my kitchen adventures would have blown up to proportions I didn’t imagine, I would’ve taken a video of every single time I did it.  I eventually had gotten tired of taking pictures of the food I made and ate, as I found myself getting used to cooking — it wasn’t something new anymore, something that you take pictures of. It became just my everyday, commonplace cooking breakfast or lunch or dinner episode.

During the second half of my stay here, I’ve started to explore more with the food I cook. After all, one can only live so long on adobo and nilagang baka and stir-fry vegetables. Oh and I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but we cooked some 4 kilos worth of adobo for the international day midway through November. much as it took some 3 hours preparing and cooking that, Bless and I craved adobo so much (we weren’t able to eat some of our adobo, we just served) that we cooked and ate adobo the night we got back from serving everyone adobo — it was insane!

So anyway, going back to my kitchen adventures, I did end up exploring with pasta, first buying those premade pasta sauces they have so many of here (and not the Jollibee/fastfood style sauces!) and adding a bit more tuna or meat or whatever I can get my hands on into it, cooking some fusilli or farfalle (I just love those tiny pasta) — voila! more than decent pasta dinner or lunch. Eventually, I moved forward to making my own pasta sauces, with a little secret ingredient or trick of some sort, and voila! an even better pasta dinner. First it was meat sauce pasta, then carbonara, and then the al funghi sauce i managed to concoct last night. Somewhere along the way too, I ended up making crepes from scratch, and sloshing humongous amounts of Nutella on ‘em.

It’s all time consuming, really, and I couldn’t stop the whole cooking drama until I’ve cleaned up the kitchen after I’ve eaten. When I’m in the flat, it’s either I’m cooking, I’m sleeping, or I’m on my netbook. It’s almost scary. I have become a creature of the kitchen.

A little photoblog of my cooking adventures shortly follow, after the jump.

now what?

done with five exams. we just had what was probably the hardest just this morning – European Geopolitics, where we wrote essays about Russia and the European Union and their Treaties for a good 2 and a half hours, 3 if you max the time out. i still have one last on Monday, and the moment I turn in those essay sheets, my academic stay in Rennes would have officially ended.

so now that all this is actually ending, what happens next?

truth be told, i’m really excited to get home, what with the Christmas and New Year holidays coming up soon. Yes, i’m being redundant, repetitive, and reiterative – probably things I know I’m good at. I really miss home. I mean – don’t get me wrong, this whole Nicole-in-France thing has been absolutely wonderful –honestly more than I could have ever asked for — but I’m excited to go home. I’m excited to get all the exams over with, spend my last week as a local Rennaise, and finally hop on that A380 at Paris CDG that’ll take me home on the 22nd.

one of my friends who’s also in JTA posted a picture with a Mark Twain quote on it  and the caption “Europe, we have four weeks left”on Facebook. Comments like “:(” and “:’(” popped up from  everyone, and they all seem to be dreading going home. Much as I don’t exactly share the same feeling now, I really can’t blame them for feeling like it all happened too quickly, and that four months is way too short. It truly has been – oh i’m running out of adjectives – exhilarating. It brought us to so many new places and experiences. But what makes this amazing,  I think, is the fact that it all has to end, and that we can’t have it forever.  Having it forever will mean everything that we experience here will be just commonplace. We wouldn’t be excited to cram as many sights and cities as possible because there’ll be a lot of time for that in the future.  We wouldn’t go to that cafe downtown and just marvel at how beautiful and different things are here because it’s just always going to be there anyway. We wouldn’t be excited about the Christmas market, because we’ll have it anyway every year. We wouldn’t be excited when the lights of the Eiffel goes nuts like something we’ve never ever seen before – heck, we wouldn’t be excited at the Eiffel Tower, because it’s always going to be there. If we do have it forever, it’s all going to be in an entirely different context, and we probably wouldn’t be feeling this way.

So what happens next?

now what?

What’s actually scary is that after all this, we’ll just be back to our regular lives as students in Ateneo, cramming an entire semester’s worth of studying in three months — reading overwhelmingly-Filipino essays on Philosophy, staying at Matteo Ricci for god-knows-how-long, among other things we do on a regular basis pre-JTA. So what difference does all this international experience bring us anyway? We may be able to just have the bragging rights to it, but what implications does JTA bring to our post-JTA lives? It sounds like something off of a final exam questionnaire, really. Well maybe this IS the final-exam question for the class that is this whole JTA experience. It’ll be like “in 5 pages, discuss the implications of having lived and studied in a whole new place.”

Maybe in future entries I’ll answer that question, but you better remind me. Right now, my brain’s a bit squeezed out from writing an accumulated number of pages of about 25 for different classes. Maybe i’m just stalling because I don’t know the answer, or I’m just afraid to face the fact that right after this, there won’t be too much of a change.

I got into talking with Richard when I visited him in Lyon, and it went around the idea of us changing with all the experiences we milk out of this whole JTA thing. Four months is four months, and while it all seem to have happened too quickly, it’s quite a long time and so many things can happen in four months. Pre-JTA, I was too afraid of how I’ll change once this happens. But Richard said that it will be more troubling if we don’t change, because that’ll mean the whole experience was a waste of time. Touche, I said. After all, change is good. Change is what makes us alive. Four months is bound to have changed something.

j’ai une moleskine

eat that, Starbucks planner

I’ve been lurking around the papeterie section of Virgin Megastores here, first at Champs-Elysees in Paris and then at Centreville in Rennes when I realised there was actually a Virgin Megastore here. Almost in all cities actually, I look for agenda/planners, just because I feel they’re worthy investments since you get to use them the entire year — well of course if you’re that kind of person who can sustain the use of a planner all throughout the year.

This is probably one of the reasons why I’m excited to get home and get a headstart on 2010 – I’m excited to get this little bugger filled up with so many things for 2010. But before I go all “allons-y 2010″, I have two more weeks left as a Rennais, and a few more weeks of 2009. wutwoo.

get ready, manille

Possibly one of the downsides of going abroad for four months is missing out on school activities back in Manille. From what I’ve been seeing online, everyone has been busy with placement forums and whatever org activities, that it almost pisses me off that they actually get to do all those stuff — exactly the things I would have been doing now had I not gone to France. Most people I’ve asked told me that while having better-than-average grades really help, it’s the co-curriculars which companies look at. I think I was actually succeeding in the co-currics aspect of things prior to leaving, but then I had to leave for France. Not that I regret going to JTA, of course, because I would definitely not have things any other way, because JTA’s possibly one of the best things, if not the best thing, that has happened to my life so far (I’ll probably elaborate on this in another entry) But yeah, I can’t help thinking what could’ve been had I not gone. I will probably be frustrated. And I will probably be expending all my frustrations at my would-have-been non-JTA-life in Manila into co-curriculars. Ahh, I think that’s it.  The frustration at not going to JTA, should that have been the case, would’ve probably driven me to do even more co-curriculars. I would have been so frustrated that I’ll channel all that frustration into something productive.  Thank god it’s not the case pour moi. I would probably be on overdrive.

I’m actually excited to go home. There, I’ve said it. Possibly quite contrary to what everyone else on JTA have been feeling. I mean — it’s amazing here, and I love the weather, and the fact that I have Paris two-hours away from me, among others, but the fact of the matter is, I inevitably have to go home. We all have to go home. It may be scary as shit there right now, what with everyone going nuts about politics and and security and all, but home is still home. And well, The Dean had us sign a commitment to return waiver, of course, so there’s the rub.

I guess this excitement comes from the fact that just this morning, I was busy planning for 2010, jotting down things I want to do, things I want to prioritize. I mean, 2009 has been BEYOND amazing. I’ll probably make an even more obvious year-end entry in a few weeks, the way I usually did in LJ, but right now i don’t even know how 2010 could possibly top 2009. That’s why I’m getting a headstart, and actually trying to plan for it. I know it’s a little too anal, and it seems a bit early. But there’s nothing like knowing that you’ve spent the year well.

anyway, it’s finals week next week. and my god, I am overwhelmed at how they do exams here. here’s why:

• the exams make up 50-60% of the final grade.
• they’re 2 – 3 hours-long
• they’re comprehensive.
• they’re ESSAYS.
• it only comprises 2 – 3 questions/items/cases.
• answers must be around 2 – 6 pages long PER ITEM

insane in the membrane. bonne chance to our lives! but yeah — the homestretch, this is it. i swear, when they said JTA’s just Junior Travel Abroad, they were lying! HAHA.