I was wondering why students studying in Singapore don't travel, when their counterparts in the US and UK are going on Grand Tours of Europe and/or South America. Jiekai suggested that it's for the same reason why they study in Singapore in the first place - they have no money.

I realised why my rent costs so much - rent control. Or lack thereof. This is why there's such a long waiting list for local students.

Jiekai says the Brits suck at making savoury food, but excel at sweet dishes like mince pies and biscuits, so he found my Aldi chocolate chip cookies nothing to write home about.

EU residents (or those who've resided in the EU for 6 months) get to use Inter-rail passes, while the rest of us have to use Eurail passes, which are almost always more expensive. Gah.

In the supermarket in the Muslim quarter of Utrecht, I found Coke and Sprite/7-Up cans with Arabic words on them. This is ridiculous (unless they were cheaper because they were parallel imported on a camel train).

A guy I saw in Aldi was wearing a partially-buttoned jacket, and he had a tabby cat inside, which kept peeking out. I also saw cooking wine in tetrapaks.

On a Saturday afternoon, when the streets in the city centre were really crowded, I saw one of those guys lying stomach-first on and tied to a motorised stretcher crusing through the crowd. These people are really hardcore.

For one reason or another, I keep missing the free Saturday afternoon concerts at the Dom. I either forget, am busy, am not in Utrecht or am coming back from the market with food. So last Saturday I finally made my way down at 3:30pm (the usual concert time, and 1/2 hr before the place's Saturday closing time at this time of year), only to find nothing and no one outside the Cathedral and the main door to the building shut, with no visible and accessible side doors. I asked a local woman and she was also surprised.


My eggs and soft drink cans keep disappearing, so I've brought the latter to my room in a vain hope of cutting my rate of loss. The former I can't do anything about. What was really ridiculous was that my ginger disappeared - no one else uses ginger.

I don't know why people like drinking Orange Juice so much. The normal sort you find in cartons all tastes like airline juice - if you can't drink Florida's Natural or something similar, you might as well drink water. The same goes for milk (and there're strange people who readily drink airline-quality juice, yet who refuse to drink UHT milk and go only for fresh).


Quotes:

[On midterm] For each exam, we stated the time it was handed in... We regressed the scores on the time [each was] handed in. We couldn't find any significant results. (script)

[On capital mobility] Domestic savings is strongly correlated with domestic investment. It's one of the major puzzles of macro-economics. So if you're looking for a topic for your thesis you can try to solve it.

What they usually do, or what I usually do when I read papers is I read the start, I skip the middle and I go to the end.

What do you like better - the calculation stuff or the talking stuff?... [Student: It depends on who's doing the talking] It's better if you do the talking. I don't like to talk.