Mandarin Class Excursion

Mandarin class was funny. Roslyn and I had our first lesson during the weekend. Imagine, consonants in Chinese are not pronounced similarly in English. A 'r' is pronounced as 'zhe'.....or something like that. I laughed out loud a few times when the teacher was teaching us the pronunciation and we had to repeat it after her. If I looked at the notes today, I can say I've forgotten how to say them. I wish we were learning French or Spanish or even Jawi instead!

But the worse is yet to come; Chinese writings must be written in a number of strokes and for each word, there is a certain way of writing it, i.e.; this stroke comes before this stroke and this after that... Not only do we have to remember how to write it but we have to remember which stroke comes first?

But there were good times during our Mandarin class - the excursions we had after the class that is! First we looked into this camera shop just outside our class. Makes me wanna get another more professional camera where you can fix lens and you can take long and far shots - 10x optical zoom - gawd..... I didn't know how important optical and digital zoom were when I first bought mine. I know now what is lacking in my camera - optical zoom for very far shots and the auto 3 times click when you're taking pictures of a moving object. I think my camera may have it but I've not found out where it hides.




So anyway, back to our Mandarin class excursions - right after that we headed out of the building where we bought the best and healthiest ice-cream ever - soya ice-cream. Not bad, even without the creamy milky taste and only for a dollar, what else can we ask for? This is definitely a must after our weekend classes from now on. I heard Roslyn went back for second round after I left.



We headed to a few more places, taking pictures all the way till we arrived at Sungei Wang's Parkson where we left our mini oven before going for class. Yes, for our ex-colleagues, eat your hearts out because we now have a mini oven in office! Think about roasted chicken (only half each time but good enough), sandwiches with toasted bread and buns, pizzas with your very own favourite ingredients, hot croissants and any other thing you could think of cooking in a mini oven (skip the 'siew yoke' ok?).

So that was our Mandarin class indeed!