30 Oct 07 (Tuesday, Delft)

Day 2 of serious lessons .. still a bit apprehensive as it has been more than 8 years since I walked out of my school's gate. The feeling of being a student once again, attending lectures & tutorials, especially having been thru so much in working life feels so weird and certainly needs time to get used to. I could still remember my 1st day of school in NUS vividly .. it was a lab session and that was where I met my 1st classmate who is now one of my very good fren also working in the same organization as me :)

Today's lesson is a workshop on Hydrology - learning to extract hydrological data, managing them, techniques to estimate missing data and appreciating the relationships of these figures and the story they are telling us. Haha .. sorry tat this sounds a bit boring or chim.. the lesson wasnt too hard to follow though, just that the qualitative analysis of the data is very open-ended and I spent some time concocting a couple of points :P

Time passed really fast during lessons. Perhaps it's because we were doing the exercise that made time felt passing faster this morning. Then we break for lunch - had fish & chips with a cup of hot chocolate. Umm .. yummy! When paying for my food, I realized I'm running dangerously low on funds. Sure hope my funds can come soon ... Had lunch with senior Wong (the kind fellow M'sian who has helped me a lot in settling down), Ahmad (another fellow M'sian doing his PhD here) and Paul.

As I cycle on my way home, I took some quick pictures of more views of Delft that I havent blogged before. There's this nice coffeeplace just outside the New Church. Imagine sipping your favourite coffee in the luke-warm sun, chatting with your loved one/frens or simply admiring the vicinity's architecture or watching people walk by.. At a canal nearby, the mandarin ducks are enjoying a lovely feast of bread, courtesy of a little boy and his granny.

Not all is so wholesome at Delft though. There is also this little video rental (I think so. I'm not sure as I did not go in to ask) store carrying a huge array of sex video titles (I saw them thru the door panel. Nope, I did not go in) :)

It rained last night, and even this little town where the folks take so much pride in keeping their environment clean (a fellow IHE student once witnessed a Dutchman chidding a group of tourists over a piece of unwanted bread their kid threw into the canal) could not be spared by the omni-present flotsam! I'm wondering if the flotsam will get washed out or cleaned up by worker .. and this struck me that I have not seen any maintenance chaps working in the canal since I was here. Hmm..

I spent a good part of the afternoon and evening doing some work, afterwhich I had my pre-cooked nasi-goreng again. Very kelian hor .. especially thinking back on how comfortable life is back in SG. Sigh.. these are times when I really miss home .. family, frens, food and warmth .. another 17.5 mths to go .. jia you! gambatei!