Third day of school

I went to bed at around 3am and was woken up by a mosquito at 5:30am just now!! Couldn't sleep anymore and I have to get ready to go out by 8:30.. so here I am, writing another blog entry...

Yesterday I went to the first lecture of Government and Politics in Singapore. It was far much better than I expected. The lecturer is so humorous and enthusiastic. Although it was a long lecture yesterday, I didn't feel very tired after that.

This is a kind of challenge to me to take this course because I have no knowledge about the Singapore history. All I know is Sir Raffles found this place! And the lecturer was so right that it seems that this piece of land was never exist until Raffles 'found' it!! And of course it wasn't the truth!!

So what I have to do now is to roughly memorize the history of Singapore, the key personalities in Singpore except for Lee Kuan Yew and Lee Hsien Loong, 3 pages of abbreviations from ACB, AMP, BS.... to NEC (not the brand name), NSS, NTUS... all the way to WP, WSC and YEC..

One of the major problems for me to study these fundamental things is that I can't pronounce the name of the person, or the name of the place.. it makes me very hard to memorize it. For example the previous PM of Singapore Goh Chok Tong. I know this name for a long time, but in Chinese 吳作棟. The word 吳 pronounces as "Wu" in Mandarin or "Ng" in Cantonese.. to me, I will never relate it to "Goh"... Same problems happen when people with surname "Teo" which is 張 in Chinese, pronounces as "Zhang" in Mandarin and "Cheung" in Cantonese. I guess the "Goh" and "Teo" etc are the Hokkien way of saying the surname and so I have to memorize them all over again and relate them to the previous knowledge of the same person..

Besides for Chinese names, I also have problems with names like Dhanabalan, Jayakumar, Rajaratnam and Shanmugaratnam.. these are some names that I wonder if I can spell them correctly during exams!!

And then when it comes to terminologies, I also have to learn all of them. Firstly, I come from a place that there is no PM and no President. We have a different system because HK is not a nation but we have our own government. Secondly, all the terminologies I've been using for so many years when reading the news in HK or discussing with friends, I used Chinese. Now I have to match up those terms in the 2 languages.. I guess it takes some time!!

But apart from all these difficulties, I still love this course! No, I don't like politics, I hate politics. And that's why I have to learn more about it. The lecturer said that "Politics is the power of deciding who gets what at when and how." Every new stories we read on paper nowadays has some purposes behind it, especially those news by the governments. This is how those big guys play the game.. I'm not very familiar with the Singapore situation yet. But if you think deeply about things that the US government did in recent years.. most of them were trying to attack China, directly or indirectly. And their current aim is the Beijing Olympics 2008. Of course Chinese Government did things to attack US as well..

okie... going to far already...

Back to the courses I'm taking this semester..
Yesterday I received a call from the Econ Department for the courses that I applied earlier on.. and interestly I've got 6 courses registered now! So I've got a choice!! I have to decide which one to drop.

Let's see what I have now..
1. NM2201 Intercultural Communication
2. NM2216 Introduction to Interactive Media
3. EC3332 Money and Banking I
4. SE3214 Marketing Southeast Asia's Heritage
5. GEK2003/PS2249/SSA2209 Government and Politics in Singapore
6. EC3341 International Economics I

Firstly, I will never drop Intercultural Communication as I really love it... and I don't think I will drop Govt and Politics in SG after yesterday's lecture. SE3214 is also my flavourite, cos there will be several fieldtrips to NUS museum, Malay Heritage Centre and Fort Canning. =P

So I have to choose one from Money and Banking, International Economics or Interactive Media. I'm not so sure about this. I'm never good at econs.. maybe I should drop one of them.. but it's really bad for me to tell others that I'm a Bachelor of Commerce that doesn't know about economics!! For interactive media.. after the first lecture, I didn't feel as good as other lectures.. but this is also something useful as a marketing student.. but there is a group project in this course which worth 25%, then another 25% is just participation.. the remaining 50% are all for the final exam!!

well.. it's too early to make the decision though, I only had 3 hour sleep... maybe I should think about it later.. =P

If you have any suggestions, please tell me!!