New Zealand Day One.

Airport Control Tower at Christchurch.

Landed at Christchurch at 10am, and we exited the airport and were immediately greeted with the most awesome air I've ever breathed. Hahaha. Okay that's pretty dramatic considering I haven't had much experience with the air in other countries besides Singapore, so I cannot reach an unbiased conclusion. But the air was so nice; really clean and fresh and rejuvenating. I was like standing outside the airport taking deep breaths, hah.

Junior Year.

The first day of school started yesterday, and conversely that means I am now a junior in my school. I don't feel particularly different, nor have I developed any sudden feelings of junior-ness towards anything. But then again, junior-ness is probably something that announces itself gradually, like maybe by the end of next month I'll feel really junior-ish. Whoever came up with the silly terms to describe the years anyways hahaha.

I am feeling rather stoned after spending 6 hours straight reading a novel from start to end in one sitting. It was a science fiction novel intermixed with world politics and the respective histories of Russia, Thailand and India, with philosophy thrown in now and then as well. Awesome book.

Anyways, my current module is Studio Lighting, so I get to use monoblocs and light-stands and modifiers and all that stuff. Yay. =D I'm definitely hoping not to get a C+ for this module like I did for Photography, haha. I think it's going to be worse than photography though, in the sense that you're pretty limited creatively in terms of the media and forms of expression. It's all very technical and structured.

Today we saw a cockroach running about in the studio.

A bunch of girls: Minghui go step on it!

Me: What? EEW NO WAY.

Can you imagine the horror of it all?! Why in the World would I ruin my White Nike Dunks stepping on a cockroach? And I just washed them as well. So some other guy stepped on the cockroach after Wei Shi's many failed attempts to throw her shoe at it. But I did carry the cockroach out on a piece of paper after that, and it was still alive with it's feelers moving about although it's white-coloured insides could be seen visibly protruding from it's midsection. Okay very graphic.

Blame the 6 hours of reading. =)

Drinking.

How to drink water from a drinking fountain.

This was I think one of the few gifs we shot during the trip? Since we had two iPhones and a compact camera to shoot videos with. Meh.

New Zealand Day Zero.

Okay I am finally going to start blogging about New Zealand! =) The trip was a lot of firsts for me. Like, first time travelling alone with friends, first time away from Singapore for so long, first time being to New Zealand, first time travelling overseas with my camera. New Zealand's the third country I've ever been to, besides Australia and Malaysia, and the second time I've ever taken a plane. And I've always been taking planes without my parents hahaha, since the trip to Australia was a school trip.

In Black & White.

Pictures shot with Iso 200 film before I left for NZ. Was using some New Lucky China brand film, which was the cheapest black and white film available at the shop, hahaha.

Ketam Mountain Bike Park at Pulau Ubin, which I went with Deon and Russell some time ago.

The leaves look weird. Haha.

Aeroplane!

Sunsets in black and white aren't very nice, haha.

Ryan with his iPhone.

Timothy before swimming.

Timothy after swimming.

This is actually Bandung. =)

Snowie in his (relatively) new tent! Haha.

Okay that's all.

Entropy.

Haven't been blogging lately, although I got back five days ago and it's the last week of school holidays so I should be free. It's just that the most depressing thing imaginable happened. My 1 terabyte external hard drive refuses to work. And it is most depressing, as pretty much everything I own electronically is stored in that drive, and only in that drive. So I've lost pretty much every single picture I've ever taken up till three weeks ago, and that's about sixty thousand pictures? As well as my music files and design school projects and a million and one other things. =( Utterly devastating.

It feels like I've lost a significant part of me that I never really paid attention to, until it was gone. And I was planning to get a backup drive, as this one was nearing two years old already. I guess there's no need for a backup drive now, since there's nothing to back up. =P

Maybe it's a good thing, like starting on a clean slate without anything. Maybe it's good because now I'll just slowly forget everything, both the good things and the bad. But the problem is, I'll probably end up remembering the things I want to forget, and forgetting the things I want to remember. Isn't that what always happens?

But then again, I shouldn't get too attached to material things right? I shouldn't be so depressed over the fact that my hard drive is not functioning, although it's not the loss of the hard drive that I'm depressed about, but the loss of information contained, which I can never replace.

Gah. No big deal. 60000 pictures. I can start from scratch. And I already have 4500 pictures from New Zealand to start going through. Unless the hard drive in my laptop crashes. In which case I will save myself a trip to the hairdresser and systematically pull all of my hair out strand by strand. =D

Next time I'm getting 3 1Tb hard drives and linking them up in Raid 5 configuration.

Back in Singapore.

Window Seat on the plane, twice. =D

Okay I landed yesterday, and I'm slowly getting used to life in Singapore again after the past two weeks of traveling around New Zealand. Haha. The thing I miss most about New Zealand is the air, which was super amazingly fresh and clean there, but feels like thick and polluted here in Singapore. And the weather, gah. It's so hot and humid here. =( In fact, I've been showering without the heater on and the tap turned to the coldest, and that feels warm as well. Haha okay maybe I'm just super susceptible to heat, even air-conditioned places feel stuff and hot.

I even stopped swimming in an outdoor pool today because the water was really warm, even though it was raining. =O I went to the indoor pool instead, and for the first time ever in the history of Minghui swimming in Sengkang's indoor pool, I didn't shiver once when I stepped in.

Hah. Anyways, took about 4500+ pictures in New Zealand, and that's not counting the 180+ pictures I took with my film camera waiting to be developed. I'm so lazy to start sorting through the photos.

Random Pictures.

We're totally running out of poses to do when taking pictures of ourselves. Hahaha. I mean, we've done the tourist pose, the awkward tourist pose, the Japanese tourist pose, the Ken Watanabe advertisement pose, can't really stay original and fresh anymore. =(

It's about 4 degrees outside now and the temperature's dropping at a rate of 1.5degrees an hour, so yes. Cold. And the other two are sleeping already, hahaha.

Sunset at Hakitika beach was amazing. We went back later to shoot the stars, and the stars were amazing as well. I saw a shooting star! =D For the first time ever. Haha. Ironic that I've been to a meteor shower before and didn't see a meteor then, but I saw one that night. It was super cool, watching it streak across the sky for a few seconds. And then it was gone.

And the three of us have this crazy plan to learn to skydive solo in New Zealand in the distant future. I think skydiving > bungee-jumping. Then we'll be photographer-musician-skydivers! Yeahh.

Fish And Chips.

I realised that for the past 3 days out of 4, we've been eating fish and chips daily. Hahaha. And on the day we didn't eat fish and chips we ate Macdonald's, which had fries as well.

Anyways, it's 11.50pm here in New Zealand and the other two are sleeping already. Haha. It's been awesome so far. Mountains and valleys and lakes and cows and sheep and goats. Very Lord Of The Ring-ish too.