Poverty in Singapore

In Singapore, there generally are no beggars on the streets, giving most foreigners the impression that Singaporeans are rather wealthy. Well, even if that is the case, what is undeniable is that us Singaporeans are poor in etiquette. In our daily struggles to be the best in this competitive society, we overlook others. We get to the very top by bringing others down and in doing so we often ignore their feelings. This makes us extremely selfish in a sense and therefore, poor in etiquette.

African Poverty

A word to describe this photo is cruelty. This photo depicts how cruel this seemingly warm world can be, where one waits for another to die, in order to fill their stomachs. The fact that this is a photograph reminds us that the photographer did not help the poor child, reinforcing that this world is cruel.

My holiday -Saffren

My reflections Saffren

We've been learning how to see not look. This will help us I'm observing what we will get to SEE in Taiwan / china. We have been learning lots of thinking skills too. For example, the beggar stories help us in thinking before we donate money. 

Also, we have the vulture and child, which was one of my favourite lessons. I like good photographs but after understanding the background of the photographer and how he commited suicide afterwards, it really made that picture memorable for me.

Overall, I think that CID lessons were really interesting and I cannot wait for the next lesson.

My reflections (Yuanru)

Until now, I have learnt a lot from CID2. Just knowing that we would be going overseas got me excited.  

In the first lesson, I learnt about creating a blog and posting things about myself and sharing my experiences. After that, we observed the activities in school everyday, and learnt slightly more about our schoolmates and what they do. We had a deeper understanding of of school too. Although most of us are very busy, we are still reasonably happy in school. The most important thing I learnt in CID2 until now is how not to judge something or someone by his looks. He might not be the kind of person we think he is. The impression of somebody before and after we know about their story can really change a lot. 

Colour, Image and Symbol that Represents Chinese New Year for Us ^^

Colour to describe Chinese New Year:

Purple

Purple is a mix of red and blue. Since red symbolizes happiness while blue symbolizes sadness, we think it expresses how we feel as we are happy that it is Chinese New Year but sad that we only have a short holiday and still need to do homework during the holiday. T^T

Image:

The festive spirit of Chinese New Year: Crowded, busy streets of Chinatown which happens every year without fail :)

Our symbol of Chinese New Year

We are still happy about Chinese New Year (because we get ang paos XD). :D

Reflections - Carine

Throughout the last three weeks, I have learnt a considerable lot and here I would like to summarise what I have learnt and what I have done here.  For the first week, we were supposed to create a blog and post a reflection about our holidays on it.  I scoured through thousands of pictures and sifted through various memories and experiences to select some for posting about my overseas trip during the holidays.  I was tempted to put all! :P However, I think this task helped us to review our holidays, learn more from it and reflect on it, so that we took home valuable lessons and knowledge from it.  For the second week, we were tasked to take 4 pictures which depicted school spirit, fear, life and happiness.  This was our first try at taking meaningful pictures.  To be honest, I think it was rather difficult to capture a good picture at the right time, one which was able to express those words clearly, and I can say that the pictures we took were not really the best.  Looks like our photography skills need some work. :P This week, we are supposed to post about one colour, one symbol and one image to describe our feelings, thought or experience of the upcoming Chinese New Year.  I think this is meaningful since it makes us think deeper about this celebration which occurs every year but is not really given much thought. 

The most important thing I learnt from these three weeks is that almost everything has a background story.  Therefore, we should dig deeper to find more information about that particular subject before we judge.  As the saying goes, do not judge a book by its cover!

Our Holidays- Yuan Ru

For me, my holidays were very boring. Since my parents were busy, I did not go overseas like many of my friends did. I spent my holidays mostly doing homework, training, or just going online. However, there was an activity planned by the school for the sport CCA members, and as a floorball player, I joined the one day sports camp too.

We arrived early in the morning, and went to our own groups as we were not going to spend the day as a CCA. First, we tried out some sports to get to know them and how hard the particular sport CCA members had to train. We tried playing softball, netball, wushu and table tennis. Among them, I thought that softball was the hardest to play. I was amazed at how the softball members could play so well. After that, we played like captain's ball, which was very hard with 20 or 30 players playing at a time. The basketball players had an obvious advantage then.

The organising committee also had some people from Team Singapore to talk to us. However, the part i really like was when we could play against the 3 basketball members invited. Some boys took up the challenge, and played really hard against them, although in my opinion, the players from Team Singapore were not trying to win at all. I had a good look at how strong the people that represent Singapore in international games were. We even took a photo with the basketball players from Team Singapore.

In the evening, we had tea break, and I ate together with my CCA mates. We also ate together during dinner, not too long after tea break. After dinner was the prize presentation. When our seniors were on stage, we stood up and cheered for them as loud as we could. The prize presentation was the last event of the day and we went home soon after that.

Our Holidays- Yang Hui

I did nothing interesting over the holidays but I got to sleep in, I got that going for me, which is nice. :)

Our Holidays - Carine

In general, I feel that my holidays were quite interesting.  Since there was no CCA except for the first few weeks of holidays, I spent most of my time doing homework, practicing piano and Electone, going out or just doing leisure activities.  Only this portion of my holidays was rather mundane.  The last two weeks was fun and interesting because my cousin and I went to Taiwan with our parents.

Unlike the past two trips to Taiwan, the first few days of this trip was rainining.  On board the plane, as we were high up in the atmosphere, the rain turned into ice as it came down, so we could hear the pieces of ice pounding on the aeroplane.  Upon arrival in Taipei, we found that it was very cold.  We immediately put on our jackets.  Our driver cum tour guide for the trip picked us up from the airport and drove us to our hotel, Just Sleep hotel.  Interesting and cosy-sounding name for a hotel, isn't it? Even the signs in the hotel room were interesting. 

    The toilet sign at Just Sleep

In addition, there was a 7-eleven shop right next to the hotel concierge.  The 7-eleven shops in Taiwan are quite different from those we have back here.  They sell nice brewed coffee using a coffee machine, hot soup which you can choose the ingredients you want, with either the original or the spicy (麻辣) soup base to choose from, a whole lot of delicious cup noodles and microwaveable food, as well as some drinks which we are not able to find here in Singapore.

After resting, we went for walk and dinner at Xi Men Ding which was a stone's throw from our hotel.

On the second day, we went to Yilan, which is famous for its Sanxing spring onion (三星葱). The food sold there are often made using this spring onion, including ice cream.  The most famous delicacy there is the spring onion pastry（葱油饼).

    Spring onion noodles (Smart noodles, anyone?)^^

    Spring onion ice cream

We stayed in a small wooden house at an organic farm in Yilan.  This was a unique experience which felt like staying in a chalet but much better and more fun.  There were two levels, so my cousin, our mums and I slept upstairs on mattresses while the dads slept downstairs on nice beds.  We also had fun throwing and catching things from upstairs and downstairs when we were too lazy to walk up and down the stairs.  The most hilarious thing was, in my opinion, that everyone had to fight for that one toilet in our house.

The first day at Yilan was spent at the cultural village.  There, we experienced the general culture of Taiwan, including their Chinese opera and the cultures of the different tribes.  On the second day, we went out to a hot spring to experience cooking eggs, water chestnut and sweet corn in the hot and bubbling spring.  The food was delicious!  What was intriguing was that the eggs were cooked on the outside but the yolk was liquid.  Even without seasoning, it was superb!  The sweet corn was very sweet too.  On that day, we also visited the Sanxing Spring Onion museum and a roadside art exhibition by Jimmy.  We also made spring onion pastry ourselves when we were back at the farm. Due to our inexperience, the pastries were not very nice.  They were not fluffy enough and tasted rather bland.

    Hot spring egg

    Hot Spring Sweet Corn

    Spring Onion museum

    Art exhibit

   On the fourth day, we went to see the Shifen waterfall before going to Jiufen Old Street.

    Shifen water fall

It was raining very, very heavily on that day.  As the guesthouse that we were staying in for the night was located in a narrow alley, the van we were in was not allowed through, so we had to push our luggages through the super heavy rain.  To make matters worse, there was no elevator so we had to haul 6 heavy luggages and many shopping bags up 5 floors using the stairs.  This was one unpleasant experience!  Thankfully, we had fun walking in Jiufen despite the rain.  At the end of the day, we had to buy an extra pair of shoes because our shoes were soaked.

The next day, we headed to Yeliu Geo Park to see the Queen's head rock formation before heading to Danshui for shopping and to buy "iron" eggs (铁蛋). 

    Yeliu Geo Park

The following day, we went to the renown and scenic Yangmingshan National Park.  It was freezing cold up there, at about 3 degrees Celsius.  Even the water from the tap felt like Ice water.

  

    Look at the temperature!

The next day, we went to the Leofoo Theme Park to play.  We rode camels and horses there too.

Finally, we wrapped up our trip with 2 days of free and easy shopping and we flew back to Singapore on last day of the year, 31 Decmber 2013.