Wake Up Hibernation 2

It has been too long, much, much too long, dear, dear Shiny. Well, it has, hasn’t it? Anyway, since the past month a lot has gone on.

First of all, I went to Hong Kong, originally to skip our Chinese long test, but then the aforementioned test was postponed so I was just skipping school with a somewhat valid excuse. The excuse: there was no one home because my mom went to Hong Kong. That was a total lie, by the way, one, which my mom made up. Lol. And parents are supposedly supposed to be our role models. Either way, the trip was fun. (We went to Disneyland! XD) But I’m getting ahead of myself, I have to explain why we went there in the first place, noh?

There was a convention, of cosmetics, no less, there called Cosmopac of which my mom had to attend and introduce her replacement to PACC’s suppliers and customers, actually, I don’t think they had any customers on the global scale… Oh well, like I care. I'm not interested in this kind of business and never intend to get into it.

The convention was really cool though, fascinating. I’ll list them off…

1. The booths.

You don’t expect people to just walk up to your booth in its plain boring-ness, now do you? So of course, to attract, well, people, some companies went crazy on the designs. I swear, too cool to be true. Some seemed to be made entirely out of glass, another one was practically all pink; another one (which I really liked) was all black. Others even brought out a couple of their machines of which they used to make their products.

2. The products.

Right, so your booth’s interesting enough to draw the crowds to it, but it’d all be useless without the right products to appeal to them, heck, that’s the whole point of the convention, to advertise your stuff. XP Some of the products there were totally boring to the normal consumer, like what normal man/woman would be interested in the cap of a can? But this is a cosmetic convention, which is obviously inclusive of perfumes, make-up, and other beautifying products.

These kind of things have to appeal to the beautifying yourself people, so in turn they are beautiful. I was in awe of the lipsticks and powders and even the eyeliners there. And to think, I hate make-up… Anyway, have you seen a lipstick with a design on it? And I mean on the actual thing you apply to your lips. Well, have you? Have you even heard of such an idea? It’s a really awesome idea and got me staring at them through the glass.

The face powders were like that as well, they had such beautiful designs that even an artist would be at awe, heck, it looked like some really artistic kid went crazy on his mom’s powder there. They even had jigsaw-like ones… I mean that they had groups of powders beside each other, forming powder artworks in their shiny glass make-up galleries.

Unto the boring looking eyeliners I go. So what’s so cool about the eyeliners? Do they have like super-awesome-cool looks? No, but they’re very unique I’d have to say… Ok, so with pencils (the writing instrument) you have a normal Monggol pencil, a magic pencil, and a mechanical pencil. I wouldn’t know of any other types. But eyeliners are like normal pencils right? Eh! Now the mechanical eyeliner has been invented! Dun-dun-dun-dun!!! You twist its body to make the lead come out and I doubt you have to sharpen such a pencil. Too cool!

One really weird product there, which kinda falls under the cosmetic description (But not quite to me…) is the bath soap I found there… Right, bath soap… Bear with me for a moment, but you do know about the plastic dingy you use while swimming, right? Take that, and remove the air then put your bath soap, liquid form, duh. And Tah-daah! Really weird container for bath soap! That’s not all, but you can apply the design theory to it. (The theory where when you have a nice container, you get more customers! >.> Ok, I made that up…) So there was a Halloween theme, a Christmas theme, a Valentine theme, and a *shockhorrorgasp* “Naughty theme… *silence ensues* Wha-? Yes, yes… When I first saw it I stopped and stared for a moment and thought to myself, “Was that a penis?”

So ends the description of the products, with a lot of snickering and probably some blushing as well. Anyway, out of the three-day convention we only spend two days there, so we couldn’t go crazy buying the rad stuff there.

And on the third day of not resting we went to Disneyland! It’s still the same cool place, but the advantage of going on a weekday that isn’t vacation time yet is that there is hardly anyone there! Whoot! Three-minute line on Space Mountain! The crappy thing was that when I tried out the newest attraction there, Autopia, there was like a 30-minute wait for it. And it was a crappy ride to boot. Gah! I wasted four rides on the rollercoaster!

So, since our flight was later that day, we hurried to the train station at 5:30 to take the Airport Express, which was fast, but took about 20 minutes, probably…

But this does not end my description of my trip. That was just what we did… *Big grin*

My two best friends must be influencing me, but the clothes of those in Hong Kong were really cute. Compared to the Philippines, the only place I can say that would interesting to watch out for cute clothes is Greenbelt, but in Hong Kong, whoa. Just walking down the street you can see them, the fashionitas of Hong Kong that Olay is promoting. Ah, the joy of visiting a fashion capital. You do not see people in the Philippines wearing knee-high boots… Apart from the policemen in the rain… *shudder*

So, while I’m comparing the two countries, I may as well do the common comparison of how fast these people do things, from walking, to eating, to serving the food you’re supposed to eat. Eep, fast food there really is fast food. And they’re serving noodles.

*Stares at palm… Tennis lump*

…

Anyway, being a car freak another thing I noticed was that they have awesome cars there… I saw an S15!!! :D (People: Eh?) Anyway, it seemed like the most common car there was the Toyota something… Crown or Corona I think, basta, something along the lines of that. Not surprising though, seeing that Toyota is one of the top three car companies in the world, based on sales. The thing is that the most common car is the taxi, yep, the Toyota taxi.

But somewhat surprisingly, the second most common car is the Mercedes-Benz. Pfft… Rich much?

The most common cell phone however is probably the Motorola. Yep, Hello Moto is really popular there, while it’s only gaining popularity here. Ahem, Razor…

Another things that seems significant (to me) about Hong Kong are the players there… No, not the dating too many people to count them, players, I mean the Initial D Arcade Stage players. I even heard that the best Initial D player is from there. :D I so wanted to check out the arcade there, but to no avail… Boohoo. So what?

But, before I forget about the most amazing and shallow part about out trip, I shall announce to the invisible crowds of my blog that HMV is the best! It has… *takes a deep breath* Jpop, Jrock, Kpop, Krock, Cpop, Crock, regular Rock, regular Pop, and ANIME!!! But most importantly, INITIAL D!!! They have the OSTs, and even the actual anime there! They had the 3rd and 4th Stage there, complete on DVD! If I didn’t expect that the subtitles would be in Chinese, I would’ve bought it! But oh well, I did purchase a CD of K and of Move. So there was some avail to it all. XD

It’s frustrating though; it’s very expensive compared to the Philippines, duh. That goes very much without saying.

And before I close this very long post, I would like to say that walking around in the morning I saw some schoolgirls in their uniforms. It isn’t as cute as anime puts it to be, but heck that was not Japan. XP

Educational System of MHCS (Chinese) Compared to Chapter 19 of Noli Me Tangere

As you may be aware, the 3rd year students of MHCS (Makati Hope Christian School, if you are unaware) tackle Jose Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tangere for their Filipino class. Of course, being part of that 3rd year batch, I am studying this work as well, not in Filipino though, I can't understand it in Filipino. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that if I'm comparing something in Noli Me Tangere to something in life, I can understand the story; therefore, I must be reading it in English. Yeah, duh, English…

And if you're wondering, you can buy the English version of Noli Me Tangere, with a translation of El Filibusterismo at the back, in National Bookstore for more than P400. That’s quite a good deal, considering the alternatives. Those alternatives being: A. Buy the comic (in Filipino, I haven't seen an English version) B. Deal with the Filipino version you get from school, and slave over it with a Filipino-English dictionary (No thank you) or C. Ask about it from a classmate/batchmate (No thank you once again, as much as possible I’d like to handle stuff by myself). Anyway, away from the somewhat brief advertisement and back to the post…

So… Since I've been keeping myself aware of it by reading the English version of the thing and pretty much ignoring the Filipino version (Poor book…) but listening to the reports of my classmates on the chapters do help. Anyway, it’s so much more understandable and helpful for tests when I read the book, but one chapter really hit me. It was chapter 19. Now, boys and girls, turn to page 86 if you have the same book as I do. (Teehee, 86… Lols insanely)

The basic summary of the chapter is that there is this schoolteacher, who's name I didn’t catch, telling his story to Crisostomo Ibarra. His story is, well, that kinda that he noticed stuff about the way he was teaching. He noticed that the kids he was teaching weren't encouraged to study, due to the way they would be punished if they made a mistake, and that their location was bad. They couldn’t read aloud because they studied in a church of some kind (I think a parish one or something) and if they did the priest would scold them.

The teacher tried to teach the kids Spanish, but after a bit of time the priest, Damaso, called him over to his office and insulted him. So he couldn’t teach Spanish, if he did he would lose his career, as Damaso was one of the most powerful men in San Diego (The “town” the story mainly occurs in). It resulted in the teacher losing heart in his work, but he wanted to fight back still.

Anyway… I'm continuing where I left of and don’t feel like finishing the summary. My comparison is based on what the teacher wanted to change by teaching Spanish, actual Spanish, and not pure memory Spanish without really understanding what it means.

That is basically how it is in our Chinese class. We have to memorize this sentence and that sentence, without really understand what it says. I appreciate the fact that our Chinese teacher is trying to teach us the meaning of what we studying, but I think that it is somewhat unsatisfactory. I'm not saying this to smite out teacher. No way, she's a wonderful teacher. She's very kind and nice, and funny to boot. That’s very rare for a Chinese teacher in our school. The only other teacher I remember myself favoring this much was our teacher in Grade Two and that was because he used to tell us stories of the Monkey King – or something along the lines of that – if we were good little kiddies. *eye roll* But, yeah he was very nice.

I remember hearing from someone, whose name I can no longer recall, that the Chinese in our school is a joke. I mean, compare it to the Chinese of other schools like St. Jude. Compared to St. Jude, what we’re studying is pretty much nothing. I mean, they studied History, Science and other subjects in Chinese. So they were trained to speak, write, and think in Chinese. When all we can do is pretty much write what we copy in Chinese. For proof, look at our transferees from St. Jude, they're all pretty much honor students in MHCS in Chinese.

We need someone to do what this brave schoolteacher did. We need to get back to the ground basics. There is no real point in studying Chinese by memory, everything flies out the window the day after the test, and possibly wasn’t even there in the first place.
Children study so they can prepare for “real life”, working and such. Chinese is supposed to be an advantage, but studying Chinese like this could be something we could use in our resumes, but when it comes to the actual usage, be better put on a paper bag before we g