New year 2013

Finally I have my own time to invest a little bit to this blog, after 6 months. So this is basically how I was in the past few months.

As I have mentioned before in my previous post, together with JE, ZY(F) and CL, we went to Vienna, Austria and Budapest, Hungary for our year end holidays! It is worth noting that I have decided to buy the ticket after looking at the SWISS advertisement for just 5 minutes. CHF 120 for return direct flights was for sure a good bargain and I managed to convinced my crazy friends to tag along. And the next next day after sending off ZY(M, hope to have him back but well, he doesn't like Zurich, haha) at the Zurich Airport,  we were back there again flying to Vienna airport. We were eating like hungry ghosts everyday at Vienna, from Schnitzel, Spare ribs to dozens of desserts at famous cake houses. Visited a couple of palaces, museums, and christmas markets in the city.

After 2 days in Vienna, we took a train to Budapest and arrived there with highly alert mode, as we have heard that pickpocket rate is very high there. Although our plan was to look for suspicious people and avoid them, in the end I think we were the most suspicious people there.  This was for the first time I have been to an ex-communist country and I could really feel the difference compared to cities like Zurich, Vienna. As Hungary is in the middle of Germany and Russia, they suffered a lot during the World War and it took them quite some time to recover. For that reason, the living standard here is not as high compared to western Europe and the living cost is also much lower than in Zurich. 100 CHF was basically enough to survive there for 2 days including hostel and foods and souvenirs. The best view in Budapest was perhaps the Parliament that is situated next to the Danube river.

It took me a few days to recover from the travels and then it was 31st of December 2012. As usual, together with a bunch of crazy PhD students we went to Ah Fatt's place at Dietikon and had our new year eve party over there. On the way back, we did our count down in a bus with many strangers and that was superbly amazing! Afterwards we went to Rigiblick to enjoy the view of Zurich downtown and fireworks, of course not without beers and snacks. Different countries, different locations, different friends every year. Time is ticking away from us .......

Before I could spend time flashing back all the previous events, busy life started again in the new year. After several meetings at PSI, I had also a demonstration of advanced student lab for physics teachers in Switzerland. Then a special lecture on Bayesian analysis in a particle physics experiment by my boss's PhD supervisor. Then I was back in Bolehland again together with CL. Oh, and before that, I have won finally 2 single matches and being promoted to D1. However, my team fared badly and was last in the 3rd league. Will be dropped to 4th league in the coming season and hopefully we can get back to 3rd league again next year.

Back to my back home trip. Celebrating my birthday on the arrival day's evening (haha, on purpose!) was perhaps not a good idea because of jet lag. The foods were really nice but my stomach wasn't in fully enjoy mode. But still it was great to be back at home. Maybe it is because of me getting older and the limited time I could spend with my family, I started to appreciate time together a lot compared to last time. My parents are in their 50s, and I am soon 30s. No matter how far apart, I love you Mummy and Daddy! and of course my sister as well. (else she will kill me, :p) In this 2 weeks, I have accomplished almost everything that I have planned to do, such like hair cut (bloody hell RM 7 only!!! compared to RM 150 in Zurich), car driving lesson (yes, I still don't have my license yet, T.T), new specs (luckily the eye sights are not getting too bad), meeting elementary (after 17 years! everybody still the same. What a miracle!) and high school friends, etc. Chatting with them reminded me of how little I still remember of the past.
This is most probably my brain is full of information about new location and friends each time I moved to another city. (Penang->Osaka->Kyoto->Tokyo->Zurich) And I am sure the list will continue to grow. Two weeks were really short, I wished to have more. Perhaps after my PhD, I can think of spending 3 months with my family.