A special day off for all of us today! Each division lecturer actually gave us a day off today just to let us attend activities which were specially arranged by the China student leaders.
So the activity for today is…. PLUCK TANGERINES! School buses were specially catered for us and we set off at about 1.30pm. Weather was just nice for such activities =) We were transported to a tangerine farm which was located about 30minutes bus ride from our school.
Greennn Tangerines!
The farm didn’t really look like what I had expected. It was all green in colour instead of the usual orange oranges. Haha! I ate quite a number of it which were all freshly plucked from the tree.
Group Photo.
After having a big feast of tangerines, we headed back to our campus in anticipation of the BBQ at night!
Made our way to the place and we were all quite fascinated by how the pits actually looked so different from BBQ pits found in Singapore’s East Coast Park. It seemed more like those tribal style BBQ with people sitting around the fire and cooking their food.
Special BBQ Pits.
The guys had quite a hard time starting up the fire because there was no fire starters and our only alternative was to gather dry leaves & twigs to start a fire. The china students were quite NPCC, Scouts, Girl Guides etc. etc. started to pop out. Haha! Test of our outdoor survival skills.
Reflections:
For the previous 2 nights, I had been in touch with the China student leaders together with the other 2 divisions in charge to plan this event. They came over to our hostel to discuss with us on the timing, dates and what to bring etc.
This was quite a good exposure for me to try working with other people rather than just my usual group of society members or other Ngee Ann student leaders. It was a good opportunity to understand their organizational skills and how they displayed their leadership. Quite interesting to be able to learn how foreign students deal with things differently from us.
There were some language barriers which made our communication a little difficult. When we tried speaking to them in chinese, they found it hard to understand our type of chinese but when we tried conversing using english, we had to talk at a very slow pace so that they can catch each sentence. So it became that there was a mixture of both english and chinese so that both parties would understand what each other is talking about. Haha! Not bad that both parties are trying hard to accept each others lingo.
In Singapore, we are too used to conversing with each other through the virtual world eg. MSN, Skype etc. and the common sentence we normally say to each other “see you in msn tonight, we shall discuss and settle it there”. Most of our stuffs are discuss through all these internet widget which we cannot conveniently find it here in China.
Lets see for example the china student leaders would rather come straight to our hostel to discuss stuffs with us instead of taking our email and discuss through MSN.
The advantage is that face to face communication would reduce the chances of miscommunication. But the disadvantage about this would be that efficiency of work is not up to standard. I had to sms them one night before the actual event to enquire about the details once more & to reconfirm if the outing was still on because there was no news after our last meeting. And instead of telling me all these through the net or text messages, 2 Student leaders came down specially just to tell me a piece of information. Is it really necessary?
If I was in Singapore, I believe that we would have settled this on the night of the meeting and not drag till one day before the event to reconfirm again. Maybe many might say that Singapore students are very lazy, but I would see this as the convenience which internet has brought to us. And how much is the virtual world influencing our lifestyle.
Unknown:
Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks.
(True? YES! If the China student leaders were to be as frequent a user of internet widgets as Singapore students and understand the convenience of internet, I believe that they wouldn’t even bother coming down personally to our hostel just to relate a piece of information to us. Not that we are lazy, it is just the time saved can be better utilised in other areas of your life! Hmmph… think about it! )
