Beach Life

So, trials were over and done with. But AS is coming up in another one week. Next Monday! OMG, THIS IS SCARY.

But anyway, I thought I'd fill you in with what happened after trials. Housetrip! All houses had their Housetrips on the same weekend after trials with Diamond in Pulau Perhentian, Garnet in Pulau Pangkor, Sapphire in Pulau Pinang while Topaz went to Kuantan. Yeah, yeah Kuantan may not be the most beautiful place to be in but surprisingly, we had a fab time at our Housetrip. With comfy hotel rooms (Swiss Garden Resort & Spa), elaborate breakfast and dinner buffets, the white sandy beach being few steps away from our rooms, what's not to love, right?

I've seen how hard the committee worked in making it happen. They had some major obstacles along the way from changes in locations to shortages of funds to last minute pull-outs from the House members. It was no easy task but I think they did a tremendous job in pulling this off. At the end of the day, we enjoyed ourselves and rejoiced in the company of fellow Topazians who came along. So, great job! :)

Okay, photos. In no particular order. Enjoyyyy.

The hotel we stayed in for 3 days and 2 nights

In my beach attire

Megat, Zehan, Me and Dora in front of Teluk Cempedak beach

Dancing by the bonfire with Alippp

Sunrise overlooking the horizon

The guys trying to make out the word 'TOPAZ', I guess?

Roommates for the trip in our hotel room

Trying to be Yuna with the guitar while crooning out 'Deeper Conversation' by the beach

With the lovely captains of Topaz, Megat and Zehan

The night of our arrival

Our 'Ala E wa' league

The guys pretended to chase after 'Yuna' when it was actually...me

The Topazian family

Here's a couple of photos unrelated to the Housetrip but got them from Megat's camera anyway.

I love this photo! We look like a group of young, aspiring students kan? Hehe.

And the winning Phoenix kite that helped Topaz garnered first place in last week's Kite Making Competition

Exam Season

Arrghhh, it's the exam season again!! I've two weeks of trials next week and 3 weeks after that comes one month of AS exams. With classes still going on as usual on days without exams.

It's like SPM all over again. You have 1 year to cram for it, do endless past year papers, get all stressed up, go through jitters of the exam season and at the end of the day, you sit for the same exams taken by 100, 000++ students all over. Except that this time is even more intense. So much more.

You sit for exams set by University of Cambridge with the other thousands of A-level students all over the world. You have more pages of essays to write, harder mathematical equations to solve and deeper thoughts to delve into. And if you falter badly, you'll miss your next plane to UK or where ever you're planning to go. In other words, you won't be able to get into the choice of your university. Scary, no? Very!

I've been prepping myself for the upcoming trials and AS exams and well, even with trials being few days away, I don't really feel the jitters yet. I think it's the fact that my teachers are so laid-back about them. They don't believe in getting so stressed up over some mock papers when our real aim should be the AS exams and eventually the A2 exams. My History teacher made this clear to us, "Quite frankly I don't care what you score for your trials. I wouldn't look at it but rather evaluate you based on your performances through out the 2 semesters you had." And of them even said, "Trial exams are part of learning. If you want to make a mess, make it now!" Ahh, how can you not love them :)

It doesn't mean we're going to take our trials lightly but we'll do the most we can and improve from there. So I'm free to make my mess this time. Hopefully it'll be a beautiful mess though. If you know what I mean.

But exams are still exams. That means less play time for me till they're all over in June. So do expect very few updates on here till I'm done.

Here's to another round of the exam season. Cheers!