More friends!

From left: Roland (Finland), Anna (Philippines), Abram (my roommate, Holland), Leen (belgium), Luis (Philippines)


Jimmy (Queenstown) and Filipe (Portugal)

Really looking forward to go Europe in may. Been in touch with my ASEF friends and the plan is to meet Leen, Filipe and Anna in Brussels, make a detour to Paris to join chelsea, dawn and shaun for a few days, and then ryan air to Eastern Europe to backpack with Daniel and my JC bud, Chun Chia. The Ultimate plan is to land our hands on those champions' league final tickets come 23 May in Athens. UEFA is allocating half of the stadium's tickets to each club finalist. So the plan is to go online IMMEDIATELY when the the semi-finals are over. This is not some asean tiger cup final you see.. Hope the plan will work out, keeping fingers crossed.

Ha, Filipe is a really cool portuguese guy who tried to take me down during the shot above, realized i got that bit of remaining abs, and then proclaimed out loud "you know kuuung-fu!!!". hahaha.... talk about stereotyping asians. Oh! And I must add that Roland was a lieutenant officer during his national service days, in charge of an 'Artic mountain' platoon to stand guard against the Russians in times of a war. I felt like a mouse when I told him I was in the military police doing investigation, and singapore fight over stupid issues with malaysia like water and expanding pulau tekong into their land. Tried to hype up my national service a bit by saying we do CSI sort of stuff - minus the gadgets of course. They are really a bunch of extraordinary folks, and it will be really great to drink beer and banter with them again, albeit for only a few days. Thesis deadline is a month away, but I need to think 3 months ahead in order to make any meaningful sense out of these few tiring weeks. Met my thesis supervisor earlier on friday noon, and it doesn't sound so good for now, for the conceptualization, and trying to bring an abstract stuff like cosmopolitan citizenship onto earth.

You see, I'm writing a paper on how the European Union is able to uncouple citizenship from state sovereignty and distribute it across multiple sites of sovereignty through the various EU institutions, and through their own country. So I'm trying to see how they are exporting that model of lifestyle into the extra-european world through human rights foreign policy, with EU-China as a specific case study. ALL the dots are just unconnected for now. Felt a bit discouraged after discussing with my supervisor, who has to battle his own monsters with reservist next week, and a tonne of arrows that the dpt head has thrown at him. But I think the dpt head thinks highly of him, so i guess i'm in the right faction. He told me he is trying to escape from Singapore too and take a four month sabbatical somewhere in uk. Gee, my third paragraph is so miserable compared to the first. I think Singapore is way too stress.