I finally stepped onto 西贡, a place which I always dream to visit after watching the movie Sausalito starring Maggie Chan and Leon Lai a couple of years back. The protagonists met in Sausalito, a small town near San Francisco and their love developed. It was mentioned in the movie that Sausalito resembles Sai Kung (西贡), a small town in HK. Ever since then, it has been my wish to visit 西贡 to see for myself the beauty of this small town and to experience the other side of HK.


I was there because I wanna pack lunch for Emily; I thought of packing something simple and yet special. 西贡 immediately came to my mind as it is a place well known for seafood. It was only 15mins bus ride away from HKUST and it was a really scenic journey. I witnessed hills, seasides and yachts along the Sai Kung Highway. 西贡 is a very different place from most places in HK; there's this magic embedded in this small town and I immediately grew in love with this place and I'll love to visit it again to take more photos. Ahh, by the way, my camera ran out of battery when I was about to take a very nice scenary!

Anyway, I received an email from Dr. Yao on Thursday and he asked me whether I'll be joining his group for my honours year project. Hmm felt quite honoured as I'm kinda "wanted" in a way; usually it's the other way round - students hunting for supervisors. I've made up my mind quite sometime ago and I gave him an affirmative reply. He was pretty enthusiastic about my reply and wrote me quite a long email reply. The gist of it is asking me to think of a suitable topic and also what I will really like to do. He gave me some papers to read as well and also asked for my date of return to Singapore (so that he can discuss with me the details).

For the remaining period of my exchange, I'll find time to read and plan for my honours year project. It'll be another one whole difficult year but I'm willing to work hard and stretch my limits. The courses that I'll be taking next semester are more or less confirmed as I've already planned for them before I embarked on my exchange. They are as follow:

CM4221 Chemistry of Natural Products
CM4211 Advanced Coordination Chemistry
CM4215 Bioinorganic Chemistry
CM3232 Physical Chemistry of the Solid State and Interfaces
CM5222 Bioorganic Chemistry

For my courses at HKUST thus far, the one that I enjoyed the most is still Advanced Organic Chemistry taught by Prof. Wu. He's a pretty good lecturer and I got to learn many fundamental stuff about Physical/ Mecahnistic Organic Chemistry from him. He made me appreciates Organic Chemistry at another level. I'll love to read more on my own and bug him more often :p The other 2 Chemistry modules are good as well. For Intermediate Inorganic Chemistry, Prof. Leung is good at explaining concepts and I've learnt many Inorganic stuff which were missed out in our syllabus. Prof. Xu taught me many NMR fundamentals which I didn't learn back in NUS. Kudos to the both of them. The remaining 3 courses were ok - Biochemistry of Dieases taught by Prof. Xia was quite decent, except that he's not very good in classroom management. Prof. Mi's Material Science course is not too bad either, a vast improvement from my perception at the beginning of the course. Prof. Chasnov's Introduction to Ordinary Differential Equation is a disappointment. This is because he was pretty slow in his teaching and didn't teach us many things. Thus far, what I've learnt are all the "C" and "F" Maths stuff that I learnt in "A" level 6 years ago.

Finally, if you are reading this, I wanted to say that you have been wonderful thus far and I've not regretted my decision. There's always uncertainties in the future - this is what make life interesting. If the future has already been laid out and well-planned, why live it. It is because of its uncertainties that makes life worth living. If I know that I'll be getting the Nobel Prize 10 years later, why will I bother to work hard now? It's lame but come to think of it, there's some truth in it. Fate arranged me to meet you and I will hold on to it.