Greetings from Malacca. Yup i'm home. For now at least.

Went back to my secondary school yesterday. Turns out that the Ang Mo Kio MP was from my sec school, Notre Dame Convent. She came back to NDC to give a speech during the installation of class monitors ceremony.

Very engaging, inspiring talk. With booming and authoritative voice that fits an MP. After she graduated from NDC, she went on to study in GBS for her form 6 and then to NUS for civil engineering. Coincidentally, this is also the same path i've taken to reach NUS. Poverty is a good motivation i'd say. Well it drove her to succeed.

It's good to be back in NDC again. The basketball court is covered with roof now, with cooling fans all around. i still remember those days when we had to sit cross legs on the ground, to endure the morning sun and also the long and boring speeches during assembly. And the labs! The familiar benches, the smell of old woody material. The biology, chemistry and physics labs, the place where we spent most during our last two years of secondary school life. The corridors, the staircase, they all brought back fond memories. i forgot to check whether they still have those long mirrors at the end of every corridor. Mirrors long enough for you to inspect yourself from head to toe, mirrors that are big enough to appease that narcissistic self in every girl. To keep your appearance clean and tidy at all times, our principles once explained. i guess you can only find that in a convent.

i've met some of my teachers, said hello to them. i saw the disciplinary teacher Mr. Su. Yup he's still around. The chemistry teacher Mr. Tan who somehow always called me in class, the very strict maths teacher Mrs. Koh (i told her that i used to be afraid of her when she taught me in Form 3), and my Malay teacher (whom i told her i got an A2 for BM). Saw my two English teachers, Mr. "Scottish" Yeo and Mrs. Gan. Mr. Yeo recalled that my class was always trying to argue for more marks from him. And that our batch was the best in the cohort, but also the nosiest. Oh boy, i do remember those days when we would defy the prefects and had to stay back after assembly as a result. Ahh..those ol' anti-prefects days. Mrs. Gan said she was right in trying to get us to speak more English. Her efforts, however always fall on deaf ears. Unlike other convents where the students speak English, ours is a chinese medium school, and speaking English around your friends is just...weird. But look at where i am now. Mrs. Gan said we should come back and give a speech to the younger batch on the importance of speaking English. Ha-ha. But..i guess that's how things are. You don't do the things your teacher tells you to, because not until you see the importance of it, you'd brush off whatever they say.

After the speech, there were photo taking session of all the old girls of NDC who were present. i was from the 2002 batch and there were some from the 70's batch. They all went exclaiming and gushing when they saw the old wooden working tables in the cooking room that were present since their time. i guess that returning to the old secondary school means more to them. Some of them were doctors, police officers, and not to mention a S'pore MP. i've never been prouder to say i'm from NDC. Notre Dame Convent gals rawks!