Southpart
Most of you would have known by now that my stage (pronounced as 'starch' and really just meant 'internship') has started. Some time back, third had asked me on the tagboard what I was going to do for the stage. I replied that I intended to go south. But I supposed none of you would have guessed where south I wanted to go. I wanted to go Brazil.
I had dreamt of retracing the Che Guevera's motorcycle trip through South America one day. Doing my stage in Brazil would have brought me a step closer to doing that. However, since I still don't have a motorcycle license, a June 2007 séjour in South America would probably not include any motorcycle rides, though I must say that the continental gives me the impression that you wouldn't really need a license to be licensed to drive.
Nonetheless, even though the chance of me motorcycling through the continent is dim, the thought of being at countries such as Peru, Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil still sends electricity - not quite in the way Rocky Balboa felt electric when he thought of his wife - through my body. I need to be at a place a bit more chaotic, a bit more rowdy and hence, a bit more colourful (at least in chye's terms) after spending one year in a place as tranquail as Champs-sur-Marne. Not that my place in Champs-sur-Marne is really that tranquail in the first place. 2 rooms on the same level as mine caught fire yesterday and the whole residence had to be evacuated. And at the start of the academic year, a Brazilian had a gun pointed in his face in his room after he had only arrived in France 3 days ago. What a welcome Champs-sur-Marne gave him.
Champs-sur-Marne, thus, is à la fois tranquail and unsafe. How a town can be described by these 2 adjectives at the same time may appear puzzling but that's just what Champs-sur-Marne is. However, it still lacks the character that you would find in towns such as Ho Chih Minh, Siem Reap, Ninglang or Kathmandu, the kind that makes you feel alive, the kind that would purge your jadedness. I'm mentioning 'jadedness' because Xian commented that I had appeared jaded when we met in Paris last Monday.
Anyway, I was really quite excited about going Brazil for the stage. I was thinking it will be quite convenient to drop by Diego's house for tea. But these days, it's more likely to find him at the hospital than in his house. Or I can visit Hugo too and let him entertain me with his passionate rants on the President of the United States.
And so it is (to the tune of 'Blower's Daughter'), I submitted my choices for my internship with the stage in Brazil my number 1 choice. I knew that chances of me getting selected was low because the internship department in my school had told my senior last year that NUS-ians have to fulfill their internship requirements in France. But I wasn't going to give up without putting up a fight, literally. If the Head of the internship department didn't grant me the Brazil stage, I was prepared to go into his office and give him a sharpshooter until he agrees to approve my request. However, it would be physically impossible for me to lift him off his chair and pin him to the ground. To be honest, even he has difficulty lifting himself off the chair. That's how massive, and with it, inertiatic he is.
And so it is(again, but with more emotion this time, to tune of 'Blower's Daughter), I didn't get the stage in Brazil and I didn't sharpshoot the Head. The stage in Brazil went to my project mate who had been studying Spanish, German and Arab in school, who's already bilingual in French and English, and is now in Brazil picking up Portugese. So, dashed were my South America motorcycle dreams and my chance for tea with Diego and Hugo. If I had obtained the stage, maybe it would have given Kaiyuan more reasons to do Galapagos this year.
In any case, Brazil or France, Kaka or Zidane, I had to do a stage from April to July. My senior had told me that the 3 months of stage will be very slack and since stage has started, I have been very slack. But I am slack because I am choosing to be slack. For instance, my professor is not at school today and I have decided to stay home, on the pretext of reading up more on my subject, when what I'm really intending to do is to finish up this post, go to school library after that to see if they have any spanish language learning materials I can borrow and to go carrefour...all these to be done before lunch. I really need to 'attenuer' this slack mentality if I want to achieve something concrete for my stage.
Actually, this stage that I am doing now was my 2nd choice and I must have fought off quite a few competitors to get it since it really is an interesting stage. The stage will bring me to Toulouse some time in May or June to visit the French meteorological centre there and to learn about one of their climate simulation models. I need to learn about the model because I (and my partner...we're working in pairs) will be required to anaylse more than 100 years of data i.e. since Industrial Revolution started, to see if human actions have had any impact on the rate of extreme precipitations in Europe. This stage has the exciting prospect of making me one of the pioneers to shed light on the debate of the effects of humans actions on climate changes. But with one toe on the ground, it probably would not.
The stage is also particularly interesting because the climate models that we will be using were built based on fractal theories. I first encountered fractals when I was researching for my French 4 presentation in NUS, which required us to talk about a topic in our field of expertise - mine, supposedly, Mathematics. My presentation on fractals gave a Lousy-French-Me an A- in French that semester and that was probably why, since then, I always have an affinity for everything fractal.
In simple terms, a fractal is a geometrical object that exhibits self-similarity property. That is, its shape keeps repeating itself. That is, if you look at the object through different microscopes having different microscoping powers, you will, theoretically (this word means that what I'm going to say next is not true in general), see the same shape all the time. An example of natural fractal is coastline. Since the shape of a fractal, in this case the coastline, keeps reproducing itself, that means if you try to approximate its perimeter with lines, each time reducing the length of the approximating line, you will find that the length of all coastlines are infinite. In other words, infinity are found beside the seas.
So, to end the post and proceed with my other errands before lunch, I am still above the Equator and not under it. I am doing an internship that I want to do but am not doing it at where I want to do it. My South America dream will have to wait and I am very much open to the idea of going to Galapagos. Even though I do not even have the faintest idea of where on Earth Galapagos is, I think I'll enjoy the idea of being somewhere where I don't know where.
I had dreamt of retracing the Che Guevera's motorcycle trip through South America one day. Doing my stage in Brazil would have brought me a step closer to doing that. However, since I still don't have a motorcycle license, a June 2007 séjour in South America would probably not include any motorcycle rides, though I must say that the continental gives me the impression that you wouldn't really need a license to be licensed to drive.
Nonetheless, even though the chance of me motorcycling through the continent is dim, the thought of being at countries such as Peru, Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil still sends electricity - not quite in the way Rocky Balboa felt electric when he thought of his wife - through my body. I need to be at a place a bit more chaotic, a bit more rowdy and hence, a bit more colourful (at least in chye's terms) after spending one year in a place as tranquail as Champs-sur-Marne. Not that my place in Champs-sur-Marne is really that tranquail in the first place. 2 rooms on the same level as mine caught fire yesterday and the whole residence had to be evacuated. And at the start of the academic year, a Brazilian had a gun pointed in his face in his room after he had only arrived in France 3 days ago. What a welcome Champs-sur-Marne gave him.
Champs-sur-Marne, thus, is à la fois tranquail and unsafe. How a town can be described by these 2 adjectives at the same time may appear puzzling but that's just what Champs-sur-Marne is. However, it still lacks the character that you would find in towns such as Ho Chih Minh, Siem Reap, Ninglang or Kathmandu, the kind that makes you feel alive, the kind that would purge your jadedness. I'm mentioning 'jadedness' because Xian commented that I had appeared jaded when we met in Paris last Monday.
Anyway, I was really quite excited about going Brazil for the stage. I was thinking it will be quite convenient to drop by Diego's house for tea. But these days, it's more likely to find him at the hospital than in his house. Or I can visit Hugo too and let him entertain me with his passionate rants on the President of the United States.
And so it is (to the tune of 'Blower's Daughter'), I submitted my choices for my internship with the stage in Brazil my number 1 choice. I knew that chances of me getting selected was low because the internship department in my school had told my senior last year that NUS-ians have to fulfill their internship requirements in France. But I wasn't going to give up without putting up a fight, literally. If the Head of the internship department didn't grant me the Brazil stage, I was prepared to go into his office and give him a sharpshooter until he agrees to approve my request. However, it would be physically impossible for me to lift him off his chair and pin him to the ground. To be honest, even he has difficulty lifting himself off the chair. That's how massive, and with it, inertiatic he is.
And so it is(again, but with more emotion this time, to tune of 'Blower's Daughter), I didn't get the stage in Brazil and I didn't sharpshoot the Head. The stage in Brazil went to my project mate who had been studying Spanish, German and Arab in school, who's already bilingual in French and English, and is now in Brazil picking up Portugese. So, dashed were my South America motorcycle dreams and my chance for tea with Diego and Hugo. If I had obtained the stage, maybe it would have given Kaiyuan more reasons to do Galapagos this year.
In any case, Brazil or France, Kaka or Zidane, I had to do a stage from April to July. My senior had told me that the 3 months of stage will be very slack and since stage has started, I have been very slack. But I am slack because I am choosing to be slack. For instance, my professor is not at school today and I have decided to stay home, on the pretext of reading up more on my subject, when what I'm really intending to do is to finish up this post, go to school library after that to see if they have any spanish language learning materials I can borrow and to go carrefour...all these to be done before lunch. I really need to 'attenuer' this slack mentality if I want to achieve something concrete for my stage.
Actually, this stage that I am doing now was my 2nd choice and I must have fought off quite a few competitors to get it since it really is an interesting stage. The stage will bring me to Toulouse some time in May or June to visit the French meteorological centre there and to learn about one of their climate simulation models. I need to learn about the model because I (and my partner...we're working in pairs) will be required to anaylse more than 100 years of data i.e. since Industrial Revolution started, to see if human actions have had any impact on the rate of extreme precipitations in Europe. This stage has the exciting prospect of making me one of the pioneers to shed light on the debate of the effects of humans actions on climate changes. But with one toe on the ground, it probably would not.
The stage is also particularly interesting because the climate models that we will be using were built based on fractal theories. I first encountered fractals when I was researching for my French 4 presentation in NUS, which required us to talk about a topic in our field of expertise - mine, supposedly, Mathematics. My presentation on fractals gave a Lousy-French-Me an A- in French that semester and that was probably why, since then, I always have an affinity for everything fractal.
In simple terms, a fractal is a geometrical object that exhibits self-similarity property. That is, its shape keeps repeating itself. That is, if you look at the object through different microscopes having different microscoping powers, you will, theoretically (this word means that what I'm going to say next is not true in general), see the same shape all the time. An example of natural fractal is coastline. Since the shape of a fractal, in this case the coastline, keeps reproducing itself, that means if you try to approximate its perimeter with lines, each time reducing the length of the approximating line, you will find that the length of all coastlines are infinite. In other words, infinity are found beside the seas.
So, to end the post and proceed with my other errands before lunch, I am still above the Equator and not under it. I am doing an internship that I want to do but am not doing it at where I want to do it. My South America dream will have to wait and I am very much open to the idea of going to Galapagos. Even though I do not even have the faintest idea of where on Earth Galapagos is, I think I'll enjoy the idea of being somewhere where I don't know where.
posted by le chye at
12:36 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home