I am Sof.

The marks of the final examinations for Chinese high school students are out today. This final exam for high school graduates is not a bit similar to what we have here in Canada, their exam is pretty much like the ancient Chinese merit system: all the high school graduates in China write exam on Chinese, chemistry, math, physics, English and another few courses during three days organzied by the national education board and universities look at the marks on these exams only. Which is not quite fair because a lot of students get very consistent good marks throughout the whole year but because they can’t handle pressures or encouter family tragedies or whatnot, they can’t concentrate when they write the exam and would end up getting bad marks. And it also means that this exam is pretty much what decides a Chinese student’s whole future, it is the most important milestones in one’s life; consequently, society treats this exam excessively seriously, and during this year’s exam, a student’s father was waiting outside the exam building for his child and suddenly had a heart attack and died. Another girl was under so much pressure that she went mad when writing the exam, scratched her exam papers and was eventually dragged out of the examination centre. Sometimes I feel lucky that I don’t need to undergo such torture.

This year’s Number One Scholar (one with highest marks) of Beijing is a girl from my former school. I’m so proud - although I don’t have much reason to be, I only went there for 1.5 years… but still, just so proud. Nearly every year one of the Number One Scholars is from MY former school=P. Oh, sometimes I just really wanna go back and spend my high school years there… it would be hard and different, but I know the school life would be much more colourful than what I had at Woburn.

Anyway. Zoe told me she applied to the criminal psychology program of the China People’s Police/Security University (sorry about the translation, but you get the idea of what it is). That sounds great, I’d probably go into history or psychology too if I were in China.

Yesterday Viv and I went shopping at Kensington, bought stuff from the Indian store and a belt from Tribal Rhythm, leather, black, thick and super simple. Afterwards we went to Kensington Cafe and I ordered an iced cappuccino envisioning it’d be something like Tim Horton’s, but it turned out to be just icecubed cappuccino. Coffee products sicken me so I don’t drink any of those unless it tastes far from coffee. So I had to survive myself by adding, literally, 15 table spoons of sugar in my cup. When I drank to the bottem, it was like sugar syrup, heehee…

I have been packing, so tired.