today's the second time it struck me that something was 'amiss' in Singapore--when i needed a nice cafe to sit down and do some reading. there is a sore lack of places where you can sit down with a book and have some peace and quiet to yourself to do some afternoon reading... while there are cafes around, it's sometimes even difficult to secure a table... i suppose it being the weekend makes it a lot worse. i miss the Berkeley cafes... like Brewed Awakening... where ppl around you actually inspire you... haha. imagine having loads of ppl reading at 8am at a cafe... and i remb more than one occasion whereby i unintentionally "eavesdropped" on ppl's intellectual and cheem discussions... i suppose the best alternative is to hide at home, but home's ultimately not the best place to be if i want some peace and quiet to myself :P sometimes i really wished i could make half the Singaporean population disappear... hehe being evil.

day 2 of tagging along with colleagues to see how they explain to respective residents compensations they are entitled to etc etc... and got to do a couple under supervision of experienced colleague! i'm RATHER lousy :( have to learn to think on feet, practise bilingual capabilities and perhaps learn to be more proficient in dialect! (though i'll prob be too embarrassed to speak in broken Hokkien) wun be doing such things that frequently though. haha and uttered first sentence in teochew in a very long time. i said something like i am Teochew but i don't really know how to speak teochew (in weirdly-accented teochew), while feeling a little guilty and useless... ha. i hope to become a good 'explainer' in future. seriously, all these calculations, regulations, rules and conditions are so confusing! if i were an old illiterate lady i'll be downright lost... while generally standard of living is rising; technology improving... yet somehow feel like lives are also getting more complicated by the day.

though most of my new colleagues are young mothers/newly-weds and so there is a tiny age gap... for once i feel young! haha. and INEXPERIENCED, of course. but as a former scholar who worked in the unit told me, "the aunties will take care of you".... they are far from aunties, in my opinion! some of them look so young i couldn't believe them when they told me they were married with kids! i on the other hand, despite being a decade younger than some of them, probably didn't look THAT much younger.... :P
it also appears that many of them have been working at HDB for quite some time.... and were happy with their jobs. it's certainly comforting for a newbie to be told that :) of course, i will slowly find out why.

first day of work was expectedly pretty uneventful, but at least everything went smoothly. HDB hardly gets new faces and so i couldn't help but feel extremely new and inexperienced :P tmr however seems to be a day to look forward to-- i start work at around 1 something in the afternoon... and day ends at 930pm! will tag along with colleagues visiting residents eligible for SERS (Selective En bloc Redevelopment Scheme) and good thing is... i actually get to go out in jeans and sneakers! :P