嬉しいの日。

I was happy 'cos I didn't have to work today. I was happy 'cos I watched an excellent film today. I was also happy... 'cos I found out on my birthday that I had passed my JLPT 2 exam! That was perhaps the best present ever! I mean, I seriously think I was just super lucky, but hey, it feels good.... ;)

The movie I watched today, that I really liked, was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Would blog about this in a separate post... aargh, all these nice French films are tempting me to learn French...

I am also officially addicted to One Republic's Apologize:

This morning I finally hunted down a Japanese cafe cum bookstore that I've been wanting to visit ever since I saw it in CityScoops some 6 months ago. This Japanese cafe (see pic below) is strangely named Bon Gout (which I understand is French) and sells no-frills homestyle Japanese food. The food is not particularly tasty, but I like the atmosphere of the place. You can pick any Japanese book/mag/comic to read while or after having your meal... And it's right by the Singapore River (Robertson Quay), so one can easily take a stroll by the river after his/her meal. I shall return some time to sample other things on its menu.... or when my Japanese actually becomes good enough for me to browse the mags/books with ease haha. hmm... that one must wait long long.

I alighted at Chinatown station before walking over to Robertson Quay. The place was really re nao, even at 12pm on Sat... guess I shouldn't be surprised, since Chinese New Year is but 2 weeks' away. Saw this flower stall upon emerging from the station...

Liked how my zhu jues came along, one almost clad entirely in white (hair too!) and the other in black... provided some nice contrast to the sea of red, pink and orange flowers :)

my stomach was making rumbly noises yesterday afternoon in the middle of Japanese class, cos I had left my wallet at home when I was actually supposed to dine out for lunch. and so had to try hard to keep attentive despite being rather hungry. turns out that it wasn't all that difficult, because the sheer amount of time/effort I was expected to put in for my JLPT 2 prep class soon made me quite intimidated and worried. and so after a semester and half or so of relaxing Japanese lessons, I now have to memorize tons of Kanji each week and practise all that we learnt in class on my own, too. This course basically tries to squeeze in 2 yrs of Japanese study into 1, such that by the end of the year all conscientious students would be well-equipped for the JLPT 2 test. I so look forward to the end of the year... cos I dreamily forsee that my Japanese should be waaay better than it is now... but on other hand also fear that I don't have enough perseverance to pull through! oh well. we shall see :) in conjunction with my accelerated Japanese study starting this month, I have also resolved to check out more independent Japanese restaurants from this year onwards. have been relying so much on chains and have been eating the same kind of Japanese food all the time... it's time to be more adventurous with Japanese cuisine too! only that it might burn a small hole in my pocket...