My Favorite Teacher

Guess I have come to the stage to start to look back to my life. I started to look for my teachers who had a great impact on me during the period of time that I developed my personality and characteristics. I did it once last summer to visit my piano and primary five teacher, Ms Tsai, when I was back in Taiwan.

Yesterday, I was really surprised to see Vega's blog that our English teacher, 殷非凡, back in senior high school time retired two years ago and now lives in Sydney. The first thing came to my mind was that time really flies. My last time seeing her was almost ten years ago when I just entered university and now I have already graduated and started to work for five years. Secondly, she is really my "KEY SUCCESS FACTOR" to work and live in Singapore. I do not think I would get the chance to come over and adapt the life here as an English environment without the three years hard studying under her.

(From: http://tw.myblog.yahoo.com/jw!iEb7x7yRAg6arpAdAkezufEM.p2D/photo?pid=56)

Thank you so much!! My dear teacher!!

Hope we got the chance to meet up again soon in either Australia, Taiwan or Singapore.

Suprise Birthday Party

Had a suprise birthday party for Ying last Sat at Breeze, the rooftop restaurant of Scarlet Hotel. Quite a nice place and heard that the food there is also quite nice. Really want to try their dinner one day but got to find a cooling day. If not, the tropical summer night in Singapore is quite hot and humid especially for outdoor place like this. Maybe should come during "WINTER". : )

Anyway, Happy Birthday to Ying Ying la...

MBA with Merit

Scoring has never been a big problem to me especially back at school time. So I have never really taken scores and those exams seriously other than the two big entrance exams for high school and university. After entering the school, seems I spend most of my time on other stuff. It was the band in high school time and AIESEC in uni. So I can say I enjoyed my student life quite a lot.

However, part time studying is a totally different study. I took on Graduate Diploma in Marketing in 2002 as I wanted to know if I have the capacity to take on part time MBA courses. After the one year course, I was quite confident in my time management so that I started my part time MBA in April 2004.

Today, I received the transcript and the result is that I have been awarded Master in Business Administration with Merit. At the very beginning, I did make Merit one of my goals in this course. However, when it came to the later part of the course, I was not that confident as I did not really like some of the courses so that I didn't take it seriously and aim for high score. However, with the hard work on some of the subjects and the management project, I did make it. I was really happy and excited this afternoon when I saw the result. I guess the whole thing became much more meaningful to me as this is part time course and it's really tiring to study while working. I'm very glad that I finished it and I really made it. : )

Now, I have started to look for other interesting courses or challenges. Seems I have been used to the life style with FULL schedule. haha...

Surprise

Have been walking around quite a number of shopping malls to check out the market situation as I felt that I have been away from Singapore market for too long. Besides, our company is also looking into some strategic locations to increase the brand publicity and exposure. So this weekend, I have visited Orchard, Raffles City, Suntec and the last, Marina Square. A lot of people told me that Marina Square is quite happening after the renovation. There are indeed a lot of people, a lot of shopping crowd.

However, what really surprised me is theses two shops at Marina Square. Firstly, I saw Azabu Sabo. It just looked very familiar to me at the first sight and I haven't really recognize it's actually 麻布茶房, which is one of the popular restaurants back in Taiwan. I just walked in straight away as I really missed the Red Bean Soup and I sort of needing something to replenish the blood that I lost these two days. I was really satisfied with the hot red bean soup and the rice cake.


After that, I started to walk around the mall and something familiar again caught my eyes. I saw a shop, Taiwan Lao Zhao Pai, selling all the Taiwan snacks such as the Sun Cake and all the others. I started smiling from the first sight I saw the shop until I walked one round and took this picture.

We have been always complaining that the food here is not as nice and we do missed all the nice food back at home. Now, seems I have much more options here to hill my home sick. Ha ha.. One more reason for me to stay a bit longer.

Office Drama

Had a big drama in office this afternoon. One of my admin colleagues was asked to visit our dealers to do some merchandising and stock count. I am not sure how the whole thing was presented to her but after that she started a big drama in office. She started to criticize the company ad the management that it is only a small company which pays her very little. She is not happy with the company and the management. She is prepared to go as long as the company retrenches her. She can find better jobs at other places if the company retrenches her. She also mentioned that the management are only talking to the younger group of people and did not treat the old staff fair.

I do not think the whole logical or reasonable to me but I might not be able to judged like this as I am not sure what had happened in the past twenty years and the talk this morning. However, I do not understand the logic why she cannot leave the company even though she is so unhappy about it just because the company does not retrench her. I always believe the person him or herself is the only one who can make the decision for their own life. You can't leave your life on others' hand. That is to say if you really find yourself miserable, you should either change the situation or adjust yourself to suit the situation. So if you are really not happy about the job and the company, you should just leave to look for what you want. Cannot really understand the reason why she does not want to leave unless she is looking at the money the company may give for the retrenchment or she simply cannot find any other better offer.

From my understanding, the company is trying to keep the older staff as I heard the director mentioned that the management wants to take care of them as they have devoted their youth and precious time to the company. I believe that is the reason why the management does not want to retrench the staff especially the older ones if they are not leaving by themselves.

At least to me, I still find my company and job interesting and rewarding in a way though it might not be the best or the perfect one. I cannot say that I would be with this company forever but I do believe that I would ensure myself work happily every day. If cannot, it might be time for me to move on. I would not let myself to become so miserable.

CPF

From last month, my CPF(Central Provident Fund) contribution would become 20% and the company side would become 13% as I have gained Singapore Permanent Resident status for 2 years. I'm not sure if this is something worth celebrating as I do have some extra funds coming in because of the higher percentage of contribution from company but that also means that I would have less disposable income as 20% of them would go into the CPF directly.

I actually do think of buying a place in Singapore if I'm going to stay for a long period of time, which I think I would need to decide these 2 years. The portion going into CPF and my current rental should be able to sustain a 3 bedroom HDB flat here which I would be able to do some investment with my CPF here and might be able to convert my current rental into some sort of investment.

However, this is still far from any concrete decision as I think I would need to go back unless there are some other unforeseen factors coming up these 2 years. Who knows?!