Yesterday was the day that I took the YELT test. As it was an important day, I set the alarm clock to 7:00 am in advance. In the morning, the alarm did go off but I accidentally switched it off and continued to sleep. Fortunately, my biological clock reminded me of the test and when I finally got up, it was a quarter to 8:00 am. I was shocked but felt a little bit relieved because I still had some time before the exam. I sprang out of bed and rushed to the washroom. When everything was done, it was 8:00, then I rushed to the bus station. Because it was Saturday, there were few buses and I had to wait for a long time for a single bus to come. When I arrived York, it was around 8:55 am, so again, I rushed to the building where the exam would take place. While rushing, I also had to look at the map because I had forgotten to look at it in advance. Finally, I made it: I got to the exam room in time -- and there were some other people who also nearly late like me. The exam room was a lecture hall which was kind of small and I think nearly half of the hall were YUELI students. Finally, the test started; it was funny that as soon as I got the question sheet, I couldn't understand the passages and spend quite a long time trying to figure out what the main idea was. It was something about people's attitude towards the idea of television. Honestly speaking, it was hard to understand; I had to reread it again and again. I was stuck on the last question of the reading part and there was little time left. However, I managed to finish it but I'm not sure that all the answer made any sense. Then, in the writing part, I also finished just seconds away from the final time. Nevertheless, I was surprised that I could finish the short essay in half an hour with nothing prepared in my head. I'm sure that this is because we did a lot of writing in class and I had improved my writing speed. However, I can't guarantee that I'll pass this part of the test becuase I was focusing on filling words in the sheet rather than constructing the right answer; leaving blank space would deduct my points. After the exam, I was relieved that the exam was over. York was so quiet and there were nearly no students on the campus. Somehow, I was happy because I didn't miss it.

Summer!

I do not like hot weather. However, after I arrived in Canada, I realized that I do not really enjoy cold weather either. I had longed for the summer in Toronto for a long time and yet it still eluded me. Nevertheless, through these days I have found that the weather is becoming warmer and warmer. I said to myself - Finally, summer has arrived! Last Sunday, I and two of my roommates went to a place near Dundas station; I cannot remember the street name, but it was a kind of Festival. We left at 1.30pm after having lunch. To my surprise, when I stepped out of the station, it reminded me of my hometown. The temperature was about 31* and it was very hot and humid; moreover, I was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans! The sun didn't seem friendly that day, and as we walked along the street, there stood a lot of shops on the right side of the street.

Everybody was having fun with families and friends, they were walking under the sun while we were walking in the shade. There were a variety of shops, each selling their unique goods. I'm sure that the one who sold drinks was making a profit! As we walked, we saw a crowd of people sitting on the platform and enjoying the Mexican music(my guess). That was my first time listening to that kind of song and I liked it. Their guitars were a little bit different from what I've seen. There, some guys were taking off their shirts, and some were drinking. We got up after listening to two songs and continued to walk down the street. There were also one or two small music bands entertaining people. Actually, the road was not very long, and we could see the end of the shops from a distance after we had walked for about 15 minutes. Again, I saw a crowd gathering at the corner of the street. With curiosity, I went into the crowd and I found a man trying to put pieces of rocks onto each other. It was very interesting; he just put the rocks on top of each other without any help and managed to form stacks of rocks on the street. Then, we reached the end and we bought hotdogs and headed to the station. If the weather were a little bit cooler, it would have been a perfect holiday. However, I could feel happiness in the people despite the scorching sunlight. It has been a wonderful weekend for me for I don't usually go out on the weekend.

Once upon a time in CLH A: Memories from the "Mathematics for the Life and Social Sciences" lecture hall.

Today, after my class in the afternoon, I and Blake went to the NEXUS to see whether there were any lectures for today. Fortunately, we saw one lecture which started at 2 pm and we decided to go there. However, when we carefully looked up the sign up sheet, we saw that it was already full. Nevertheless, we didn't change our minds and jotted down the lecture hall location and professor's name, and after that we went to the food court to have lunch. On the way to the food court, we bumped into Terry, and later found out that we were on the same ship. Then, we had lunch and conversation together without noticing the time. It was about a quarter to two when we realized that we had to go to the lecture hall. However, it didn't take us a lot of time to find the hall. We arrived before the lecture started and decided to go as far as we could from the professor. After some time, we saw the professor coming into the hall and we knew right away that he was an old professor and maybe a strict one. He started off by explaining about limits. At first, I had no idea what he was talking about because I hadn't been in touch with Maths since I finished my high shcool and plus, I was not good at Maths, either. However, later on, I somehow realized that although I had studied something like that before, I still couldn't understand it. Moreover, I couldn't catch up with his English. I have no intention to insult this professor, but sometimes, his English was not clear enough for me to understand. I found out one thing, that there were more Asian and Middle Eastern students there than in the lecture that I had attended before. Some student seemed to be understanding everything and, as usual, some students were doing what they wanted to do. This professor somehow liked to ask students some questions and ask them to go up to the front and write something. He showed some charts to the students, which I think helped a lot of the students to understand better what he was teaching. All of a sudden, the professor pointed at Terry and told him to come up to the stage to write something. I was shocked, too; I thought he was calling on me. Having no choice, Terry went near to the Professor and told him that he was a YUELI student. The professor seemed like he didn't know what YUELI was and asked him what that was. Suddenly, I heard the professor say, "You come here for English!!" and the whole lecture hall burst into laughter. I couldn't imagine what I would do if I were in his place; that would be such an awkward situation for me that I would be like a 'retarded cockroach', without knowing what to do next. However, my friend Terry managed to come back to the seat without writing anything. I am sure that he also felt very awkward to be laughed at in front of the hall. However, it had been a scary and funny lecture experience for me and of course for Terry.

My first time helping friend moving stuff to a new house : Great exercise

Today, I woke up quite early this morning because my roommate told me that his friend is moving to a new house so we decided to help him move all the stuff out of his old one. It was cloudy and raining a little bit this morning. Not long after we woke up, the friend of my roommate called us and said that he was waiting downstairs from the apartment to pick us up to take us to his home. His name is Lakmal, a Sri Lankan, and his wife is called Lenna, and she is an Indonesian. When we arrived at his home, we saw a big truck at his apartment and it was really a big one. So, we went up to his apartment which was on the second floor. As soon as Lakmal open his door, he said, "Guys, welcome to the jungle", which was true: the whole apartment was filled up with boxes, furniture, and all kinds of stuff. We were surprised by the piles of boxes and electrical devices. There, I met another man and he told me that he was called Surash and he probably is a Sri Lankan too. At first, we were very energetic, lifting and moving items, and had a good conversation while working. It is quite funny that whenever I meet somebody and introduced myself, and say that I'm from Myanmar, they all ask me about the cyclone, which I don't know much about. We started from around 7.30, early in the morning; there were countless times of running down the stairs and lifting the goods from the elevator. As for breakfast, I had only had a small bowl of cereal and I could hear my stomach making some noise. I was tired and hungry, too. Unfortunately, while we were moving stuff, we got into an argument with other men. They claimed that they had also reserved the elevator because they were also moving things. Maybe the manager messed up the schedule and this resulted in an elevator fight. However, we did leave the elevator for them but not the loading place, which also made them very frustrated. At last, we didn't want to argue anymore, so we just let them load their things and we just waited. When they finished, it was nearly 11.30, and I was getting more and more hungry by that time. As the apartment was on the second floor, we moved some items by dolly and some, which were light and soft, we just threw from the balcony. This actually sounds very lazy but it worked and saved a lot of time. We took a lunch break and had a delicious meal, maybe because we were starving. Almost everything was loaded on the truck by 1.30 pm and it was not over yet, we still had to move it all to the new house. When we arrived at the new house and started unloading the stuff, every box seemed to be heavier than the previous ones because we were exhausted. However, the truck had to be returned by 4 pm, so we had to rush unloading all the stuff. After taking all the stuff of the truck and returning the truck, Lakmal said he wanted to change the main lock so he bought a key called a "smart key," but I'm not sure. We took off the old door lock and put the new one in, which took us more than an hour and a half to assemble, but we were not successful! Later on, we found out that the door was poorly drilled so the new lock won't go in. After trying to figure out how to put in the new lock, we wound up replacing it with the old one again because again, we were longing for dinner. Nevertheless, that was a great dinner: we had a lot of dishes and sat in the restaurant and had a lot of converstion with each other. Although I was very tired, it was a good oppurtunity for me to have a chance to exercise because I don't usually do any exercise at all. I had a great time and the experience I got was much more than just moving things on the truck.

"This is what they called, a lecture hall"

Until today, I still have not been to any lecture yet in level 6. But, I would like to share some of my experiences at my first lecture, one month ago. I and two of my friends, Abdul and Eyup, signed up for a lecture called Environment and Technology. Becuase it was our first time going to a lecture, we got lost and could not find the lecture room. Fortunatedly , I managed to find it and we arrived in time. There were about 200 seats and it was a large lecture hall. That was my first time to see what lecture halls and student life look like in Canada. We went up to the place where there were fewer people. As soon as we arrived, the professor came in and started his lecture. He was not quite old, maybe in his mid 30s. When we looked around us, we could see many different things happening in very funny ways. We saw a lot of students sleeping sweetly as if they were in their beds, others shopping online and chatting and, of course, checking their Facebooks. It looked like some were having a delicious lunch further back in the hall. Yet, there were many hardworking students who always only glued their eyes on the professor and took notes. We were suprised, moreover, to find the lecture to be quite interesting, dealing with how to decrease the emissions of CO2 or invent new technologies that would have zero emissions, which would have a positive effect on the environment. The professor was a nice guy, always asking the students whether the presentation was too fast or too slow. Also, there were many other kinds of teaching aids to help students understand better. We felt like it was a little boring because we just sat there and took notes, and tried as much as we could not to produce noise. I happened to see some note taking techniques used by the student in front of me. I survived through the lecture thanks to an interesting lecture; otherwise, I would have ended up sleeping like some of the other students. We left as soon as they had a break time and had some snacks sharing our opinion about the lecture and comparing it with the lectures from our hometowns. It was really interesting, maybe because of the content.............

Eat! Eat!

Before this session started, I and my roommate took a trip to Vancouver. The weather was fine but a little colder than Toronto. There were trees everywhere compared to Toronto. However, Toronto is more convinient in terms of public transportation. We rented a car downtown because the skytrian didn't take us to where we wanted. Almost every part of Vancouver is being renewed for the upcoming Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. The city is quite peaceful and beautiful.

One day I had a chance to meet some friends of my roommate. They are all older than me and yet still very funny and friendly. There were a couple of Thais and one Chinese. Having a conversation with them was like having a tough listening test! We all decided to have lunch in a Korean restaurant. Then we ordered about ten dishes and of course they ordered beers and alcoholic drinks because my roommate said that was her treat (hee hee). Well, as I'm not 19 yet, I was the only one who was having Pepsi. However, we had a great and long conversation during the lunch. When my roommate asked for the bill, she was repeatedly looking the bill again and again. We all thought that it was too expensive. Later on we found out that the waiter gave us the wrong bill which included only four meals. It was a really tasty and "cheap" lunch.

In the evening two of her friends said that they had some other things to do so there were only three of us. The one who was left, who was named Mar Liang, does not usually speak but sometimes makes a lot of jokes. Again, we agreed to have dinner in an all-you-can-eat Japanese BBQ house. It cost us 22$ per person which was not too cheap or expensive. At first, everything seemed to be very delicious and we kept ordering. Then, during the dinner, we started to feel very full and there were still many kinds of dishes that we had ordered. My roommate said if we couldn't finish everything that we ordered, they would fine us. It was supposed to be a wonderful dinner, but we ended up having trouble finishing many dishes. This sounds stupid, but we survived by eating, having a rest, having conversations and then eating........ . After that Mar Liang couldn't even make any jokes, since we all were very very full. This was a stupid and yet very funny experience in my life.

One beneficial thing is that I, having a shy personality, had overcome the shy problem to some extent through communicating and having conversation with others.