For the past few days, I've been having late-night mahjong sessions with the only exception being yesterday because I fell asleep while waiting for Ervin to come. The accumulated sleep debt in recent days were too much for me to bear, especially when I couldn't rejuvenate myself that afternoon because my dad wanted me to accompany him to some CNY function at his friend's house. The reason being that the host's wife's brother is living in New York, so he'd be a good contact to have should I require any help when I'm studying there. Yeah, time to work the Friendster magic. I was a little skeptical about the usefulness of the contact considering the 4 degrees of separation, but I went nonetheless.

Huge mistake. The function was a terrible experience for me. Most of the food was halal because of some Muslim guests, and it reminded me of the horrid cookhouse food in Brunei all over again. To be fair, the food at the function was of a much higher quality, but I still couldn't bear to take more than a bowl of the lontong; the colour of the food simply brought back too many gastronomic nightmares.

The worst part of the whole affair was not the food, but the crowd. Most of the guests were members of the aviation industry, so naturally, the conversation tended to flow towards engineering stuff, which got a bit too technical for me. In short, absolute boredom. Now I remember why I decided against pursuing engineering; it just ain't my cup of tea. But things weren't too bad towards the end, when the guests started to gamble, and my dad sponsored me to play with them. I learnt a new game, and if I recall correctly, it's called si ji puay, which translates to 4 eights according to my dad. No idea why it's named as such, but it's a pretty fun game to play and a good alternative to blackjack and poker. I shan't elaborate on the rules of the game here, because, well, I'm lazy to. Haha.

Anyway, I've gotta stop short this entry. Mahjong crisis now. San Que Yi!