Unfortunately, I have already started one of my blog entries with 'long time no see,' so I don't think I could do this again... but I can redeem myself by now posting two entries, this is part one, where I will talk about all the great things that happened between October and January.
To be completely honest, there is not much that happened during that time. As we left behind our busy term 1, we entered a little less stressful term 2, but there was still a lot of work ahead. We finished our Internal Assessments, took tests and lived a relatively uneventful everyday life.
However, the anticipation of our Christmas break kept us excited. Although I told myself to use that holiday primarily to study, I have to admit that I did not get up to a lot of work during our three-week break, as I spent most of the time with my friends here in boarding and outside. We had a lovely big Christmas dinner in the boarding house, and although many were sad not to be with our families, we managed to celebrate with each other, give little gifts and decorate the boarding house to make it feel even more like our homes. I also managed to get out of the boarding house a lot, I have two german families here in Singapore to whom I have grown very close, and both welcomed me, Milena (baby scholar) and Moana (G11 scholar from Austria), for dinners and brunches. I also went out with Francesco, Nandini and Izzy over the holidays, we had a lot of fun celebrating New Years together as we stayed over at Izzy's place. Because of Covid, bars shut at 10.30 pm here in Singapore, which means everyone in the Condo was at home. Shortly after 12 am, everyone went on the balconies to scream happy new years to each other, which was a very uniting and celebratory moment for all of us.
I also spent a lot of time with the girls in my corridor, we started to grow closer and closer over the past months, so we had a few fun girl's nights. Izzy and I have a little tradition of going hiking on the weekends, as Singapore offers many green parks to hike around, so we continued doing so over the break, which gave me some new perspectives of Singapore.
After the break, we went right back to our school work and the rehearsals for our musical. As I mentioned in the last blog entry, I auditioned for the musical and ended up landing a leading role in one of them. Because of covid regulations, we were only allowed to sing in groups of five without a mask which led to the decision of making a musical revue instead of an entirely new one. So we ended up playing around 45 min out of the musicals performed on campus in the last years. We started with The Wizard of Oz, going into Jesus Christ Superstar, then Aida and lastly, a preview of Jane Ayre, a musical to be performed next year. I was one of the singing and leading roles in Aida, it was soo much fun to work with the rest of the cast, and we were able to perform four great shows in front of a live audience (Pictures are in the Gallery section :)).
And that's it. After the musical, we went straight into the Chinese New Year break, and I think this is a good place to move into part two of the blog post, see you there :)