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The semester is over! Now for the exams. Yay.

I'm really glad that the last day of semester 1 was a good day. Lit. tutorial in the morning was pretty fruitful, even if I didn't quite understand every single thing during the class. (To tell the truth, I didn't understand any of the questions in the tutorial, but oh well.) It helps that my tutor is a nice person. And an excellent tutor. (Unfortunate for him that this lousy lit. student is in his class. Very unfortunate.)

Then I had lunch with Yuekai and Johan at the engineering canteen. Nice food. (I wouldn't be able to stomach science canteen food 'cause I absolutely insist that my last meal in school for this semester must be a nice one.)
The mix of company is rather weird, I know. A girl from the school of business in my lit. class and a guy from my OG. And the guy can be rather weird, to boot.
It was a good lunch 'cause the food was YUM. Everyone should try the Indonesian grilled food stall in the engineering canteen.

Johan is amazing at exploiting people's friendships. I can't reveal the reasons yet... except for one: he calls up friends to serve as lunch company when he's alone in school. Staying in a hall has its downsides huh.

After that I had my last lesson for the semester. Thank goodness it was a fun one. Hahah. Final lesson, final practical: a trip to the zoo! Everyone who can should take the biodiversity module too. LSM1103; go check it out. Heh.

The zoo is a great place to spend the entire afternoon in, but having great company makes it even better. A4 is a funny group. (Maybe 'cause we're named after the standard paper size. HAHAH.)

Okay um, credits to Wes and his brother's camera for the photos. (I plucked them off Facebook.)

Animal species 1. Our lab group's unofficial rep who was forced upon the job. He does a good job of emailing everyone and telling them to wear the science faculty tee though. He calls himself the monitor lizard. ('Cause class monitor/lab group monitor. Get it? Sorry eh, this isn't very funny. Bio students' joke.)

Camwhoring on the bus. See how well we're camouflaged against the blue backdrop of the bus? Biodiversity lessons come in handy.


Our group with the nice lecturer aka Otterman. (He studies otters hahah.)

Too bad our TA had something on, so he couldn't come. We had an Andrew-Seow-lookalike substitute TA who was very nice to us too.

Animal species 2. Wes in a raincoat that makes him look like he's going trick-or-treating. Halloween's over, my boy.

It was raining very heavily on our way there, and we were all going "OH NO" on the bus. Thankfully after we reached, it slowed to a drizzle, but not after Ricky spent $15 on an umbrella. (More about the brolly later.)

I'm pretending that this act of blogging is a way to consolidate the stuff I've learnt, so humour me. Here goes the more interesting parts. (Gosh I'm actually reading my practical schedule as I type this.)

The tapirs have interesting disruptive colouration. My notes say that they resemble brown watermelons. Hmm.

Each tapir is brown with a white middle section. To me they look like jigsaw puzzles with straight lines; that's how stark the difference in colour is.

It's really a pity we can't see the white tigers 'cause some suicidal guy jumped into the enclosure, got attacked by the tigers, and died. He should have stuck to cleaning the monkey enclosures.

We saw jaguars, leopards and lions though. Big cats are seriously sexy. Especially those sleek lines. Mmmm.

Anyway, tigers are the biggest cats (i.e. the heaviest), followed by lions, jaguars, and leopards. These large cats are slender 'cause of their short alimentary canals (aka digestive tract: mouth, oesophagus/gullet, stomach, intestines etc., you get the idea). Unlike herbivores which need a relatively more complicated digestive system to digest all those cellulose, carnivores don't need so much stuff in their bellies.

One way to remain slim and sexy is to only eat meat huh. HAHAH. (I'm kidding. Don't take my word for it.)

Don't you just love bio terms. Heh. Jargon, jargon.

This just occured to me: Toothpaste is a white tiger!

If you don't know what Toothpaste is, it shows that you haven't been visiting facebook often enough. Check out my (fluff)pet.

Jaguars' coats are patterened with rosettes, with a spot in the centre. Leopards' coats have no spots in the centre of the rosettes but they're really sexy too.

Black panthers are black 'cause of the extra melamine they produce. And black is a sexy colour.

Crap, the zoo trip screwed up my sexual orientation.

Ohhh. Pumas can purr but can't roar, unlike the other big cats. Silent and deadly.

Now about lions. Apparently the darker the mane, the more melamine is produced, the more testosterone the lion has. So lionesses prefer brunette lions to blond lions. (And our TA waited till all the tourists were gone from the little air-conditioned hut before he said this. Hahah.)

The pygmy hippotamus undergoes progenesis, i.e. they develop sexual maturity precociously, so there's no need for them to grow any bigger. Thus they remain small.

Kangaroos are so cute. I love their paws.

There's this whole section on animals found in Australia, which I thought was rather cool. There's also a placard that's dedicated to Steve Irwin. Sweet.

The primates (monkeys/baboons etc.) didn't impress me much, so I won't talk about them. Severe bias. Hahah.

We saw two manatees kissing when we went by their enclosure, and this group of Japanese tourists were going "KAWAII!" and "SO SWEET!".

It was interesting to watch. They were using their tongues... Hmm it should be highly unlikely that they were feeding each other or something. SHOULD BE.

Dugongs have forked tails while manatees have spooned tails. No pun/joke/whatever intended.

Apparently penguins do not only exist at the poles. (I can't remember where else they're found, but they ARE found in tropical areas too.) So there was one open-air area and one air-conditioned area just beside it, and we were like, "Eh why is there an air-conditioned area here?"

Hmm maybe the air-conditioned enclosure is for the richer penguins.

One of the penguins was semi-bald 'cause its feathers fell out, I think. Poor thing.

Otters are cute. And social. And so pretty to watch when they're swimming. Streamlined body shape.

Zebras are black-and-white 'cause their main predator, the lion, is colour blind. And they're striped to mimic their natural habitat, the grassland.

Giraffes are sexy too 'cause they have impossibly long legs with tight skin, such that they look like they're wearing tights. The tight skin on the legs is to prevent excessive blood flow to their limbs (constriction). Their hearts can weigh as much as 20kg, 'cause they need really strong hearts to pump blood all the way up to their heads. Um, their eyes are extremely pretty as they have the thickest and longest eyelashes.

My sentences are badly linked now 'cause it's... 0147h. Oh no, so disjointed.

Two rhinoceros(es?) were fighting when we dropped by their enclosure. They were chasing each other to and fro, and were surprisingly fast. They have thick hides, so predators are not very fond of hunting them. Their butts are huge and saggy. Hahah.

For some reason the rhino reminded me of Jensen Ackles. I'm sure the physical appearances had nothing to do with it.

The orang utan enclosure was closed, but we saw some of them hanging out in the trees. They started swinging on the vines from tree to tree but one was left napping on the platform. And then Wes shouted up to it, "Eh exams are coming!"

In other words, time to get up and study. Wahahah we've become mugging mammals, to use Wes' words.

We saw some bats hanging upside down on branches. Apparently they have to flap and right themselves when they uh, defecate, or their excrement will flow all over their bodies/faces. Ugh.

Alex "Irwin" Goh with a group of croc enthusiasts.

The group went nuts posing with the bronze statues of animals around the entrance/exit. Alex has this series of photos which should be put in an album titled "Alex's dangerous adventures at the zoo". Okay I can't find any of those photos. Basically he was just posing with the statues and taking photos with his foot in their open mouths. He wanted to put his head in but crouching down was a tad too unglam. Hahah.

OHH I forgot about Ricky's umbrella! Anyway after we walked for a while, he started talking about how he wasted $15, and immediately after he said that, it started pouring.

Better still, we were approaching this rainforest open enclosure thing that kinda looked like an aviary, and there was this bridge that we were supposed to walk on. AND, Ricky asked whether we'll see dinosaurs. (Think Jurassic Park.)

I told him, "No. You'd better not say anything in case it really comes true."

Dinner was fun. We ate at KFC, and decided to send a message to our original TA to congratulate him on getting a teaching award. So being the group that we are, we composed identical messages and sent them at the same time. It was like a dictation session HAHAH. One person composed and read it out for everyone to type. Hilarious. People like us with nothing better to do than to annoy others with little pranks... annoying right.

Alex "Irwin" chilling out with a bowl of ice-cream after wrestling with the (fake) croc.

Hahah we shared a Ben and Jerry's ice-cream. Yum yum yum.
We saw this cute caucasian girl with huge eyes and everyone couldn't stop ogling at her. We saw her again at the bus-stop on the way home and the ogling started again. Gosh we're turning into paedophiles!
Maybe the wanting to visit the water playground had something to do with our paedophilic tendencies. Oh my.

I want to visit the zoo again. And the night safari, and the bird park.
Tickets are kind of expensive, but they cost as much as tickets to a concert. Plus you can spend the whole day there, so I guess it's kind of more worth it?

The bus ride and train ride home was hilarious. We've all gone mad with mugging. Normal curve, ellipse, regression line, halophiles, nucleophiles, double-blind randomized control test etc. were terms heard throughout the day. On the other hand, I guess you could say that we were doing some cross-module application. Hahah.

It got so bad that while we were waiting for the train from Choa Chu Kang to Jurong East, while discussing which carriage was more crowded, we hypothesized that the level of crowdedness follows a normal curve (congested in the middle, sparse at the ends). Anyway we found out that that wasn't the case. I can't really draw the curve here, so. Just know that it doesn't follow the normal curve. Don't even ask about the standard deviation and average, which was what Wes did.

I'm tired, and I'm not making sense anymore.
Next entry, I shall explore the definition of mugging. Whee. Do remind me if I get too caught up in mugging and forget all about it.