NEW FACES
I am starting to realise that there have been the same few faces making an appearance on my blog posts. Well, that is because they are friends from my freshmore class. As much I enjoyed spending time with them, there are days where you just need to break away from that monotony (no hard feelings!!!!) and today was the day. Coincidentally, one of the ALP-ers i.e Dan, “open-jioed” to hike 虎跑山 – a supposedly 12-kilometre trek that starts from Lingyin temple and would bring us to multiple peaks in the 西湖 area. After deciding I was not going to coop myself up in the hostel for the whole of Sunday, I decided to go on this hike led by the true mountaineer, Dan.
Unfortunately, the air was foggy that day and we did not get to see the ideal scenery. Fortunately, the climb was arduous enough to make us appreciate whatever view those peaks have to offer us – like we were in some mysterious forest ( I don’t know ) but it was pretty peaceful.
What I gained from this trek: legs-day, much needed inner peace, some friends, several mosquito bites, MANY new nicknames…
CULTURAL ACTIVITY
This week, we were given the opportunity to visit China Academy of Art. When we arrived, the place did not look like a school at all because the campus was so spacious and had many natural landscapes coupled with interesting looking buildings. We were privileged to be able to visit the final year project exhibitions which were pretty impressive. Coming from a design and technology-centric university education background being able to see design from a more artistic and abstract lens was truly eye-opening. We also got to see the oh-so-familiar building models being exhibited. While I am far from being an architecture student in my pillar years, the sight of bleached and aesthetically arranged materials only reminded me of all my ASD volleyball seniors ( mostly the blood sweat and tears that accompany the models ) Turns out studying architecture is pretty similar across the globe.
WHOLESOME LATE NIGHTS
One thing that was brought over to ALP from our mandatory hostel freshmore terms was spending late nights in hostel rooms with a group of friends. One of the nights, my friends and I decided to just sit around and complete my barely half-completed 1000 piece puzzle. Let’s just say we were very engrossed that we were very sensitive to every shade of colour of the sky and water feature in the puzzle AND we stayed up until 4 am for that. Until the birds were already chirping S(tay) U(p) T(il) D(awn) indeed.
I don’t think that was the craziest we went for the week. We also went for an all-nighter stroll around Hang Zhou which took us to places we least expected like a random place with two sheep. Pretty sure we were not hallucinating from sleep deprivation because we have a photo.
DESIGN FICTION
Just when we thought toasters are out of the picture when it comes to Design Fiction, we were wrong. Continuing from last week’s lessons, we are now expected to make higher quality videos based on the same topic of “how to make a toaster. This time, we decided to use fewer memes and more raw footage which honestly a much better video than the previous one.
Credits to my group mates: Junjie for being a sufficiently dramatic actor and Cheryl for her highly-improvised prop toaster 🙂
THEME MEETINGS
On this weeks episode of theme meetings, we laid out ALL 18 ideas all of us have come up with throughout the week. The biggest struggle I encountered was expressing my ideas in Chinese – it was tortuous. As we go around sharing our ideas, our professor and TAs critique our ideas and probe us to think of more considerations. After this “firing round”, our group decided to narrow down our ideas to three main problem statements ( BAM! design thinking back at it again) which are those shown in the picture. Be right back trying to refine the problem statement on anxiety-induced insomnia.
P.S: Our prof wants to bring us to berry pick. Stoked.
FUZHOU
Actually, be right back because I have an early train to Wuyishan Dong railway station to catch tomorrow
