cheers! all major exams for semester 2 have just concluded today and i'm half alive after a whole week of late nights and last minute cramming. late nights of pouring over endless notes and textbooks have become more important than getting rest, cos we realized that there ain't no point getting rest if ur mind is blank.
so anyway, after prac today jielin, kc, jiawei, zing, decheng and i headed down to town for some Jap food at a little joint along russell street. pretty decent place. the lunchtime conversation was surprisingly morbid though, we somehow ended up talking about supernatural stuff and how people we know have actually been possessed before. DC said something about his mum's friend being possessed and speaking in a man's voice and encountering "ghosts" which came back to settle a score.
freaky!
apart from that, we had a nice stroll in downtown melbourne. the city's been spruced up lately by the city council. new chic looking metallic benches have been installed on bourke st and more disabled friendly tram stops, apparently to prepare for the commonwealth games next year.
it then dawned on me how liveable and beautiful a city melbourne actually is, and how i'm pretty fortunate to study here. some of the guys in the US are in really remote places the nearest city could be hours away.
the hot topic this week has of course been the arrests of the terror suspects in melbourne and sydney. its scary how these people could well be the ones we rub shoulders with on tram number 19 everyday! one of them lives just up the street in Coburg! and apparently they've got enough juice to make 15 large bombs! WTF!
which really leads me to wonder why these people do the things they do. some have been in australia for as long as a decade, even living off welfare handouts from the state, courtesy of the australian tax payer, the very people they were trying to blow to smithereens.
i mean...yea...one could argue that they are really upset about australia's participation in the iraq war...etc...etc....and how they feel for their muslim brothers on the other side of the world, but this really isn't the best way to express resentment.
if u can't integrate into australian society, why come in the first place? and why stay on?
the thought of a bomb ripping through the peaceful and rather pretty city of melbourne or sydney is just really unfathomable. its good that the Australian Federal Police acted fast this time. amazingly, the stupidest thing about it all is that the PM John Howard himself nearly tipped off the terrorists by annoucing just a few days before that they had received specific intelligence about a terror threat!
Howard is probably secretly pleased about these arrests though, and the awakening of the community to the threat of terror...its gives him more political capital to push through tough laws that would make it easier to apprehend suspects. most importantly, people would want him to stay on as PM as he is now seen as effective in handling the terror threat.
all right...so much for politics...i need to a shower...
ciao
