Month: November 2017

Today I made fish and chips for my dinner. I have had it before but I have never made it. Instead of using a traditional batter I used flour, eggs, salt, pepper and breadcrumbs. I also had some chips to go along with it. One challenge I faced while cooking was the oil. The oil was very hot and because you fry the fish it sprays everywhere. It was a challenge to remember to hold on to the side of the pan to keep it steady while flipping the fish or chips with the spatula. When it was done I found it quite nice, the chips were very oily but I did not mind that much.

The earth

The video about falling through the earth was quite interesting I had seen a video before about it but it wasn’t looking at the mathematics side of it and was just looking at the other side. In the video, they started off doing quite rough calculations with 42 mins. He also mentioned that that was the amount of time it would take for you to go around the outside aswell. In the end shaved some time off by taking into account other factors that they hadn’t before, at the end of the video it came out to around 38 mins and 6 seconds in total from pole to pole.

This October break I went to Japan for my school trip, I went to Nozawaonsen specifically I was there for a week from the 14th of October to the 21st. We left the Friday school finished so we were all very tired during the travel but when we came back we had another week which was good. It was very cold while we were there, not as cold as it can get but still cold, it was around 2º at night and without heating when we were camping you had to keep yourself warm.

The question I went to Japan thinking about is how is the lifestyle in Japan different from Singapore. During the trip we didn’t spend a lot of time in the city, it was only 3 days, but I think we spent enough time for me to get a good understanding of the answer to my question. One of the major differences in Japan compared to Singapore is that they didn’t have any showers but instead had an onsen an onsen is a natural hot spring in Japan. The onsen in our hotel had public shower heads around the side and you could use them.

During the trip, one of the recurring things that came up was that they didn’t have much cutlery I was used to using it was mainly those big soup spoons and chopsticks. I had to learn how to use chopsticks whilst on the trip although I still don’t really know how to use them I managed to eat. This was different for some other people as well because we all struggled to use chopsticks. This is different from Singapore because in Singapore there are loads of different nationalities and cultures, that means that here they have all of the utensils.

What I think was the biggest difference and relates back to the different cultures in Singapore. It’s the language. In Japan or at least where we went they only really spoke Japanese we only met one person who wasn’t with our trip that spoke English. For me that was quite an issue because I speak English, however, the 2 instructors who live in Japan spoke Japanese and there was a group of around 7 girls on the trip that where Japanese and that helped because they could translate for us, like when we went rafting the raft instructors spoke Japanese but because they were on the rafts they could translate for us.

Overall I enjoyed the trip a lot and I think it was a very good experience. What made a big difference was being able to pick your own trip. I made some new friends in Japan and I have also learned a lot about Japan and the Japanese culture.