Of Tear Gas and Tears

Dear blog/diary (maybe it's time I gave you a name huh),

Quite a little bit of drama happened yesterday. It didn't make the headlines (no, Datuk Nizar's "BUBAR DUN" songkok had that honour), but it still managed to cause quite a bit of sensation among us nervous wrecks about to sit for C4. From a distance, the only indication of anything out of the ordinary was the humongous traffic jam leading to Jalan Dungun and Jalan Semantan, but then again, maybe a car just stalled. The drama only started when people suddenly started running out of the level 6 toilet, clutching their noses and throats, mouthing the word "Smoke". Smoke? There's no smoke without fire! And then Eu Jinn says that there's a fire down at the Ground Floor Mamak place, complete with billowing smoke and fiery blazes. Oh dear. But then, I remembered that when I was at G a few minutes ago, I didn't see anything or smell anything odd. But then, the door was closed.

Heeding the call of their bladders, Eu Jinn and Fei Ni decided to take their chances. Later, they came rushing out, Fei Ni saying that the smoke smell was so strong that her eyes began tearing and she began coughing. Lucky she didn't suffer from asphyxiation or something before the exam. Poor dear was so shaken, I had to let her breathe in my jacket smell to clear her head a little, since the *smell* was leaking into the whole corridor. Pretty soon, everyone's eyes began tearing and my nose began to get a little well, funny. Finally, Tash told us that it was actually the Iraqian protesters outside the UN Office, and that the police had actually thrown tear gas grenades at them, as the crowd refused to disperse peacefully and instead were trying to stage a sit-in. What? You think this is Thailand? Not if the police can help it. What we must have caught were whiffs of the gas, which were minimal since we were up at level 6 and pretty far away from the UN office. It was pretty cool though, I thought tear gas only existed in like movies or something. After the exam, I tried to drag Fei Ni towards the UN office to see if there was anything interesting left, but her dad came before we managed to reach there. Still, there were banners and papers saying stuff like "Where's My Vote?" and "Ahmad (whatever his name is) is not my president" lying around the road.

But you know what? After that C4 paper, nobody needed any tear gas to shed tears. Integration and vectors friggin SUCK.

Bummer.

PS Happy belated birthday to Pooh :)

PPS This is way late, but congrats to Roger Federer for completing a career Grand Slam by winning Roland Garros last week, and equalling Pete Sampras's record of 14 majors. Go FedEx :) Wimbledon is next! Oh God. There's no football anymore except the Confed Cup (who cares much) so I've turned to tennis sigh. Next season can't start soon enough.

UPDATE: Conditional offers received from University of Melbourne, Sydney and Monash.