With Mel it's always windswept detail, waking up early-early to comb Bugis and Far East, as bleary pupils in morning pictures clearly illustrate. As a result we can truly enjoy retail goods and expat areas - CHIJMES, lights and prices, also enough to know that the floor at Long Bar is crunchy with peanut shells - but heartland enough so we find ourselves at Ghim Moh facing chwee kueh mountains sponsored by her lovely grandmother.

Also, because first times are crisply satisfying when you don't expect them to work out royally, there's meeting Emma as well as Mel's cousins, latter being so classmate-familiar I wanted to shout "WELCOME TO THE 1C, BITCH" hahahaha. Here's to a over-the-top holiday for our Aussie girls who worked their arses off to be here!

Huixin's back too, looking beautifully healthy and rosy - my girl, how on earth can so much have happened in one year? And one thing I'll always be talking about with you and every other International Student is Home. Again, it's weird how none of us will embrace Garden State, but we're impatient S'poreans who feel the need to discard any trace of emo.

Enough that MSN always unearths friends who restore your faith in... other friends, and feeling largely horrified that my father called clubs "a place of sin" - we're not in a movie or graphic novel, dad - and knowing I'll be in for ongoing ethical wrangle/debate with parents for a while that may actually turn out to be fun in the strangest sense. Sometimes the quietest thing in the world to do is swirl around the room to a Queen CD.