kindness

apparently a tiny act of kindness can go a long way. it's amazing to see that you're able to put a smile on someone's face just by being kind to them. 

so today in school, during recess, my best friend, tracia, went to buy food. she ordered her usual dish which is minced lamb in a hot dog bun. since the school is too cheap to let us use plates, they serve our food in a piece of brown paper which we have to carry our steaming hot food in back to our table. now note that the workers at the cafeteria always prepare our food fresh from the grill so it's piping hot. tracia accidentally loosened her grip and dropped her food onto the ground before reaching the table because it was too hot and she got really upset about it. 

seeing as she was incredibly upset that her food and the money that she spent on it had gone to waste, i did something that i knew would probably lift her spirits. i went over to the lunch lady and ordered the exact same dish that she dropped and paid for it then gave it to her. her happiness came to me as a shock because all i did was just a small act of kindness and she treated it as if it was such a big deal. 

i always did this even back in elementary school. one time when my best friend back in year three dropped her bowl of noodles i went ahead and bought her another one. it was just something normal for me to do. but according to tracia no one had ever done that for her before and according to my other friend, joyce, it was the first time she saw someone do something like that. 

so what i'm trying to say here is spread a little kindness as often as possible. even if it's just something small like complimenting someone or buying food for them after they've dropped theirs, the tiniest acts of kindness can make someone's day. even though it probably doesn't mean much to you, it'll probably mean the world to them. trust me. just try telling the next three people you see that they have a nice smile and marvel at their response. 

where's the maple syrup and pancakes?

O' CANADA! 

the land of pancakes and maple syrup with the most polite people that you can find. 

so yesterday, i attended sunway international school's first ever "international understanding day" (aka IU day) held by their interact club. this is the second IU day that i've attended. the first one was an IU day celebration by my own school last year with the theme life in technicolor. it was pretty enjoyable for a first time but it wasn't as good as sunway's IU day celebration. 

so being a school that follows the canadian education system, their IU day theme was o' canada. i was excited to go because i've heard that the people there are very fun and one of my friends, amanda — whom i met via the wonderful and glorious internet — has been sharing information about the event and it looked very exciting. another reason why i wanted to attend was because i wanted to meet amanda for the first time in person. and let me just say that the girl's hair (which is bright purple and pink) is brighter than my future. 

i didn't attend the celebration alone. in fact I went with two of my friends that live in the same neighborhood as me. wei lyn and shyne-ni (pronounced as sheh ni) it was their first ever IU day attended and it seems that they had quite a fun time as much as i did. 

the performances were great and the mc's were hilarious especially one of them named denzel who was as wild and loud as his long afro tied into a ponytail. him and the other mc (rahul) started of the celebration with the both of them entering the stage while singing a high school musical song. the performances were pretty unexpected too. most of them were singing performances but there were also cheerleading and poetry reading which was different from your usual stage acts. there was even a flash mob that occurred which completely took all of us by surprise. random people started standing on their chairs when the music went off and ran onto the stage and started dancing. 

the majority of the students there were korean. even the group of girls sitting in front of us were koreans. there were so many koreans there that i thought to myself "damn am i in sunway or am i in korea?" 

other than the performances, the food they provided there was incredible too. did you know that the hawaiian pizza despite its name was originally created in canada? well now you do. and did you know that poutine is a french canadian dish that is  made of french fries with gravy and cheese and it is also heavenly delicious. it was the first time eating poutine and now i absolutely love it ♡ it's a definite must try for all you who don't know it's delicious cheesy and gravy coated goodness. 

sadly i didn't get to have any pancakes with maple syrup because they ran out but i did get loads of poutine and pizza which made up for it ☻ overall a great event and i will definitely come back again for any of their future events. i'll end this blog post here with some other pictures we took at the event. till then, au revoir! xx