Dry throat weekends

Had a weekends of dry throats.

It started on Friday. Somehow I woke up with it.
I could feel the pain when I was teaching in the lab. It was Project 2 due date for CES105, so it was a busy session. And I had to restrain myself to eat only a small piece of the Apple Strudle when we celebrated Jason and EJ's birthday.
[More on Corica's apple strudle on asia1 and makansutra]

Saturday I went to the AMWA meeting at the Malaysia consulate office. AMWA stands for The Association of Malaysians in Western Australia. It's established just last month and now in the process of growing and forming sub-committees to provide services to the Malaysian community in WA. I'm really glad to meet the committee personally and voice out the need of young adult Malaysians here.
The committee really want to make a difference to the Malaysian community here, and most of them seem down to earth, open to comments and criticisms and not like a bunch of bureaucrats. Hope it'll remains like that. :)

On Sunday I was supposed to go to a friendly service at ShihChing's church at 9am, however, I woke up at 8am (after 8 hours of sleep) and still felt a very dry throat, so I thought getting more rest instead of going to the service was a better choice for me then. So I had another 4 hours of sleep after letting Rina who offered to pick me up know. And I did feel a lot better after the good sleep. :)

In the afternoon, Rongxin invited us out for drink and dinner to celebrate her upcoming birthday. So we did. We went to Chopstick (重庆美食家) for sichuan steamboat. It's a double soupbase steamboat (鸳鸯火锅) such that there are two separate compartments in one steamboat, the inner one is super spicy hot and the outter one is normal soup.
For my throat's sake, I had to only dip into the outer soup... It was good. :)

We had a couple of games in Timezone and had a good 2 hours of "Truth or Dare" game in Annie's place before we headed home.
The "Truth or Dare" game I learnt today was worth elaborating. We all pick a card from a deck, and the winner (who got the biggest card) gets to ask the loser to choose between "truth or dare". For "truth", the loser will be asked a question and have to answer it with ultimate honesty. [It is such a great way to get to know each other, asking something that you never get to ask in normal conversations.] For "dare", the loser will be asked to perform some act that is not usually seen. [It's also a great way for a person to express some part of themselves that's not usually expressed. To push through some embarassment/comfort zone]
I personally feel that such a game if played with respect, encouragement and authenticity, can be a great way to build friendship. But if it's directed to embarass, insult or dig out the dark secrets will be rather harmful and uncomfortable.
I think we played it the good way, lots of encouragement for 'dare acts' and respect for the 'truth' questions & answers. I really enjoyed it - I got to know my friends a lot better and had heaps of fun, can stop laughing to see the unseen talents.
It actually surprised me because I was a bit worried it'll go towards to crazy/sick path when we started the game. I'd love to play it more. :)

That is it for this weekends of dry throat. Hope it'll be good after I wake up 8 hours later. Good night.