When all hope was lost.

Here I am once again in Kampar, where I am to spend the next 14 weeks in the purest form of suffering known to humanity.

It’s a Monday today as I am typing this, but I have no idea when I will be able to publish this online as the new place I am staying at has no internet connectivity. Hell, I don’t even know the other tenants (if there are any at all) to discuss with them the solution to this problem. I realize I was in a rush when I got this place and didn’t think several things over before I decided that I wanted to spend one more semester here. Fortunately, Plan B is easily available. Of course, like all back up plans, it isn’t as ideal and there will be extra complications to deal with, but in this case I’m quite grateful that it isn’t totally unreasonable of a plan.

I still remember the Saturday that I arrived here. The moment I set foot on the familiar streets, I was immediately filled with this overwhelming surge of sadness and sorrow. I was instantly depressed and felt intense weight around my eyes. But, as always, letting those tears out is the hardest possible thing for me to do. It was so bad that I actually decided that for once I might actually benefit from spending the night with my parents at Grand Kampar Hotel.

Fortunately for me, Sunday was a much better day. The morning spent with mother and father was actually quite enjoyable. Again, never thought I’d say this, but that’s how it turned out to be. Ironically, I might actually have that bout of depression to thank for getting my father back to talking terms with myself, after almost half a year of deliberately not talking to him. Lunch with the family actually did not feel irritating, even with father’s usual blatant self-embarrassing. After they left for home, I killed the entire afternoon at the local cyber café, Fecca. Got a damn good friend (probably the best I have over here) to help me kill the evening. We went to the local McDonalds and talked about the good old times during our first year, how the second year became the point that tore everything apart, for both his course and mine, what were we planning to do after graduation and so on. Then just when we were about to leave, our Tae Kwon Do instructor showed up with his assistant, and we decided we should get some other fellow students to come over and talk crap until midnight.

So thank you Vingent for being a friend in need, a friend indeed.

I was about to talk about what happened during my semester break as well, which was actually spent very meaningfully, but I guess I’ll just leave that for another time. All in all, those 4 weeks were the time where I potentially fixed some broken bonds with my ‘19’ family, made a small number of friends halfway across the globe and otherwise having a jolly good time on PSN with said friends, as well as chilling with another brother of bonds.

And to close, to every one of my friends out there with a PSP, please pick up a not-too-old game called Phantasy Star Portable 2 and join us, The Grey Army, online.

With that, adieu to y’all.

P.S.: This is finally published on 17th