Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?

For the first time in about five years I am going to be spending New Year's Eve at home. I have absolutely no plans whatsoever, and I plan on sitting up and watching re-runs of my favourite cartoon show and eating ice-cream all evening. Then I am possibly going to get dragged out to watch fireworks at night. I suppose this is not what most 22 year olds are supposed to enjoy doing, but what could possibly be a better way to start the year? I am surprisingly looking forward to this plan muchly.

As mentioned before, I have never been too fond of the arrival of another new year because I always feel the pressure to do better than I did in the previous year. Also, as you get older I have found that this gets harder to do. However, I do think I will survive for another year, maybe with a little bit (or a lot of) of whining ahead.

I hope everyone else has managed to do something substantial this year; I would like to think that I have! I do know a lot more than I knew at this exact time last year, and that sufficiently satisfies me. I have never been good with resolutions, so I am going to steer clear of them. World peace can wait for a couple of more years, for now. I don't have any agenda for the year; I am going to try to worry less about things and see how that works out for me. From my relatively brief life experience I have learned that things mostly work out for the best at the end of it all.

I am going to approach the new year with high spirits (the exams I have next week can be damned) and I hope that the year goes well for everyone else as well.

And now, bring on the ice-cream!

The first noël, the angels did sing...

Milan under snowfall

Its Christmas and my favourite time of the year, which is weird because I have never once celebrated Christmas in my entire life; being a good, little convent educated school girl that I am, I can't help love this season as much as I do. I am one of those people that everyone gets sick of because I start listening to Christmas music since early December and have an embarrassing amount of it on my iTunes. This is my first Christmas away from Milan. I have completely missed the snow storm over Europe last week and I can't help but be a bit sad about this because snow in Milan is quite rare. I really love it when it snows, the city seems so beautiful even if it does mean suspension of all means of transportation within the city and mushy sludge all over the roads, in addition to the freezing temperatures. However, I shouldn't really be discussing the weather because it has been 25°C in the place where I spent most of of time last week and I am now sporting an awful tan.

I haven't been away for a vacation with my family for almost two years now, so I have been looking forward to the mini-trip we had around South East Asia last week. I just got back to Hong Kong this morning actually. Travelling with my parents is one of those things that is exhaustive and so much fun at the same time, and I am in much need of sleep. I will write more about the trip later on, but for now I just wanted to wish everyone happy holidays and a merry christmas!

As we go on, we remember, all the times we had together...

Last weekend was my graduation ceremony. I was really not looking forward to it because university graduation is one of those days that you just have to spend with your family, and mine currently lives a continent away and could obviously not make it. So, I was all whiny about it for the last month and was generally not looking forward to it, but it ended up being such a great day and I had a good time. This is because my friends are the coolest people in the world who not only sat through the boring ceremony, but also spent the rest of the day hanging out with me. I really just don't deserve to have such awesome people in my life, and I should be nicer to them!

Talking about my family, I am seeing them next week! I can't wait to see them and get back to Hong Kong again. I haven't seen them for three whole months, and I know this isn't a big deal to most people, but I have always been a clingy person who is overly attached to her mum and dad. I blame it on the fact that I am an only child and HK is generally very awesome. This also means that I have to pack this weekend and have so much to do that the best thing for me to do right now is to just avoid thinking about it. Avoidance is the best solution to your problems! Please, do not take my advice, as you can see, I am awful at it!

I am also very excited because I am probably going on a family vacation to Vietnam and Cambodia sometime over Christmas. There shall be more information on this when my dates and tickets are fixed, but traveling in South East Asia has been like a dream for me ever since I was thirteen and read The Beach (yes, go ahead and make fun of me, I am beyond all caring because I know how pathetic my teenage taste in most things was).

But I shall not think about vacations and fun for now! I have a week before I leave and too much to finish in this short period. I am full till the brim with work and my week consists of me traveling back and forth from uni. If I am feel particularly adventurous and hungry, I might venture into the supermarket, but this has been the extent of my travel for the last couple of weeks. In addition to this, the highlight of my week, which was my Korean drama series, has come to an end, and now I literally have nothing in life to look forward to. There, that is a paragraph of Pan whining, since I haven't been doing it for a while on here now!

I have been listening to 80's music all day long and have spent the day making an epic, generally awesome playlist on my itunes. This has also been my only accomplishment for the day, apart from realizing that I know the lyrics to Total Eclipse of the Heart creepily accurately without even consciously ever trying to memorize them.

I love how this post has deteriorated to a random collection of paragraphs with absolutely no link between them, but it is almost half past one at night and its been a long day, so I am unable to be coherent.