the first exam of the beginners level french (i a) got over in the morning. stayed up till about 1 am last night mugging up conjugations of french verbs. everything revolves around verbs (the centre of everything). and in french, there are regular and irregular verbs. though i wonder why, since all of them seem irregular to me! (with million apologies to all the french people). then there are accents, which apparently serve no purpose. and the ending of most words are not pronounced. and if you forget one little circumflex, beware, it might change what you are saying altogether. for example, you might want to say, ‘can i have a glass of water’ and actually be saying, ‘my grandmother gave birth to twins.’ if anyone knows how to complicate a language, it is the french! i realised how much i had taken for granted the basic rules of grammar over the years. i mean, do you think of past participles, conditional tenses, possessive adjectives when constructing a sentence? uhhh… but the only way to …

Yesterday… A few priceless ones, all in the space of a day made it really memorable… And made me thankful for the sweetest friends I have. Venkat hunted me down through Ryze (or was it the other way round?!) and discovered we work in the same office. He lent me his French text books so I could steal his notes and always be ahead of assignments that were scribbled in already. Of course, there were a lot of incorrect answers, but Venkat swears that he passed with flying colours, despite the numerous boo boos! Yesterday, a one hour conversation over coffee with him and I was constantly wiping away my tears – of laughter. He always manages to keep me in splits with his deadpan expressions and totally off the cuff one-liners. And he never passes up an opportunity to pop-up a praise or two about himself. Apparently, a result his modest upbringing and good values instilled in him since childhood. Of course, the fact that he is still in that ‘childhood’ might be the …