What a week!

Well, the title says it all. The reason that I have been MIA here for so long is that while it may be Chinese New Year in Singapore, there is NO cny holiday here and TONS of assignments to do and hand in. This week I have written at least 3 papers and completed my second photojourn assignment called "Breaking the Ice" in which we have to go around and talk to ten people and take their portraits and write a caption for each person. I basically stared at the computer screen for 6 hours before I finally managed to do a decent job of it. And then trying to get the hugeass photo printer to print out a good quality print of my assignment is no joke. I think Fundamentals of Photojournalism should be retitled as "Techniques in Photojournalism", since there is nothing fundamental about having to configure you laptop to the Epson 4000 or 4800 photo printer drivers. To cut the long story short, it's not a bed of roses for me here.

The other few highlights of the week included a visit by Harry Rosenfeld, the Watergate Metropolitan editor of The Washington Post who hired Bob Woodward and assigned the Watergate story to Wooward and Carl Berstein. He's an old man now, but still pretty sharp as to what he wanted to say concerning the United States govenrnment and the journalism industry in the US.



Another highlight is I had another guest speaker for my photojournalism class, Leah Gallo. Leah is a photojournalism masters student who had the talent and luck to work as a set photographer for the latest Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie Sweeney Todd: the demon barber of Fleet Street. You may have seen this picture of Leah's on many promotional magazine pages.

Taken from: http://www.allmegastar.com/photo/2007_sweeney_todd_001.html

Now you see why I said that the J-sch here is like the White House of the jounalism industry around the world. The most exciting things happens right here. Next week, we will see the start of the Pictures of the Year Award judging here.

Moving on, we watched an interactive play during our cross-cultural journalism class on stereotyping different races on Thursday and it was very interesting as the audience got to ask questions and even take part in the play. If only every lecture in CS could be like this. But then again, as Eveline said, it wouldn't have been so successful as there wouldn't be many people asking questions or volunteering to take part in the play.

One last announcement to make. I will be heading to New York the Big Apple during my spring break in late March with a few of the international students here. So wheee, something to look forward to at last!

Here are the pictures of the week, taken during an unusually warm day (25 degrees c throughout) on Tuesday.