Volcanic Ashes in Iceland disrupting air traffic

Recently, I have been reading the newspapers and I was shocked when I heard a huge volcano had erupted in Iceland and caused Air traffic to be disrupted for a long time.

An enormous ash cloud from a remote Icelandic volcano caused the biggest flight disruption since the 2001 as it drifted over northern Europe and stranded travelers on six continents. According to officials, it could take days for the skies to become safe again in one of aviation's most congested areas.

The cloud, floating kilometers above Earth were capable of knocking out jet engines and wrecked travel plans for tens of thousands of people, from tourists and business travelers to politicians and royals.

Non-emergency flights in Britain were canceled, and most stayed grounded until at least midday Friday. Authorities in Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Belgium also closed their air space. France shut down 24 airports and Germany's Berlin and Hamburg were shut and several flights out of the U.S. had to double back.

This has caused caused airlines direct losses of more than one billion euros. The ash cloud also caused a lot of people to be stranded in other countries.

I feel that man is overly reliant on nature to provide for his needs. This can be shown by the fact that once a volcano erupts, man is helpless and have to be stranded in other countries and suffer losses.

Project's Day Prelims

Today was the project's day preliminary round. In case any of you do not know, project's day is an annual event held in my school. This competition is meant to hone our skills as researchers. It also judges us on several rounds of oral presentations as well as a web-based report. We have 4 rounds of judging every year. First, we have the prelims which is usually held in April, the semi-finals which is held in July, the finals in August and the grand finals in September. Last year, I joined a very good group, which meant I passed prelims and semi-finals without any problems and I got an 'A' grade in the end, which was very impressive for a Secondary 1 student. This year, however, i formed my own group and gathered 3 friends to make a 4 men team. We worked during the March holidays and weekends and our mentor guided us along pretty well, thus we had quite a good presentation to show during the prelims. We were actually supposed to present before recess. However, due to some rearrangement of groups, we became one of the middle few after recess. As we walked down the stairs to start our presentation, my heart was beating like a trip-hammer. I swallowed my saliva and started presenting. We did pretty well and the judges had some questions. However, we already prepared a list of questions we predicted the judges would ask and we had the answers as well. Our predictions did not fail us and we got pass the Question-and-Answer segment safely. My only hope for now is that we could get into semi-finals and the judges have good comments about us. Hopefully it will come through.

Birthday

Hi all, today was my birthday! :) Although many people think that a birthday is a event to be celebrated on a grand scale, i beg to differ. I feel that birthdays are just the same as any other day and we still have to do work and run errands. If we just relax and have a good time and neglect our work on our birthday, we will be scolded by teachers on the next day for not doing our work. Thus, contrary to other's opinion, I feel that we should carry on living our normal lives on our birthday. In the early years of my life, my parents would buy a cake and call our relatives and celebrate my birthday like its the Lunar New Year. After that, when i could choose how to celebrate my birthday, I chose to downgrade and just buy a cake and celebrate with my family. This year, I did something totally different. I did not even bother to buy a birthday cake, which means i did not even bother celebrating my birthday. However, it was a different story in school. My whole class wished my happy birthday and every lesson and kept on embarrassing me. After school, i was also "attacked" by my classmate when i was rehearsing the presentation for my project with my friends. Luckily, I managed to "defeat" him and i could carry on with my rehearsal.

On the whole, I feel that my birthday this year is very different from previous years in many ways.

Brisbane trip - 2nd day

Today was basically just us and the host. So in the morning, we ate some cereal for breakfast. I did not really like it as it was flavourless, unlike the ones in Singapore. So, after breakfast, my host asked us if we wanted to go shopping or to the countryside. Since the city would be similar to Singapore, my friend and I opted for the countryside. We took a one-and-a-half-hour ride to Toowoomba. During the ride, I manage to finish reading a book. :) Once we reached Toowoomba, it was freezing due to the rain and i immediately regretted not bringing a jacket there. Firstly, we attempted to try to find our host's friend's house, but we failed. Then, we said that we were hungry and the host brought us to a old english pub to have our meals. I ordered the chicken kier. It was wonderful and one of the best foods I have ever tasted. When I sliced open the chicken, butter with garlic flowed out like a river. The butter was melted and the chicken was hollowed out in the middle to let the butter have space. At first, I thought that butter was lemon sauce because I never imagined that butter would be like this. I took a bite and it turned out to be very nice. The fries were also very crispy, alot better than Singapore's. After lunch, we went to play snooker while we waited for the rain to stop. I lost to the host due to my inexperience. :P After a nice lunch, we went home because we had to attend church at 4.30pm. The church had a live band playing christian tunes and I was very impressed by it. We had fruit salad for dinner and I was left hungry for the night. :(

Brisbane

As you all know, I had to go the Brisbane for an exchange programme. We reached Brisbane at about 7.30 am. After that, we went to collect out luggage, but there was some problem with the baggae system and our luggage did'nt move. After like 15 minutes, the luggage moved and I was able to collect my luggage(19.8 kg). Then we went out to meet some of our hosts. The teachers Mr G. and Mrs Mills were all very friendly and the students were very initiative as well. After leaving the airport, we went to this place called Mount Cootha. We were supposed to be able to see the whole of Brisbane from there, but unfortunately, it was raining so we had to hide in the souveinir shop until the rain stopped. I also found out that the Australian stuff were very expensive and so, I did not buy any souveinirs. My apologies. So we went out once the rain stopped, but there was a mist so we could not really see anything. After that, we went on a boat ride called city sights. It was supposed to bring us around the city and the interesting sights. But, it was very boring and I fell asleep (I was not the only one). After the bus ride, we went on a boat ride and it was very nice. The wind was blowing very fast and when it starting raining, the raindrops were like machine gun bullets. After the boat ride, we went for lunch. After lunch, we met our respective hosts and went to the host's house. It was a 2-to-1 homestay, so i played with my laptop and my friend read his book. We had lamp roast for dinner and it was very nice. :D