Sunshine

It all takes one day of sunshine to make people sick here. Well we believe that if the weather changes really quickly, say it rains today and it becomes hot tomorrow, and it rains again the day after tomorrow, it's a perfect recipe to fall sick. So it was pretty sunny on Monday after a month of rain. And on Tuesday it was just cloudy (and not raining) and today it was drizzling. My dad and I were feeling kinda feverish just now. Perhaps this is the reason why, or maybe we just have an infection.

I spent three years of my life studying biomedical science and one of the "goals" I had before entering this course was to break the beliefs we have here that involve sickness. Like the term "masuk angin", which literally translates to enter wind, or wind entering the stomach, which is a condition when you feel bloated, nauseatic and have headaches etc, usually after you spent some time outside in the wind. I want to know what causes all of these, and I haven't! Should have made it my FYP.

And I'll name it "The Investigation of "Masuk Angin" Syndrome"

I successfully did a study though, to how garlic can cure pimples and boils. Cause here that's what we do, use garlic on pimples and boils to cure it. And we (Kai Xuan, Candy and I) did prove it back in year one in our microbiology group project! So cool. This is a reason why I love science heh.

There are a lot of taboos and beliefs we have here which I'm always interested to investigate. Like how we shouldn't take a shower after exercising (which is what I always do when I was in Singapore), or how we should avoid aircon and winds when we are sweating (another thing I always do). And one of the most unfathomable one is that eating too much eggs will give you boils. I actually did a research on this and came with nothing. I even found a site where it suggests applying egg yolk on boils as remedy.

I often realise how a lot of things are much of a contradiction here and when I was in Singapore.The weird thing is that when I do all of these "taboos" in Singapore, I don't necessarily feel that they are taboos just because I'm not back at home. But when I am back here, I always take these precautions seriously. Because somehow being back at home seems to increase the chance of these situations to really happen by 200%. Perhaps it's the home-cebo effect, I would call it.

Ah well, there are lots of mysteries we have in life.