Altruistic Joy: Yui Chi's B'day and Our Last Dinner

Today we celebrated Yui Chi's 25th birthday. He doesn't like to be reminded of his age, but we still purposely put 25 Danish flags on his birthday cake. :) It is our last dinner together as a container family because Artur, our Polish friend, will leave tomorrow for Poland. We are all very sad at the thought of parting. I can still remember the first day I moved into Campus Village on 25th August 2008 and Artur was the first guy who greeted us and invited us to join him and his buddies to the supermarket. His help and advice helped us greatly in assimilation. I will never forget this friend. I wish him all the best in his life and I hope that we will meet again someday in our life, whether in Poland or in Singapore or anywhere else in the world.

When my exam ends on 17th Dec, Jon and myself will also leave for our trip to Stockholm, Estonia and the rest of Scandinavia, and when we come back, all would have left Denmark, except Bryan who will be on exchange for 1 year here. It is really sad that time pass so fast and now we have to part. We are really close as a family compared to other containers because we travelled together, talked to each other almost everyday about anything under the sun. Sarah is the only friend in the container who never once joined us for dinner. I've lost count on the number of dinners we had together already. We will never know when in life we will all meet again, but we did made an agreement that we should, one day, all of us meet somewhere in the world, bringing our husband/wife/children in the future. Ahh.... I will miss each one of my container friends, they are just like my family members in Denmark.

Yesterday, we had a formal farewell dinner for Artur with his other friends. His friend, Cengiz left me with the deepest impression. He is Danish by citizenship, but Turkish by origin. He came to our container a couple of times to prepare dinner for his buddy group, and I interacted with him quite a bit. He's a very helpful, mature, gentlemanly and friendly guy. He's always symphathetic to all his friends who shared their problems with him. He graduated with a phD from DTU and now he is working and he lives in Helsingborg (Sweden). Even so, he comes back to DTU often to help and befriend exchange students. For this, I give him my utmost respect.

Just now, Lucia also asked me to go for a meal together with Jon because we will not see each other again after I left for my trip because she will go back to Spain and come back to Denmark only maybe in Febraury when we have already returned to Singapore. There is a Chinese saying which my dad used to use to console me which goes like this, "Shi4 Shang4 mei2 you3 bu4 san4 de4 yan4 xi2", which means there is no gathering in this world that will not end in parting (forgive me for my bad translation because it is harder to translate Chinese sayings). This also reminds me of the Buddhist teachings on Impermanance. All compounded things are meant to decay, strive hard for spiritual happiness, rather than worldly ones.

Anyway, here are the photos for the 2 dinners (Artur's farewell and Yui Chi's birthday). I baked the cake (banana cake) for Yui Chi's birthday. It was my first time and I'm relieved that it turn out well and good. :)