School Starts, and some other stuff. =)

I've been bugged to put up an entry, haha, so here it is. By the way people, my room's Internet connection has been really bad, so if you see me online then I suddenly disappear, or if you hardly see me at all, understand understood lah ah.

First week of school was ok, though the subjects are a bit heavy. You see, in UvA (Universiteit Van Amsterdam), for my faculty at least, each semester comprises of 2 blocks, each block of 7 school weeks. You take different modules for each block. So basically, what we learn in NUS for 13 weeks they try to do it in 7. Haha. Oh well. I guess I have to study much harder than I did in NUS.

I met a Malaysian guy (thank God!) at school, who's doing 1 module with me. He's a masters student here. I never imagined I would actually speak Malay to anyone in Amsterdam, but hey, I sure am not complaining.=) Been hanging out with him, a couple of times noow, and will continue to do so. Safe to say, he'll be my best friend for the next 5 months.

And oh, just wanted to mention about the friday prayers here. The guys would relate better to this. Here, the sermon/khutbah is very different. Haha. The imam is very fiery, spirited; I assure you, nobody, I mean nobody, sleeps during the khutbah. I think imams in Singapore should be more lke this; but you can't really blame them too when the khutbahs are about "masyarakat majmuk" every other week. Haha.

And here, there is no problem of getting people to 'rapatkan saf'. It's shoulder to shoulder, feet to feet, something that sadly, I hardly encounter in Singapore. Another good practice here is that for the sloat jenazah after the friday prayers, no one leaves the mosque, everybody participates in the solat jenazah. The safs for the solat jenazah are also in order, people do not move in front to cover the spaces that are used for rukuk and sujud in our normal prayers. Acttually, I'm not sure why we do that in Singapore, it only leads to distorted safs. Perhaps Rizhan would like to enlighten us whether that's just a cultural practice or it really has Islamic roots.

But what I am most impressed by in the mosques here, is that everytime The Prophet's name is mentioned, during or outside of the khutbah, the whole mosque will go 'sallallahu alaihi wasalam'. It really is a good practice, which we all should try to incorporate in our conversations.

Anyway I've gotten a bicycle, which makes life much easier. Now I'm on the way to feeling like I'm an Amsterdammer. Haha.

Just a note, thanks to Mas'uud and Shaza; you know for what. It is impossible that Allah will not repay kindness with kindness, so just await for some (more) good things in your lives.