Week 3 of Autumn Term

Contemporary class started today! The teacher went really fast and expected you to know basic ballet. He was like do this, then go to first position, then second position, blablabla. I was like…I don’t even know what those positions are. And I kept falling out of the positions cause I wasn’t used to it haha, but it was really hard to keep up. I wish I had space in my room to practice, but I barely remember the technique part of the routines, so I guess I’ll just see how it goes next class.

We had another potluck with the international people and sooo many people showed up with dishes such as philly cheesesteak, Chinese stir fry, Spanish omelette, Japanese rice balls, tiramisu, and even bubble tea! Eating all of that made me so happy LOL.

I also went to Voom Ka street dance and it was so intense as well! I missed the taster and first session, so they pretty much already learned 30 seconds of it. She went over 30 seconds of choreography (about 6x8 counts) once, and then watched us do it. I was so confused haha, I think I looked retarded because I couldn’t keep up. I guess it’s time to learn it on my own to show them I’m not that lame next time hehe.

Leeds Castle

This was such a fail day in terms of transportation, but I feel like it’s the pattern whenever Susana and I travel somewhere. We are such bad luck; I bet the whole terrorist thing in Europe is because of us too…haha jk.

Leeds castle is one of the prettiest castles in Europe, so we thought we should go. The drive there would have been 1hr30min, however with public transportation (bus), it took us 4 hours to get there and 3 bus changes. We went from Brighton à Tunbridge Wells à Maidstone à Castle. It was a really nice day when we got there, the park where the castle was at was gorgeous. We visited the inside of the castle, which was really modern.

The castle was built in 1119 but went under many reconstructions and add-ons. Lady Baillie was the last owner of this place. Originally from America, she bought the castle 1926 for roughly 14million pounds (if you convert it to our times, and if I remember correctly). This is so cheap for a gigantic castle! However, the most money she spent is renovating everything. When she died, she left the castle to the Leeds Castle Foundation, where the castle will be preserved and used for the public. During her stay, she enjoyed collecting all different kinds of birds, her favourite was the black swan, so now it is a simple of Leeds Castle.

There was also a maze next to the castle, it was really fun. Since I’ve never been in those mazes before, it felt like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, that last event (sorry I’m a nerd). Nonetheless, it was really cool, and it took us forever compared to other people. I swear we went through every single path before we found the right one.

On our way back is where our good luck ran out. The last bus that was supposed to arrive at 5:30pm actually didn’t show up due to reasons unknown. We walked to the nearest hotel and asked for another bus that drove us into Maidstone, which luckily came an hour later. So we rode that to Maidstone and was going to catch the 7:10pm bus to Tunbridge. And…that bus didn’t show up as well. We waited till about 8:20pm to catch the bus to Tunbridge. When we arrived at Tunbridge it was already 9:30pm and no buses were running to Brighton at that time. Instead, we had to walk to the nearest train station and take the train back. Because it was already about 10pm, a lot of trains didn’t run anymore. We ended up taking many trains from Tunbridge à Tonbridge à Some city I forgot à Gatwick Airport à Brighton. It was so lame because Tunbridge is only 40min drive and the train took us 2 hours! We pretty much went all the way up to almost London and all the way back down again to Brighton. We made it home at midnight after riding the bus from Brighton to Sussex. The trip back took us 7 hours when it was just a 1hr30min drive.

Phew! So much public transportation in one day! And so expensive too…

Sunday was an event I’ve been really excited to participate in: Brighton zombie flash mob. It is one of those things you see on youtube where random people start dancing the same dance in the middle of a congested subway or street.

We went to Concord 2 to learn the dance, it was to Thriller and the theme was zombie. All the moves were so funny and easy to coordinate. We will be performing it on October 30 in front of the pier where there will be lots of innocent people enjoying their weekend (hopefully). Then, the three professionals will break into the dance, followed by the rest of us (I’m guessing around 200). This should be so much fun!

After this, we went to play badminton, and after that headed to a pub to eat a burger. We craved meat that day is why we had to go out haha. Susana and I both had a “Texan Chili Burger” and it was pretty good! The meat was slightly over cooked, but we were so hungry it didn’t matter.

I guess that’s pretty much what happened that weekend. Oh, and I also finished physics hw really fast this time, improvement!

Week 2 of Autumn term

Physics, physics, physics, need I say more?

Oh yeah, I went on a pub crawl with the fencing club on Wednesday. The theme for the night was Zorro. I prepped for it with some people the night before since I’ve never seen the movie. We first thought it’d be weird if we were the only ones dressed up, but EVERYONE was. It is like Halloween here every Wednesday. There was a cool group dressed up as characters from Mario Kart, their outfits were so creative! We hit 3 pubs and I had some really interesting drinks haha, they were all good and pretty cheap! Wednesdays here are like Thursdays, most people don’t have class the next day so they go out and it’s considered ‘student night’ so a lot of the entrance fees/drinks were cheap. I saw some crazy things with certain people, and it was a pretty good time.

Saturday we went to eat a Chinese buffet. It was sooo good and only 6.5 pounds/person. We pretty much ate to the point where we couldn’t walk and our stomachs hurt. We didn’t even eat dinner that night haha. There was almost everything there, even the "Peking" roast duck with wrap, cucumber, onion, and sauce. There was also various Asian curry with nan and the dessert section was amazing!

Sunday we went around the North Laines to try to buy a Halloween costume. Because that failed, we ended up eating cheap and delicious Japanese food and finishing it off with ice cream (mine was hazelnut flavored and it tasted like Nutella (without the chocolate)) There was also baked bean flavor, haha so interesting!

Saturday - London Trip

Get ready for a long and semi-eventful day. Susana and I thought we bought train tickets for 1 pound to London that left at 7am. However, we didn’t read the ticket and it actually meant coach. When we got to the train station, we waited until there was about 15 minutes to go. When we saw that our “train” time wasn’t on there, we went to ask somebody about it. They told us it meant coach, and the station was about 1 mile away. We had 15 minutes, so we walked as fast as we could and made it right on the dot. It was so tiring! The bus was pretty comfy; it actually had leather seats haha. After 2 hours, we made it to Victoria Station and headed to China Town by metro. It was about 10am and everything was closed! Our original plan was to eat dimsum but since the places all opened at 11am, we went to a small breakfast place and I had a wonton soup. It felt so good to finally eat restaurant Chinese food (although I must say the filing was definitely not as good as the ones my mom makes haha). I then bought some Asian pastries and we headed to a medical museum called: Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. This place was amazing. Admission was free and inside was two stories full of collections of different bones, organs, surgical tools, etc of all different kinds of animals/humans ranging from as early as the 1800s to now. Everything was really cool, and I definitely prefer these kinds of museums over the typical European art ones. We spent about 4 hours in there and headed to our afternoon tea, which started at 3pm.

The tea place was really cute, each person paid 18 pounds and they served us a three layer platter of sandwiches, scones, cupcakes, brownies, cookies, etc. And of course, we had tea. We basically stuffed our faces with as much as we could to get our money’s worth. There was also one free refill of food, so we did that and took the rest home haha (it’s actually still sitting in the fridge right now…) We stayed there for about 2 hours. I wish we had these kinds of places in America, to just sit, drink tea, and chat. It felt really relaxing.

(Tea pics are on Susana's camera, so this is pretty much what it looked like..but prettier)

After that, we walked along Regent Street and then into China Town again. Regent Street is kind of like a Times Square, with the lights, shops, and people. In addition, China Town at night was so pretty! There were lanterns that hung down every street and lots and lots of non-Asian people. It was also really clean. I loved it. We went to a Chinese grocery shop, where everything was so much cheaper than the markets here, and I bought tofu lol.

Our last stop of the day was platform 9 ¾ which was in King’s Cross. We spent forever trying to find it because it was at the very end of platform 8, tucked in a corner. There were about 3 groups of tourists taking endless pictures, so we grabbed the spots and took a few pictures ourselves. I know it’s kinda lame, but it was something I had to do while in London haha, even if it cost a subway ride there and back.

We then rode the bus from Victoria Station back and got back around midnight. And this was our 18 hour Saturday trip to London.

Cheers

October 1-3

There was a huge problem with my classes.

1) 1. I didn’t get into the two BCS electives that I wanted.

2) 2. Physics got cancelled

What am I supposed to do? I only came here because they offered Physics. If Rochester won’t accept this other class that I’m in as Physics then I pretty much have to take 113 and 114 my senior year or during the summer and that is going to ruin my life and maybe future plans.

Everything here is so disorganized. I changed rooms the first day I moved in and when they gave me the key, the girl did not change my tenancy agreement and so they thought I still lived in my old room. Because move in day was when we were in Spain, they moved all of Susana’s stuff to her old room as well and another random girl in her room. Luckily, my room they remembered that they moved me so they moved the girl that’s supposed to be in my room into my old room (if that even makes sense). I’m just a bit sad that nothing worked out here in terms of classes. If I knew this was going to happen, I would have never studied at this school in the first place.

The courses I’m taking are: Principles of Neurobiology, Reading Faces, Data Acquisition and Analysis (“Physics lab” hopefully), and Kinematics & Dynamics (This will be my Physics 113 if our Physics department is nice enough).

Hopefully everything will be resolved soon!

Now onto the good news: I got into the badminton club team. Yeah, weird right? Never would I have imagined that happening. They have 12 spots each year for girls and this year I think they were accepting three more. There were these two girls who were amazing; they played badminton for the county. I, on the other hand, lost every single game I played that day during “tryouts” (which I had no idea at the time). It just happened that they needed a 12^th member and everyone else wasn’t as good so I got the spot. I start training on Monday and going to games with them (I hope I’m not playing though). It’s a bit embarrassing to play in front of them because they are ten times better than me and it’s very noticeable. Hopefully with the training I’ll get better and we’ll see what happens!

Another club I tried was trampolining. It was so much different than I thought! The trampolines are Olympic size and a lot bouncier and easier to lose your balance than the round ones everyone played on when they were little. I learned how to keep my body and legs straight when jumping and move my arms up and down. It was so much fun! Hopefully if I continue I’ll be able to do a flip and make it look professional haha.

Autumn term week 1

I only have 1 class a day and no class on Wednesdays for this week. It’s a bit weird because the schedule changes from week to week so there is a timetable where you can keep track of everything.

The physics problem got sorted out. I just have to take the 113 final at the end of this semester and if I pass then the credit will transfer as 113 if I don’t pass it’ll be 100. It was a bit hard to remember everything I learned from high school because she went through the beginning chapters so fast, I was lost already haha. My class is pretty much all “freshers” so they just finished taking physics. I guess I gotta read the textbook and do a little refreshing.

Reading Faces is exactly like BCS. The teacher is my advisor and she’s really nice. We learned processing of faces today which was really interesting because she went a lot more in depth than what I have learned in Rochester. Hopefully we’ll move on to more psychology things as well so I can read emotions on people’s faces, like Lie to Me haha.

I went to poker club with a friend on Tuesday not knowing that it was a tournament. I knew I was going to lose, but hey, 5 pounds for entertainment. There were a little more than 50 people sitting at 8 tables. At first it was a bit intimidating because I didn’t even know what chips were what and how to deal. After I got the hang of it, I won 2 hands. It sucks because I never got an amazing hand. I won with the most random hands that I should’ve folded. The strategy for poker tournaments vs. games is so different! It was hard to grasp when to fold or not because your chips were limited and you can’t cash out. I was never up in chips, just always had what I started with. I think I played a little on the safe side, but I got to the final 12 and lost haha. Now that I think of it, it was such a rush. I can’t believe the school lets people gamble, US would have major problems with that. Maybe I’ll try it again, but I feel like I’m just throwing 5 pounds away because there’s no way I can win.

Show choir was interesting. I’ve never been in a singing club/group in my life so I’ve never actually sung a scale or warm up my voice. I placed myself in alto, but I feel like I’m right in between. It sucks though because I can’t harmonize, sooo hard! And that’s like all altos do. It’s funny because before this I didn’t even know what alto, soprano, and whatever the other two were, but now I can differentiate between them. We sang “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” and “Seasons of Love”, it was lots of fun!

Six Days in Spain

A very relaxing and fun vacation with Susana, Laura, Nyugen, and Hyeji.

Uno

After catching a 5am train to London Gatwick, we boarded an EasyJet plane to Madrid early in the morning.

After we got off, we went down the list of things to eat which Cristina gave us since she’s from Madrid. We stopped by a local shop that had cocido madrilèno. “A traiditonal chickpea-based stew from Madrid, Spain. Prepared with vegetables, potatoes, and meat.” It is also the national dish of Spain. We also had tortillas de patatas which was a potato omelet. The cocido was just ok, but the omelet was delicious, as you will see later on.

Our hotel in Madrid was a lot better than I thought. It was pretty much a small apartment and the five of us stayed for 2 nights. It had these crazy small elevators that we could barely fit in. We were situated in the downtown area so there was a lot to do. The streets were always packed (even at 6am) and the subway system made it easy to travel everywhere.

After dropping off our stuff, Nyugen felt sick so the four of us went to a big park in Madrid and rode the cable car up to the top. We chilled at the park, took some random pictures, and I drank an horchata! That thing is pretty amazing. I didn’t know what it was at the time but now that I’m googling it, but the definition of it is: “Horchata is the name of several kinds of traditional beverage, made of ground almonds, sesame seeds, rice, barely, or tigernuts. Nonetheless, it was delicious.

At night, we walked around many beautiful plazas trying to find a restaurant called Lateral. This tapas restaurant was very busy and in the Spanish culture, people don’t eat dinner until around 9pm. We got there around 8pm so we got a seat after 15-20 minute wait. We ordered many tapas (pics below):

Most were very yummy but I wasn’t used to their jamon or salmon as much.

We then went back and changed to go to a club called Kapital. Let me tell you, this is probably the best club I will ever go to in my life. The place had 7 stories. The first floor had a huge stage where their hired dancers (who looked very funny) would dance, a big dance floor with poles, and a giant lounge to sit and chat. The second floor was a different type of music, the third was a karaoke bar, the fourth was R&B music, the fifth was something else, sixth was something I forgot, and the seventh had no dance floor, just a place to eat and drink. Honestly, at first I was a bit skeptic about going because it was 15 euros. However, it came with 2 free drinks that were 9 euros at the bar. The drinks they make here are crazy, I felt it after one drink. They would pour half the cup with alcohol and the rest with something else, and then fill about 20% with actual non-alcoholic mixers. This is so different compared to what I’m used to in Brighton where the drinks are around 3 euros and they barely put anything in it.

The clubs in Madrid open at midnight and end at 6am. Normally, people don’t show up until 2am. I love their culture. Hyeji, Susana, and I had a blast floor-hopping and we stayed until about 5am, and then left. Actually, if it wasn’t for me, the two of them would’ve stayed until it closed. Such party animals!

We met a lot of cool people there and I don’t think I will ever go to a club like this in my life because US clubs all suck compared to this. Yes, even the ones in Vegas and Miami can’t compare (not that I’ve been to them). While we were walking back around 6am, everyone was on the streets. It was more filled up than 6pm which is pretty amazing.

What an amazing first day in Madrid!

Dos

We planned to wake up at noon, but that failed obviously. Instead, we got up at 3pm and left for Retiro Park. It was a pretty modern park with some random statues that I don’t know the history of. Laura, Susana, and I rented a boat for 5 euros for an hour to row in a small lake.

We then walked across Sol (center of the city) and ate calamari sandwiches for lunch. Because I’m not a big fan of calamari in general, it was just okay. But I’m sure it would’ve been good if it liked it in the first place.

After our stomaches were full, we headed towards a famous shop called San Gines Churreria in Plaza Mayor where we had chocolate con churro. You can never eat too much! It was SO DELICIOUS. The dark chocolate they put in a cup and you dip the churros in it. It pretty much just melted in your mouth. I loved it.

Then as the sun’s about to set, we hit the Royal Palace and Aludema Cathedral. We sat there and watched the sunset but it wasn’t as spectacular as New Mexico. The sky was yellow instead of pink and purple, I found that really weird.

Because we walked so much that day, we called it a night.

Tres

After we checked out of our hotel early in the morning, we headed towards the spa and massage. Well, it didn’t happen. That day the spa over flooded and since we had to catch a flight, we couldn’t reschedule. It was really sad because I was looking forward to my first real massage!

Instead, we chilled at a café, ate some more tortilla de patatas, and headed to the airport towards Barcelona.

Upon arrival, it was so easy to tell the difference between these two cultures. Madrid had more actual Spanish people while Barcelona had a lot more diversity. Barcelona also spoke Catalan, which was very very hard to understand. Luckily, most people spoke English.

Our hostel/hotel was situated right above Montjuic. It was all of our first experience in a hostel. However, because there were five of us, we pretty much got the whole room. All we had to do was share the bathroom with the other rooms, which didn’t turn out that bad. The place was cleaner than my dorm at Sussex, which is really sad haha.

I had an amazing mango and milk smoothie for lunch and we headed towards a flamenco show, which was in the city center.

While we were walking around, we came across this awesome food market. It had so many different things, from meats to vegetables to street food. It was closing, so they offered Susana and I three fresh fruit juice (they had like every fruit I could think of) and two small containers of already cut fruit for less than 2 euros!

We took that, then decided to head to dinner and catch a later showing of flamenco. At first, we wanted to eat paella, but because only two of us were hungry, the waiter kicked us out so we went to a small café and had crepes instead. At least he saved us money haha.

The flamenco was in a small room and it had people playing guitar in the background while a woman and a man did all sorts of cool things. I can’t really explain it but it was a very fast paced flamenco and much better than the youtube videos I saw before. The show lasted 30minutes.

It was getting late, so we explored the area around our hostel. It was pretty much an Asian town. Our hostel owner is Korean and all the restaurants nearby were Chinese. Actually, this is how we got around Barcelona, by speaking Chinese. There were so many of them everywhere! It was much easier to understand than Catalan Spanish haha. We ate some tapas for midnight snacks at a Chinese place. So I guess it was Chinese-Spanish style food?

Cuatro

We woke up as early as we could and headed towards Montjuic. It had 7 museums, the 1992 Olympic Park, and a castle. It was kind of cool because the first part of our walk consisted of escalators that took us up the small mountain. But after reaching the museum, it was all walking from there. We went to the Olympic park and got lost climbing to the other side of the mountain for the castle. This was pretty much the start of 1-2 ice cream treats every day.

At night, we went to eat the long awaited paella. We went to a pretty fancy placed called La Taverna. It was SO AMAZING. The paella was a lot better than I expected (and I expected a lot from it). The seasoning was just perfect. We ordered a seafood one and a squid ink one. I was being so adventurous that I ate all these random seafood that I never do back in the states haha. The squid ink had a very interesting taste but was too salty. That was the only setback, we got really thirsty afterwards. All in all, this was my favorite meal in all of Spain, which I guess is why they have it at every restaurants and it’s a famous dish. We spent about 18 euros each at that restaurant, so it definitely was not a cheap meal. At the end, they gave us a cool mint mouthwash that they filled up in nice looking shot glasses with mint around the rims. We thought it was alcohol at first haha.

After dinner, we met up with Drance, who just arrived at Barcelona with his mom and sister. They went to sleep so we walked A LOT all the way towards the beach area called Barceloneta. It was so pretty at night. I could have stayed there forever just sitting, talking, and just looking at the night sky/ocean.

Sadly, this was cut short as we realized the subway had closed so we had to walk an hour back to our hostel. My feet hurt so much after that day. I didn’t bring tennis shoes since I liked my boots too much and we had to pack light haha.

We actually really wanted to go out that night, but all of us were tired and passed out right when we got back.

Cinco

This whole day was dedicated to the beach.

An interesting thing that happened was a strike that hit all of Southern Europe. The metro and bus had closed down. Most of the shops were closed and the open ones had graffiti all over. It was a very interesting and a bit scary experience. A lot of the phone booths were shattered, a police car burned, angry people were marching everywhere. We pretended to not look like tourists (me being an Asian with a big camera, it was very hard needless to say), and walked to the beach as quickly as we could…which wasn’t that quick because it was far away.

I had this amazing waffle with chocolate and then we began our tanning. It felt so nice to be by an ocean after years of living without it. If only Rochester wasn’t that cold, I would go to the great lakes more. This day was just so relaxing. What I realized was that European culture is very open with a lot of things. Although there were nude beaches (and we really wanted to check it out, but got lazy), a lot of girls were topless at Barceloneta as well. Many just changed in the middle of the beach and no one cared. I like this relaxing/carefree lifestyle that they have. US is always so concentrated on self image that individuals get so closed off about certain things. I had a mojito at the beach but it was way too minty.

At night, we met up with Drance and his family again. Because the riot was still going on, we went to a restaurant as quickly as possible and had dinner. We ordered paella and tapas again. This time the paella was only 9 euro, but it definitely was not as good. The flavoring of the rice was not as rich and it was a bit dry. But for the amount we paid, it was worth definitely worth it.

After dinner, we took a long walk back. Our feet were pretty much dead after we got back. Stupid riots.

Seis

This was the end of our amazing vacation. We checked out, took our stuff, and went to lie on the beach. I had a foot massage for 4 euro by these Chinese ladies from Shanghai. We stayed there till 5pm and headed towards the airport for our 11pm flight. We were hoping to get a standby on an earlier flight so we can catch the train from London to Brighton but every single flight was packed (I’m guessing because of the strike the previous day). I had my last tortilla de patatas and finally headed “home”.

Adios Espana :)