Myvi

Saw this near the department the other day. Frankly, I was quite surprised.


Yaz.

Update

Hey ho! Sorry I haven’t written much lately. After that morose account of my mental health in my last post, I was tempted to bury it by writing other more cheerful posts, but nothing much is going on recently that are of significant interest. I’ve been meaning to write about this famous pub in Cambridge and I really want to have a picture to go with it but I can’t bring myself to act like an annoying tourist and just stand there with my camera phone. I’ll just wait for the right opportunity to snap a picture or two when no one’s looking, I guess.

And yeah, Cambridge students, especially those from colleges like Trinity or Kings, do tend to get annoyed when tourists like Asian tour groups or French school kids come and take pictures/stare while you’re eating in the hall, walking across the college or going to the shower wearing a bathrobe.

Lately, I’ve figured out that the best way to get rid of worrying about work is to get up and do them. This is based on the principle that you don’t worry about them if they’re finished. Then one night I was about to slip into bed when I started thinking about a coursework that has a deadline which is three weeks away. So I got up, went to my study table and worked on it in the middle of the night.

I guess I need to abandon this philosophy if I want to get some sleep.

Yaz.

Annoying Mental Snag

For those of you who are close enough to me, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard this phrase countless time:

“I wanna be a student forever.”

And I’m also pretty sure that by now you’re sick and tired of hearing it. But I can’t help it, though. I really like student life. You study and make friends and do whatever and not worry about things like money and stuff. Okay, maybe that last bit isn’t true for everybody, but I suppose as long as you have a sense of thrift and self control, you’ll be fine. Plus, in the context of an oversea student, you get holidays of more than a month in duration and you can travel and you can skip one day of lectures to nip down to London… the list goes on and on. I suppose one of the reasons why I’m enjoying it so much is that I never had problems with my studies. Well, not big problems anyway. I was alright with SPM, I breezed through the IB and now I’m coping well with lectures. I don’t really experience one of the major causes of stress for students: academics. Maybe that’s why I’m so content and happy with the student life.

Which brings me to a major problem. I guess you can say that it’s not really a problem; it’s just in the mind. I was too complacent with my life that whenever I’m faced with something that reminds me of a life after graduating (i.e. the real world, where you get a job and such), I tend to get distressed. It’s like a reminder: ‘Well, tough. Life has been a smooth sailing for you and now that’s all gonna change’. This also explains why I took such a long time to prepare a CV. Everybody in my department is applying for summer internships and I thought, ‘Hey, I should too.’ But somehow, I really don’t feel like starting to write it.

Such an annoying mental snag.

Everything’s alright now. Well, mostly. I finished my CV some days ago and that removed a huge chunk of my distress away. One of those things that the more you progress in doing it, the less nervous you become. I’ve started applying to companies now, and I hope that by the time the interviews roll around, I will have stopped being so despondent and am actually looking forward to it. I think this also made me value the time I have now even more. After all, it will be less than two years now, and I won’t be able to do a lot of things that I can do now when that time comes.

On a more cheery note, I’ve made plans for the winter! Going travelling with some friends. Perks of being an oversea student in Europe, eh?

Yaz

P.S. The ‘CV and Cover Letter’ book from Cambridge’s Career Service is a total lifesaver. I bow down to whoever compiled that thing.

Careers Fair

The Cambridge University Careers Service just organised a careers fair today. The event lasts for two days with different companies coming and explaining to us students about what they do, whether they’re recruiting and how to apply for jobs or, in my case, summer internship applications. Today’s fair is more oriented towards science, IT and engineering whereas tomorrow will be more about banking and finance so I went to today’s one. To tell the truth, in order to apply for summer internships they mostly just tell you to go to their website and fill an online form, so unless you’re really interested in what the companies’ representatives have to say or you want to ask them specific questions, there isn’t much point in going. With the exception, of course, for the freebies!

The different companies usually have some freebies like pens etc. that they give to people visiting their counter. Since I’m not the kind of person who visits every counter just to get the freebies unlike some people, I don’t get that much stuff. Still, after a day, this is what I ended up with.

Embarrassingly enough, I realised that amongst the free stuff, I’ve also brought this home. Drat! What on earth am I supposed to do with this?

Yaz.

Guy Fawkes

Monday night was Guy Fawkes Night in the UK, which means one thing: fireworks!

Nevertheless, somehow this year I didn’t manage to enjoy it as much as previous years, probably because after two years of watching it they became a bit repetitive. Plus the fact that this is organised by the city council, so it can’t really compare with the May Ball fireworks or ones from cities like London. Still, it was good times. Had some cotton candy (this is probably the only time of the year that I’m eating something like that).

Yaz.

Sports stuff

One of the things I miss about AC is that it has its own outdoor and indoor pool so whenever I felt like swimming I just dragged a few friends and did some laps. Cambridge doesn’t have a university pool, unfortunately, so I finally decided to register with the local swimming pool. It can be quite crowded at times but at least it’ll satisfy my craving for swimming.

Oh yeah, have I ever mentioned that I only started learning how to swim when I arrived in the UK? It was good times, but was sort of a torture. I guess I’ll write a bit about it someday.

We just had our first UCCMixed (i.e. Cambridge 3^rd team) match in the local league tonight. Two games overall, we lost the first one (that I didn’t join) and we won the second one (that I joined). Does that tell you anything, hee hee?

Well… actually, we played against different teams so you can’t draw any conclusions from that =(

I was told by one of my team mates that I have a very weird upper serve. This is confirmed by other people there. When he first saw it, he was like, ‘How’s that gonna go in?’ And then it came flying into the court. Honestly, I’ve never realised since I never watched myself play, and I don’t know whether having a weird serve is a good thing or not. I probably got the technique wrong or something.

Sorry for the shaky pictures. Were taken with my mobile phone when I was outside the court.

Yaz.

My Cambridge Interview Experience

Okay, as promised, I think I’ll share a bit about my experience in having an interview in Cambridge. Unlike a lot of other universities that only have ‘interviews’ as in ‘we just want to see your face and have a chat’ session, in Cambridge you’ll need to expect a proper, serious interview. Only then will they decide on giving you an offer. Or not. Before I start, I just need to say that this is just my recount of my own interview, so it should by no means be treated as ‘a definitive guide to Cambridge interviews’ or something like that, since there are different types of interviews and I only know about my own. To clarify, I applied to Cambridge to do Chemical Engineering.

It started when I looked at the Cambridge prospectus to prepare for the application process. To tell the truth, with so many colleges being featured in there and they all seem pretty similar, the prospectus confused me a bit. Of course, at that time I knew nothing about the different colleges, which one is richer, bigger, more famous etc. etc. In the end, I just decided to choose a college that has the type of interview that I like: Trinity.

Pretty funny that even without prior knowledge, I end up in one of the richer, bigger and more famous of the lot.

Depending on the subject, some colleges have a normal interview, an interview with Thinking Skills Assessment or TSA (sort of like an IQ test in a way), or an interview with a technical test. I realised that my people and social skills are probably mediocre, average at best, so I ignored the normal interviews. My mock TSA test (they have a model of the test online) is around 60-ish %, not bad but definitely not outstanding so I ignored those too. That left me with the interview-with-test type, which is okay for me since I’m definitely comfortable with the technical test compared with just an oral interview. At least now I have something to fall back on when I screw up in the oral interviews by either:

a) failing to be eloquent and charming or

b) spewing complete crap when asked questions like ‘What can you contribute to Cambridge?’, ‘What are your strong points?’ and ‘Why do you think you want to study in Cambridge?’ or

c) (and this is what most people dread about Cambridge interviews) being utterly gobsmacked and speechless when asked questions like ‘What do you think about extra-terrestrials?’ or ‘If you could make up a word, what would it be?’ or some other bizarre questions of that nature.

So among the interview-with-test type colleges, I picked Trinity at random. My application was accepted and they asked me to go to Cambridge (since I was in the UK at the time) for my interview. That was in December 2004.

So I went there, stayed the night, and did the test the next day. It was a combination of physics, chemistry/material science and maths. The thing to remember here is that if you find the test hard, then you shouldn’t worry about it. They purposely made it so that you won’t be able to answer everything, and that’s for a reason which will be apparent later.

Some time after the test, I walked to the place where my dreaded oral interview is going to be held. I went in. There were two people: a woman who dyed her hair red and another blonde woman (I don’t know who the first person is but the second one is my current Head of Department and Director of Studies). I sat on the chair, and the interview began.

The good thing: they don’t ask me some mind boggling questions that you have to bullsh*t your way through i.e. situation (b) or (c). I think you can still get those kinds of questions though, even in an engineering course interview so it’s wise to be prepared anyway. The bad thing: lo and behold, they have the test answers that I wrote with them! So here’s the reason they make the test difficult: they go through your answers, and they note which questions you have difficulty with, and they ask you about them in the oral interview. Personally I think it’s kinda cruel. The purpose of this is so that by presenting a problem that you don’t know and giving you hints during the interview to guide you to the answer, they can see your thought process i.e. how you think to solve the problem. One of the questions that I couldn’t answer is about unit cells, which honestly is not in the IB syllabus and the only time I’ve encountered them was when I read Chemistry 9^th edition by Prentice Hall. They have this crystal lattice model in front of me to demonstrate the unit cell and I swear I can feel the gears in my brain grinding as I try to work out the answer. Fortunately, I managed to solve it, and I think they were impressed. So am I, if truth be told.

There was a question which leads you to estimating the density of air. It began with ‘The weight of air in this room is about the same as half a dozen eggs…’ or something like that. Normally this is a killer question for me since I am horrendous at estimating things. I can’t guess the distance/weight/height of things without actually measuring it. However, I was proud of the answer that I gave: I basically ignored the question and wrote ‘Well, in the data book that I’ve read, the density of air to three s.f. is…’ and I put down the value. I think the interviewers had a laugh from it. Just to clarify things, no, I don’t go around memorising values in the data book. That would be stupid. I just did a number of physics questions some months before and since I had to look up the value a few times, it sort of sticks in my head. So I guess I’m just lucky.

Well, that’s the short (or long) of it. Hope I didn’t bore you. I got an offer afterwards asking for a 42 and 7,7,7 in higher subject. For those of you who are/were doing the IB, you’ll realise that this is a very cruel offer. Still, they’re Cambridge, so I guess they can afford to do that. So, the lesson? The interview’s just halfway. You still have to work hard afterwards to meet the offer.

That about sums it up, then. I usually stay in Cambridge in December so sometimes when I see the current interview candidates, some relaxed, and some nervous, unsure, waiting in anticipation… I can’t help smiling and be reminded of the time when I’ve been through what they’ll undoubtedly be going through. Can't help but wish them all the best either, since I know how challenging it can be. Good luck!

Yaz.

Urghh!

Sick. Sore throat. Will update later.

Yaz

Phew!

The day of the deadline of the first exercise. I managed to complete mine in good time, so no problem there. In my last post, I did mention that I can laugh at people who are still struggling to finish the exercise. Unfortunately, though, that didn’t happen. Why? Because they all skipped lectures to finish it! Cheeky buggers. There goes my chance to gloat evilly at people.

I read in the papers that there exist some people who spent up to £3500 for their kids to have a better chance of getting into Oxford or Cambridge. Seriously, are they crazy or what? Apparently, there are some agencies and organisations that offer services to train applicants to face the famous Oxbridge application process. Honestly, I know you have to make an extra effort to get into Oxford and Cambridge e.g. finishing UCAS application early, an extra personal statement, the dreaded interviews, getting good results etc. but still, £3500 seems way over the top. Unless you’re rich and couldn’t care less about that amount of money, of course.

Hmmm… seems like a long time ago that I first arrived here in Cambridge for my own interview. I guess some time later I’ll write a bit about it.

Yaz.

Resuming life as a student again

Hey ho! Finally, a breath of fresh air. For the past few days I’ve been busy working on this coursework (literature survey, to be exact) and I’ve just finished writing the main body some time ago. Granted, there are still the abstract, conclusion and reference that I need to write about, but let’s not worry about those too much. Of course I know that it’ll be kinda crappy since even though we were given three weeks to finish the darn thing, most of us only start in the last week. Me included. Well, the deadline’s on Thursday so I still have time to smooth out things and laugh at people who are panicking because they have their hands full with this.

On a different note, I’ve now accepted… no, make that fully embraced… the fact that there exist some people who are buff and sporty and are into rowing and other physically-exerting stuff… who are much more intellectually superior than me. I guess you CAN have everything.

Yaz.

Eventful Saturday

Yesterday was the Scholar’s Admission Ceremony in Trinity College, which resulted in me wearing a suit, white bow tie and gown for the event since I’m upgraded from a Junior Scholar to a Senior Scholar this year. To those who don’t know, in Trinity, if you get a first class in your first year, then you’ll be awarded the Junior Scholar, which gives you room ballot privilege, £150, food allowance, among other things. If you get a first again in subsequent years, or if you get really good result in the first year, say, top five in the university, then you’ll be a senior Scholar instead, which gives basically the same but better privileges. £250 prize money, for example.

The ceremony’s pretty much the same as last year. I got the same book (and I’ll just put last year’s pic here since it’s the same thing) but this year I managed to get it signed by Martin Rees, Royal Astronomer and Master of Trinity College. It’s basically about Trinity’s history, but since history’s not my thing I haven’t even gone past chapter one.

The Great Court Run (last year’s link here) happened again this year but there’ll be no pictures since I was not there. Instead, I went to London for the Petronas open house & Eid celebration. It was nice to meet the new faces of Atlantic College students. There are eight Malaysians this year instead of the usual five.

I didn’t stay long, however, since there’s a volleyball training session in Cambridge at four. This year’s UCCMixed team (essentially the 3^rd team) looks promising, and I noticed a few people who are definitely the 2^nd team’s level, but they are in our team for some reason. Probably because they didn’t make it in the 2^nd team’s tryout or they just can’t be bothered with the time commitment or competitiveness of the 2^nd team. I certainly hope that we’ll perform better instead of losing to a secondary school team like last year.

And finally, since I was at King’s Cross station, I thought I’ll take a picture of the famous platform 9 and ¾.

Yaz.

Yaz

Some of you might be wondering, but the nick ‘Yaz’ was given to me by my room mates in Atlantic College. It was then picked up by my houseparent and after he called me Yaz in a house meeting, everybody else followed suit. Except the Malaysians, of course, since they have known me for longer and they’ve always called me Yazid. Not to mention that it feels weird if I hear them using the nick. So yeah, it’s basically a nickname for my non-Malaysian friends to use, mostly AC people though since not many called me by that name in Cambridge.

The thing is, there has been some rather weird traffic coming to the blog from rather dubious Google searches. I decided to check and I found out that Yaz is actually a type of oral hormonal contraceptive. In other words, it’s the thing that you take (via your mouth) if you don’t want to get pregnant. Ha ha, that was hilarious! Just thought to clarify that for people who stumbled here by mistake =)

Oh, and no matter what, I still love that nick. It sounds cool.

Cheers,

Yaz.

It’s one day late but…

…I just want to wish everybody who’s celebrating it (me included) ‘Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri’ or Eid Mubarak. Take your pick. Eid was on Friday in the UK but in some other parts of the world it’s on the Saturday (today) so I’m not really that late after all.

There were classes throughout Friday morning so I wasn’t feeling very celebratory. But it's not that big of a deal, same as last year I suppose. And I totally forgot the expression ‘Eid Mubarak’ so on Thursday night I texted people saying Happy Eid, which sounds completely wrong. Oh well…

In any case, I’ll probably drop by London next Saturday for some free food. There’s also one tomorrow but I haven’t decided yet whether to go or not. We’ll see how it goes.

Yaz.

Alright, I’m angry.

I usually cook two portions of meal each day in Ramadan, one for iftar and the other for sahur. Yesterday, though, I went to the iftar organised by the Cambridge Islamic Society (ISOC) so I didn’t cook anything, thinking that for sahur, I can just eat some instant Uncle Ben’s two-minute microwaveable rice in my kitchen cupboard or something.

However, I woke up this morning, ready to eat, and the food is gone! I can’t believe it! If it’s a spoon or plate then it’s understandable (not to say it’s okay, and I left notes in my plate cupboard to warn people) but somebody actually had the audacity to steal some food items that you clearly have to microwave to eat. Since the other food item that I have are some frozen chickens that I definitely don’t have time to thaw and cook, it looks like I have to go hungry for the day. Bastards.

Yaz.

Two Days…

… since the opening day of the most despised film in my entire life (and that’s not a hyperbole). Usually when I think a film is bad, I’ll just move on and forget, but I’ve never hated one with such passion, especially considering that it wasn’t released yet at the time I started hating it. My utmost regret is that it’s being made at all, but since I can’t do anything about it, I’ll just derive my pleasure on how it tanked in the US cinemas and received generally bad reviews. Really, that’s the best possible outcome for now, since if the film is a success, they might make sequels and because they’ve diverged so much from the book for this film, the future sequels will be unrecognisable as well. Except the only downside is that the film might turn people off from picking up the book, which is a shame really.

For those of you who have no idea of what I’m talking about, it’s a horrible adaptation (and I used the word loosely here, if you can call writing a new story altogether an adaptation) of The Dark Is Rising, a book which is part of the series that’s also called The Dark Is Rising. You can read my previous rant about it here. But really, it’s such a hatchet job at an adaptation that no self-respecting fans of the book or Susan Cooper (the author) will not be pissed off at it. You can even tell things aren’t going well since they changed the title of the film twice after they released the trailer. From initially ‘The Dark Is Rising’, they changed it to ‘The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising’ and finally, a few days before the film is released, it changed again to just ‘The Seeker’. My assumption is that after reading the book properly, as well as other books in the series (no, they haven’t read the other books in the series while filming it, so they had no idea of what's going on in the story), they figured that they have no similarities at all with the film that putting ‘The Dark Is Rising’ in the title is nothing less than fraudulence. Or maybe they just got so many hate mails from fans of the book to change the title.

For now, I really hope that they will stop making sequels, and that someday someone will buy the rights from them and make a truly proper adaptation of my favourite book from childhood, the way it’s meant to be.

Yaz.

Ranking

I just had my first meeting with my DoS (Director of Studies) yesterday for chemical engineering and she gave me a piece of news that can both be considered good and disappointing. On one hand, I am in the top ten in the final exam ranking last year and the only Trinity student who got a first class (hence her star pupil, as she jokingly put it). On the other, being in the top ten is just a vaguer and grander way of saying you are ranked number ten and bearing in mind that there are fifteen students who got first class, that’s just two-thirds of the way down. That’s pretty disheartening, considering that even though I got ranked number 65 in my first year in Natural Sciences, that’s halfway in the middle of the hundred something people who got a first. Now, I know it doesn’t quite scale like that, but I can’t help feeling like I should have done better. In fact, seeing my disappointment, that’s what my DoS told me, “You’ll do better next time, won’t you?”

BP came to give a talk about their summer internship yesterday evening (which I’m giving serious thought to, considering this is my last summer here and I haven’t done any internships at all) and as I mentioned in this post one year ago, they gave free copies of Perry’s Chemical Engineers’ Handbook (which normally costs around £60) to everybody who got a first or two-one. One thing I found when lugging it around back to college: that stuff’s quite heavy.

Yaz.

Noooo! They’ve ruined The Dark Is Rising!

Okay, you know when you have a favourite book? A book that you really like, say, one that you read when you’re a child, was instantly engrossed in, and became a part of your childhood. The Dark Is Rising is such a book for me. I wasn’t exactly a kid when I read it, more like a fifteen-year-old teenager, but I remember reading Greenwitch, the third book in the sequence (which is also called The Dark Is Rising), enjoyed it immensely, and started scouring MCKK’s (my secondary school) library for the rest of the books. Unfortunately, it has all but the last of the sequence, Silver on the Tree, and I was left hanging until a few years ago when I bought the book on the internet. Just a note, you can read it in the order of book 1,2,3,4 and 5 or even 2,1,3,4,5 for the reason that (some of) the key characters from book 1 and 2 are different and they only meet in book 3 onwards. However, starting with book 3 is totally not the right way to read it. Oh well…

For those who have never heard of it, The Dark Is Rising (the second book) is about Will Stanton, an English boy who discovered on his eleventh birthday that he is the last of the Old Ones, beings of the Light, and that he has to find the Six Signs to stop the forces of the Dark. The book is deeply embedded in British and Celtic folklore and Arthurian mythology. It also received the 1974 Newbery Honor award.

I found out a few months back when browsing IMDB that the book is being made into a film. At first I couldn’t believe it since it is my favourite book, then I was really excited. However, after searching a bit more on the net, I was flabbergasted, and not in a good way.

Apparently, the people involved in the making of the film had decided to take it upon themselves to ‘adapt’ the book in a way they see fit. And by that I mean they totally butchered the story. It is now changed so much it’s horribly beyond recognition!

Now, before you start, I know you have to change the book a bit to make it into a film because of the different media. That’s pretty much obvious and everybody knows that. However, there is a line between adapting a book and making an entirely new story altogether! From what I’ve gathered, the only things that are the same are the names of some of the key characters and the fact that Will has so seek the six signs.

As a start, they scrapped all the Arthurian reference! I mean, what the heck? That is entirely integral to the story since it’s part of the storyline. In fact, two main characters (one appearing in book 4) are directly from the mythology. By removing that, you’ve effectively removed the backbone of the story itself. Which also means there’s no way they can make book 4 and 5 into films, since you won’t have much of the story left. Apparently, the scriptwriter acknowledged that he hasn’t read the rest of the series, which is absurd, since that’s a very stupid thing to do if you’re making an adaptation.

What’s more, they’ve changed the main character’s nationality to American, furthermore distancing the film with the English mythology. His age is also changed to thirteen, since they probably thought an eleven year old hero will not appeal much to teenagers. They changed the magic from subtle to flashy (a la Harry Potter style). They’ve also totally rewritten the characters. They changed Will’s family from a caring one to a stereotypical emotionally distant, pick-the-younger-brother type family. His older brother is now an agent of the dark. Instead of the English countryside, there are now police chases in the malls and kung fu fights on top of fruit carts. There are a lot more changes, and you can find a list of them in this blog in livejournal here. There’s also another big change, which I’ll get into later.

Sadly enough, I was planning on seeing the film despite all the disservice it has done to the book, simply because it’s my favourite book being shown on the silver screen, if nothing else. However, now that I’m back in Cambridge (with fast internet), I saw the trailers for the first time. And I must say, I’m not impressed. They’ve turned a perfectly good book into a cliché-ridden, typical kiddies story. What’s more, I’ve made the decision not to see it because the trailers confirmed my worst fear:

They’ve totally changed Will Stanton.

Now, Will is one of my favourite book characters of all time (the other one being Granny Weatherwax) and one that I adored so much when I was a kid (or rather, teenager) and is still now. He’s a calm, collected and thoughtful kid (that comes with being an Old One) and is described in the books as ‘wise beyond his years’. In the film, the impostor Will is a bratty little kid who tries to be cool and fit in. He blows up cars and hurled his brothers with his super powers when he’s frustrated. They even gave him a love interest! Now that is utterly PREPOSTEROUS!! In the trailer, Will is quoted as saying “I'm supposed to save the world? I don't even know how to talk to a GIRL!” I was so shocked it’s not even funny. Now that is one thing that Will Stanton will NEVER, ever say. And I mean never!

I realised that to see this film means I’ll be ruining the Will I envisioned in my head, so I’m not going. I know that it’s not really his real character, but it’ll be hard to get it out of my head if I see the film, and I don’t want to be reminded of it every time I pick the book to read. I’m appalled enough as it is now with this horrific treatment of my beloved book.

Yaz.

Hey there!

I’m now back in Cambridge. Well, actually, this is the third day since I’m back so it’s not really a big deal anymore, which also means I should have posted this sooner (e.g. the first day) but it wasn’t easy to move stuff and set the place to how I like it to be lived in. Ever tried moving ten boxes from one end of the college to another? My advice: avoid if possible, especially when none of your friends are back yet to help with it.

Speaking of which, my room this year is great! The first thing I noticed, and also the thing that most prominently makes this place worthwhile is it has a fridge installed! It also has a sort of mock fireplace that has been boarded up, which is a pity. The downside of the room, however, is that the kitchen is downstairs, so I have to walk a bit to cook.

Computer table

Bed and studying table

Fridge. Left door is the way out. Right door is the bathroom

Actually, by far, the best room I’ve ever lived in is the one in my first year. I’ll give a quick rundown:

1^st year

Pros

• Best room ever. Enormous! Like my across-the-hallway-neighbour Dom said, “Compared to yours mine is like a box.” Actually, it's not really that much bigger but you get the idea.
• Has a fridge, two tables (one for studying and the other for computer), lots of sofas, mock fireplace, and a proper bookshelf.
• Kitchen’s just nearby

Cons

• The only thing I can think of is that it’s located on the road where Sainsbury’s is, so it can be a bit noisy at times. Also in the morning it faces the sun so you will often be woken up by it, although this might be a good thing. It depends.

2^nd year

Pros

• Biiiiggg wardrobes. Lots of storage space.

Cons

• Far from Sainsbury’s, my department and the dining hall.
• No fridge in the room
• Kitchen has no oven. Also if you cook in the afternoon it will get really hot because of the sun.

3^rd year

Pros

• Fridge in room, two tables, boarded-up mock fireplace…
• Not far from my 1^st year room so it is also strategically located

Cons

• Kitchen far away
• Not much storage space, though I’ll probably manage to squeeze my bags and boxes somewhere…

Oh, and just to mention, all those room have en-suite bathrooms. I can’t live without it.

I’m a senior scholar this year, which means I get first dibs on choosing the rooms. Guess I’ll choose properly this time, with research, room visits etc unlike last year where I actually didn’t know what the room looks like until now.

Classes will not start until next Wednesday so I have plenty of time to relax/do nothing/get bored. At the moment I’m in a One Piece marathon. Episode 120 something and counting…

Yaz.

It’s almost time…

… to go back to the UK. Just another ten days. Can’t wait.

Today was the second day of fasting. To be honest, it feels kinda weird since this is my first time fasting in Malaysia in five years. I sort of like fasting in the UK. With it being cold, you don’t get that tired, or thirsty. And the fact that breaking of fast can happen as early as half past four. That was really something. I think I might have irritated the hell out of some people by whining about how I wish I can be there instead of here for Ramadhan. Ha ha, sorry to… well, you know who you are =)

There is something going on that made me feel extremely unhappy. However, since I’m currently in Malaysia and am somewhat sheltered, I haven’t felt the full force of it yet, which I probably will once I'm back in the UK. So, when I get back, expect me to have a long rant about it.

Yaz.

Just to tell you...

Ha ha, I know, I know, it's no excuse for being silent for almost a month or so, but in between playing games, reading, watching stuff and a few excursions to KL there isn't really anything interesting to tell.

Anyhow, I'm going back to the UK and Cambridge this 24th for my third year. Am really looking forward to that. So if there's nothing else going on hopefully you'll hear from me then.

See ya!

Yaz.