Back From Paris

Hey guys! I’m now back in Cambridge after four eventful days in Paris. They’re worth it, though, so I’m not complaining. If you don’t have a clue on why I was there, well... the short story is that Cambridge won the UK level of the L’Oreal Ingenius competition, an engineering competition with energy efficiency as its theme; and hence the Cambridge team (three chemical engineers including myself) represented the UK in the International Finals which was held last Wednesday until Friday.

We arrived in Paris on Tuesday and stayed in the Holiday Inn Hotel, where I found that the price per night is around €130, equivalent to £100 and almost about the price of a May Ball. Not that I’m paying for it, but I’m still astounded on how much is spent on bringing us here, not to mention all the food they’ve been feeding us. I remember stuffing myself with sushi for lunch, and tasting the best apple juice in my life sometime on Thursday night, and eating a lot of other tasty food as well.

Anyway, back to something more relevant, they were 11 teams in total: us, Canada, USA, Mexico, Brazil, Belgium, France, Spain, Poland, China and India. Germany was supposed to be there as well but for some reason they dropped out. On Wednesday, which for me is the most enjoyable day in the whole program, all of us were split up and put into groups. We then went on a team-building rally/some kind of treasure hunt around Paris where we went around locating places with GPS, singing to a person with a cowboy hat in French, playing petanque, looking for lions, having a rendezvous with a skeleton, among other things. For me, the reason why it was so fun was that we have all sorts of people in the group and we all get to mingle and know each other and do stuff together, something that for some reason was missing in the UK level. I found that my thought was also shared by other members of the group, and one of them (from Poland) remarked that it’s so amazing how now you can meet all sorts of people of different nationalities compared to a few decades ago where this is highly unlikely.

The main event was on Thursday, when we presented our solutions to a panel of judges. To cut to the chase, I’ll just say that we lost. However, in our defence I should probably mention that this is the first year that the UK has entered and things might have been different otherwise. Regardless, all the teams have performed very well and shown a high standard (it is an international competition after all) and hence, any one of them could have won. The winner of the day was the Canadian team and they grabbed a €10,000 worth of a trip to a city of choice.

Well, that’s the long and short of it. I had a really enjoyable time there and despite not winning, it really is worth all the effort that we put into it. To tell the truth, it’s not really the competition itself but the people we met that makes the whole thing so memorable. Like one of my team member said on the train journey back, she missed them already.

Yaz.

P.S. Just one thing that marred the experience: I lost my phone. And this is the first time ever that I lost my phone too. Oh well.

The Stomping Dinosaur

And on those occasions that I got bored or can’t comprehend the snippets of wisdom that they impart during lectures, I tend to do these things:

- Daydream

- Watch other people, see if they are concentrating or not

- Write backwards (mirror writing) with my right hand

- Write normally but with my left hand

- Write song lyrics, either with my right or left hand

Today about ten minutes after the start of our 9 o’clock lecture, a friend of mine walked into the lecture theatre. He probably doesn’t notice it, but he stomps his feet, thus announcing to everybody the arrival of his royal highness. And since I was in a daydreaming mode, I thought of a dinosaur, or maybe Godzilla; and I drew these on a piece of paper:

When he walks in:

When he sits:

The SHE on the picture refers to ‘Safety, Health and Environment’, the course we’re having at that moment. Oh, and if you noticed, there’s an arrow pointing to Mr Dino, but it’s blank. I erased the name to protect privacy, heh heh.

He inadvertently saw the drawing later on in the day so I had to come clean. Oops!

Yaz.

P.S. I’m going to Paris tomorrow. Yay!

A Nightly Interlude

At this moment, it’s dark in Cambridge. Friday night, so people are abound. Two policemen are prowling Trinity Street, catching unaware cyclist offenders who ride the wrong way up the street. The lights are mostly off in the Chemical Engineering department, with the exception of the computer room. There, three sad people are working on some kind of project/work/assignment, and one person is typing this blog.

Hello! If you felt that you haven’t heard from me for a while, that’s because I've been a bit busy. Just came back from Wales on Wednesday, where I’ve been giving a presentation. Got an exercise to hand in next week, except one of my L’Oreal team members asked for an extension until Monday the 17^th, and we got it. We are going to ask for more, though, since it seems like we may need it. And oh, because of the Wednesday presentation, I missed the UCCMixed volleyball dinner. And I was really looking forward to that one too! On the other hand, I’ve decided to leave Paris early so that I can make it to the Commemoration Dinner.

Wait a minute, didn’t I tell you? Yup, I'll be going to Paris for the L’Oreal Ingenius competition on Tuesday next week until Friday. All expense paid, isn’t that nice? And I hope I can win, so wish me luck!

Yaz.

My First Earthquake

So what really happened was that on Tuesday night I went to bed at about twelve or so and at around one I woke up because I felt some shaking. Being in the subconscious state between sleep and awake, I wasn’t really able to discern what was going on. I thought it was the people in the room above me jumping up and down and I remembered thinking, ‘Why can’t these people sleep like everybody else?’

It’s only later in the day that I found out that the tremors were really earthquakes. Apparently it was around 5 in the Richter scale and the strongest that the UK has felt in about 25 years or so. My first earthquake! Don’t know whether I should feel happy or scared.

In other news, a friend of mind brought one of those brown, about A4 sized envelopes with him to the department. In the tea room, he opened the envelope and brought out... lo and behold, a Macbook Air! I don’t know how to use a Mac and I’m not fond of laptops with small screens, but even then, I can’t keep my jaw from dropping! It was so thin! Other people in the tea room saw it and they were fascinated as well. It really is an amazing design.

Yaz.

Indecent Exposure

And so it is the case that in the University of Cambridge, there are two student newspapers, The Cambridge Student and Varsity. The former comes out every Thursday, while the latter on Fridays. Normal national newspapers are supplied in the common rooms every weekday, but I often don’t have time to read those.However, I made it a habit to read the two student newspapers since a) they come out weekly and it doesn’t take much of my time and effort to read them, plus they’re kinda fun to read; and b) more often than not I find them very informative of all the happenings in Cambridge that I might not realise or know about.

But anyway, I guess sometimes even the most eagle-eyed editors will miss some things that shouldn’t appear in a paper. The last issue of TCS features a picture of the Christ College’s rugby team posing for the camera and one of the guys is, errr... exposing himself more than he should. It’s not obvious at first glance. I wasn’t aware of it until a friend who visited my room today pointed it out to me. We had a great laugh out of it. Add the fact that one of the other team members is clearly staring at it. My friend pointed out that he’ll be forever known as the guy who stares at the other guy’s exposed anatomy in a newspaper.

The hilarity of it just made my day.

Yaz.

P.S. No, I'm not gonna post the picture, so don't ask =)

Dinners and Tea Towels

Okay, so sometimes in Trinity (or any other Cambridge colleges for that matter) they have these dinners for special occasions and more often than not, not everybody can go to them. Sometimes you’re randomly invited, sometimes you have to be invited by a fellow and sometimes you have to be a scholar. So I was complaining and whining to my friend the other day on how I wasn’t invited to the Rice Exchange dinner for two years now and how some of those who were invited by the fellows got to do things that are not usually allowed e.g. walking on the grass or going on the roof with the said fellow’s permission. Then, just the other day I got an invite to the Commemoration Dinner and this invitation is only extended for scholars but unfortunately enough, I can’t go because I’ll not be in the UK at that time. Great. So I don’t get invited to the ones I can go but was asked to go to the ones I can’t go.

There’s this particular Trinity third year who got the bright idea of producing tea towels with everybody’s faces on them, like those tea towel projects that were done in primary school. Well, maybe their primary schools, I certainly can’t remember having done such a thing. So anyway, the third years all got this small piece of paper each and everybody’s doing a drawing of themselves on them and submitting them to the person in charge. I can’t remember myself ever being artistic, so forgive my humble soul if the drawing doesn’t even closely resemble the subject matter:

Can you recognise me when you see the picture?

It's a small drawing so I'm sorry for the blurriness.

When I was handing mine in, I got the chance to look at all the other submissions. Some of them were bloody hilarious.

I am so buying the tea towels.

Yaz

Frank Morton day

Well, it’s Frank Morton today (yesterday, actually, since I’m writing this early in the morning). For those of you who don’t know, Frank Morton is sort of a sports day for chemical engineers in UK universities. I wrote about it too last year. This year they’re having it in Leeds and the same as last time, I didn’t go. Why? Because one, they don’t have volleyball and I suck at other sports. Two, last year I was lazy and couldn’t be bothered waking up early in the morning to take the bus to Manchester. So if I go this year to Leeds which is even further up north, that’ll be an inconsistency, will it not? Hehe.

Anyway, because of Frank Morton we don’t have lectures or anything else in the department today so I took the opportunity to finish all my work. Overall it’s quite a productive day. I essentially finished the two exercises that are due on Thursday. Oh, and when I say exercises, I don’t mean jogging or aerobic. I also don’t mean something like a few easy practice questions either. Exercises, in Cambridge chemical engineering speak means coursework or assignments; they typically take two to three weeks to finish. There was a relatively new supervisor who told me that she was surprised when her supervisees (is that even a word) complaint that they cannot have supervision at this particular week because they were all busy finishing some ‘exercises’. She now knows that the exercises are more serious and stressful than the name might suggest.

It’s nearing two in the morning now. I guess it’s been a while since I last worked past midnight. Usually I’ll stop doing anything that requires heavy thinking straight after dinner.

Yaz.

Impending Doom

Ever since the incident where I have to wipe out and restore my hard drive, I have this feeling of impending doom in which my laptop will just fail and refuse to start up again. It is nearing three years since I first bought it, so I think the end of its lifetime is looming in the horizon, just that I can’t see it. It might be another one (or two) years if I’m lucky, might be another few months.

Lately there’s this weird noise coming out of the hard drive sometimes. It made me worry. Despite that, the laptop’s actually working well. I guess the wisest step for now is just to backup everything of importance and hope for the best, that it will not fail anytime soon.

Yaz.

It’s Half Term

Well, now (actually tomorrow) is the fifth week of the eight weeks of term, so we’re halfway there. I’m feeling the pressure of things, which is noticeable because I just complained to a few people today about work. I never complain about workload so you can tell how ‘under pressure’ I feel. Don’t you ever wish that there exists a device that you can press a button and time goes by really fast and then in the blink of an eye the term is over and you don’t have to do anything anymore? If it’s just lectures and course-related work I can handle it but I have to finish the L’Oreal project with my team on top of that so things get a bit crazy.

The May Ball tickets are now on sale so people have started asking Trinity students whether they have any spares. Unfortunately, since I’ve been to the May Ball last year and will probably go next year, I don’t think I’m attending it this time around. So, for people asking me for tickets, tough luck.

Four more weeks to go... maybe I should start a countdown.

Yaz.

Mathematician’s Cake Hunting

Yesterday there was a career fair called The Works in the New Museum site where my department is and it’s all about alternative paths like voluntary works and environment and the like. There I met two other Cambridge students from my previous school (Atlantic College), one of which I haven’t seen in quite a while, the other I haven’t seen at all since I left the school. That reminds me of the fact that unlike in my first year, this year we haven’t had any UWC meetings or gatherings where we can get together and see each other’s faces, which is a pity really. I guess I might meet up with one or two other people later at some point and organise some reunion kind of thing. That would be nice.

I was having some difficulties with my stats course because the notes weren’t very clear, so I thought I might be able to get extra help by visiting the stats website. My lecturer is the head of this Computational Modelling group in Cambridge and he puts all his supplementary materials on the CoMo website, so I looked there. In the middle of this, I found out that they put an Easter egg on the site. There were several images on the site that contain pictures of cakes, and when you click on the cakes you’ll find a link to their recipes. There were eleven cakes in total. As it turned out, instead of looking at the supplementary materials, I spent my time hunting for these cake recipes within the site and didn’t manage to do any work at all.

Well, at least I got all the cakes.

Yaz.

Pancake Day?!

My friends were cooking pancakes for dinner yesterday. I thought it was a bit odd because unless they’re savoury pancakes, people don’t normally eat them for dinner since they’re not filling enough. Didn’t really say anything though, since I enjoyed watching them spent their time tossing the pancakes into the air.

Turned out that yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day. That explained it, even though such a concept sounds strange to me. Oh well, guess you learn something new everyday.

Yaz.

It’s Been Hectic

Hello there! Didn’t mean to be reclusive for quite a while but life has been busy lately. Some people from L’Oreal came to discuss with us about the International level competition which will be held somewhere around 12-14 March in Paris. Apparently, we also need to write a four-page report on our solution by the 28^th, which we will present during the competition itself. Furthermore, our current solution, while sounding good initially, doesn’t seem to be working very well (and this also seems to be the opinion of people in the Chemical Engineering department, that it’s not very practical) so we have to either modify it or come up with a new one. If we don’t come up with something good it’ll be very embarrassing (the competition being international and all) so this sets us off to a busy week with researching, meeting people and other stuff. Plus I have assignment deadlines on top of that. Oh, how I miss the first 20 years of my life when I’m never so busy.

People from Mars came to the department today (the chocolate company, not the planet). Well, actually it was just one person and he was a recent graduate of Cambridge and a friend of mine. Anyway, the point is, today during break we enjoyed ourselves with free chocolate bars and all that he brought with him. There’s also a free draw with more chocolates as prizes, the largest being a tin of Celebrations chocolate. Guess who won?

He he he.

Yaz.

Dub?! Sub?!

My order from Amazon has arrived today, yay! Well, half of them anyway. I’m still waiting for the box set of His Dark Materials trilogy, but the rest are here, safe and sound. I probably won’t be reading them for a while, though, since I started Winter’s Heart yesterday.

Day Watch and Twilight Watch is the second and third book from a tetralogy, the first and fourth book being Night Watch and Last Watch respectively. I recently watched Night Watch (a film adaptation) and enjoyed it, even though there are some significant deviations from the book. Wanted to watch Day Watch but restrained myself, since I haven’t read the book yet. I think that since the plot can be quite complex, reading the books are actually useful in order to better understand what’s going on.

Now, I’m a firm believer of watching something in its original language. Dubbed version just pisses me off. In the case of films, you get to hear the actor’s real voice. If it is some voiceover instead, the whole film will feel fake to me. The character's voice will not match the lip movement and in some cases, the way they say things are completely different. In the case of anime, the argument gets quite complicated since the characters are, well... animated so the lip movements will not be exact anyway. But, I suppose most anime production companies in Japan will collaborate to a certain extent with the manga authors, so the Japanese character voices will be closest to what the original manga author intended them to be. Anyway, it’s certainly not that hard to use a few spare brain cells and read subtitles.

So, I was extremely aggravated when I found a few comments on the web about Night Watch:

“Hopefully the second one will get dubbed someday so I can watch it also.”

“Now I will be able to understand this.” – referring to the dubbed version.

“I went and saw this at the movies, and walked out cause I couldnt be f*cked reading the subtitles.”

Okay, is it so hard to read subtitles? Do you actually go to the extent of not watching it if the dubbed version is not available? Are you kidding me? Lots of foreign films are not (nor would I hope that they will be) dubbed, so if you can’t be bothered to read subs you’re actually missing out. Which is a shame really, since there are many good ones that deserve people’s attention.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. I just get annoyed sometimes, because not making an effort to read subs just seems like being lazy to me.

Yaz.

Starting of Term, and Refilling the Bookshelf

Okay, a few things happened between my last post and now. I’ve chosen my room for next year and it’s in Bridge Street, which is a place that I’ve never actually considered living for my final year in Cambridge. Oh, it’s a nice place and is not dilapidated or anything. It’s just that I can’t get over the fact that to enter the building you have to use your swipe card and pass through a small old-looking blue door with non-functioning doorbells, unlike this year in which if somebody wanted to visit me they can go straight up to my room and knock, no swipe card nor old doors required. But apart from that, the inside of Bridge Street is quite modern and nice. I actually chose the most expensive room there: a set (separate sections of living room and bedroom) with en-suite bathroom and a kitchen next to it. Still, an eleven-week term costs about £1000, so it’s not like it’s pricey compared to London or some other places.

Start of term was the 17^th January, which was last Thursday. My new year/term resolution is to study hard, and I thought if I put it here it’ll motivate me more since now you guys know about it.

Oh, and stop pestering me about the study hard/smart thing: about how you’re supposed to study smart instead of hard and all that jazz. It’s rubbish anyway.

I realised that I haven’t been reading a lot of books for a while, and felt guilty about it since there are books that have sat on my bookshelf for ages without me touching them. So my second resolution is to read more, and in keeping with this spirit I also bought some more books from Amazon today. The second and third book of the Night Watch series, Mark Haddon’s second novel, and the His Dark Materials Trilogy (which lots of people in Cambridge say is good; and the first book, Northern Lights was made into a film called The Golden Compass, though I have no idea why they change the name). I bought them in bulk to take advantage of the Amazon’s free delivery for above $15 purchases.

Here’s my current bookshelf which I intend to fill. Don’t comment on how few books are there, since I brought home a lot of the books during my last flight to Malaysia.

Finally, I forgot to collect Nectar points on my Amazon purchases. This always happens! Drat!

Yaz.

A Layman’s Guide

I watched An Inconvenient Truth a few days ago. I know, I know, as a chemical engineer, I should have watched it ages ago, but then again, I’ve always been aware of the detrimental impacts of global warming, so it’s not like the film’s bringing me a shift of perspective or anything. Still, I did gain a few pieces of information that I didn’t know beforehand. Actually, make that a lot of information. I think before, I was just aware. Now, though, I am informed and aware, which makes a huge difference.

If you haven’t watched it, then I suggest that you do, if only to gain a better understanding of the current issue. I would describe An Inconvenient Truth as a layman’s guide to understanding global warming, so even if you don’t have a deep enough scientific knowledge, you can still follow the arguments. That is to be expected though, since the film is mostly directed towards American viewers, of which (unlike the rest of the world), there still exist a fraction of them that actually denies or are sceptical about global warming, and most of these people don’t have deep scientific knowledge.

Of course, being a documentary film that tries to present a point of view, I noticed that there are parts here and there in the film that are susceptible to embellishments and exaggerations. Plus the fact that Gore actually pours a lot of his emotions throughout the film. However, overall, it’s a well balanced and quite accurate depiction of the issue of global warming and unlike a dry science presentation, the fact that the film is interlaced with emotions actually keeps us interested to watch the film until the end, thus making it effective. So go and watch it, if you haven’t. It’s good for you.

Yaz.

The Day I Restarted Everything

Okay, as you guys can tell from my previous blog post, I was having troubles with my laptop when it suddenly crashes and gives me the blue screen of death while I was consolidating my music files. I then restarted everything and while no files are lost, the computer became very sluggish and jerky. I tried defragmenting it the next morning but it gave me the blue screen of death again, which is really annoying. Sensing an impending doom, I quickly backed up all my media and important files onto my external hard drive.

Right, there wasn’t anything much that I could do at that moment. The computer was slow but even with several restarts, I can’t fix it. During breakfast a friend of mine said (probably joking in an evil way) that three or four years sounds about right for the lifetime of a computer. I was like... nooooo! I am planning to buy a brand new laptop before I graduate, now that I have a credit card and all, but certainly not this soon. And to top it all, this is my first computer! I bought it using my own money. Well, computer allowance money actually, but it’s still my own.

Still, since nothing is working (the computer’s operational, it can surf the internet and everything, I just don’t know how to get rid of the lags) I considered wiping the hard drive clean. Erase everything and just start all over again. Of course, the problem with this is that I don’t have any Windows XP installation disks. Somehow, when I bought the computer, they never gave me one. Therefore, if something goes wrong during my hard drive reformatting, I’ll be stuck.

Of course, there’s the wonder of the internet (and Lifehacker). I searched their site and found that somebody has posted a comment on an article about hard drive reformatting: Dell computers (some of them anyway) have a PC Restore function. Basically, they have a hidden partition in the hard drive that contains an image of the drive when they first shipped it to you. This can be accessed by pressing CTRL+F11 during start-up and it will erase everything on your hard drive and restore it to the original condition like when you first take it out of the box.

So, I spent the whole of today’s morning thinking about it. Should I, or shouldn’t I? It’s irreversible, so if something goes awry I can’t really do anything at all. But then I’ve backed up most of my data anyway. So my fingers hover on the figurative big red button until...

... I pressed it.

I restarted the computer, waited until the big Dell with the white bar came up, and pressed CTRL+F11.

The PC Restore thingy came up. It asked me if I want to restore or reboot (normal start-up). I clicked restore, confirmed it and...

This is it, then. No turning back.

Finally, after about five minutes, it’s over. And no, I’m not kidding, getting rid of everything takes just five minutes.

Rebooted again, and I was greeted by the computer thanking me for purchasing Dell. Yay!

What do you know, I have a spanking new computer! Well, new in terms of the ... things inside it anyway. So, after the initial fill this and that, getting rid of the crap software that Dell bundled into my computer, and downloading 86 Windows automatic updates, my computer's ready to be used! Of course, I then have to install all the necessary programs again (McAfee, Firefox, WinRar, iTunes etc) and copy all my pics and music back into the computer but they’re not too bad. So now (since it’s ‘new’) it’s going really fast again.

Well, that’s all that I did today. It’s a good thing, the PC Restore feature. Next time something goes terribly wrong and I can’t be bothered to figure out what’s going on, I’ll know what to do.

Yaz.

A bit of trouble

I have quite a haphazard way of organising my music, remnants from the day when I first bought my laptop and didn't know any better. The files are sorted in random folders and some of them are all over the place. Never got round to actually organising it properly, until today.

So I opened iTunes and pressed the consolidate library button to copy all my music under the iTunes folder and I was planning to delete the redundant haphazardly-organised original music files afterwards. But then suddenly everything went into slow motion and my computer presented me with the Blue Screen of Death!!

I managed to get everything under control now (well, barely) but my computer is currently being very sluggish and so it seems like I will have my hands full trying to fix this. Sigh... this might take all night.

Yaz.

After the first week

Hi guys! How were you finding the first week of the new year? Anything interesting happening? Well, my lectures start in eleven days so there isn’t much going on, yet. So far, I’ve only noticed one person among my friends who is back in Trinity from the holidays and it made me realise how much I’ve missed the human presence here. Oh, there are other people near where I live, but they mostly spend their days watching anime/playing video games (though there’s nothing wrong with that; it is, after all, a holiday). It’s just that the presence of human activity makes the place a bit more… well, lively.

Just received some letters from the bank. Apparently they increased my overdraft limit by £500 to £1750, which is very nice of them though I doubt I will be reaching the limit anytime soon, if such a time exists. Unfortunately, they didn’t do anything to my credit card limit. A friend told me that maybe that’s due to the fact that I never use it, so I guess I’ll use that more often instead of my debit card.

Just watched a pretty amazing film this afternoon. Unfortunately I can’t put it down here since it might tell a bit too much (or maybe too little) about myself, so I’ll leave it at that. Heh heh heh.

Sorry for being so cryptic =)

Yaz.

Less Than Ideal

The thing is that you’d expect the New Year to start in a grandiose kind of way: with sparkling and dazzling fireworks which made a spectacular view along the Thames and the London Eye, all those people in the crowd cheering and shouting as soon as the countdown ends, together with the chimes of the Big Ben. Oh, the fireworks were sparkly all right… but only if you could see it.

I walked with a friend from Trafalgar Square towards the Thames but every way which we tried was blocked. We ended up in an area with a big screen instead, with the consolation view of the top bit of the London Eye. Imagine that, the TOP bit. Only. Which means that we also saw just a fraction of the fireworks too. Plus, it was raining to boot, albeit short and not heavy. Still, not the experience that I expected.

Oh well. To be fair, I know a certain someone who got this most excellent view of the whole New Year celebration from the Millennium Bridge but he got there at seven, so there’s a certain trade-off between the best view and the time needed to arrive there. I guess I’m just grumpy because I went to see the fireworks at around the same time last year (31 December 2006, that is) that I did this year and I still managed to get to the riverbank and have a full view of the London Eye. So when things didn’t turn out the way I expected I guess I got a little sulky.

In any case, it doesn’t really do to start the year with a negative note, so we’ll stop talking about it and move on to the next topic. Term is about to start (January 15, to be exact) and I’ve got an e-mail about next year’s room ballot. So now I’m thinking about what kinds of room should I live in next year. Two candidate places, really. The place that I live now, which is called the Blue Boar’s Court that has nice modern en-suite rooms; or the ever famous Great Court.

Now, for you who don’t know, rooms in Great Court are prized possessions. They are MASSIVE, and the people who tend to live there are scholars like me since we are placed on top of the ballot. Scholars can retain their room every year, but Great Court rooms are the exceptions. A Trinity College student can only live there for one year maximum of their studies*. That should give you an idea of how sought after it is. Apart from them being huge, the Great Court itself is a place that you can show to people with pride since it looks magnificent. However, most of the rooms don’t have en-suite bathrooms, which is a really important factor to me. Hence, I will most probably choose one of the Blue Boar rooms. But I really haven’t decided yet. And my ballot is number 21 out of 41 people, smack in the middle, so there’s a good chance the people above me will take the two Great Court rooms with showers that I wanted, but we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, happy New Year and have a good start to term!

Yaz

* Edit: Apparently the rulebook says that you can live in Great Court once throughout your scholarship. This means that if you chose a Great Court Room as a Junior Scholar, you can choose it again the year afterwards if you become a Senior Scholar, since those two count as different scholarships.

My Trip: Part 3

Right, this is long overdue but I’ll try to finish it. On the fourth day we were in Vienna but (and this is a last minute thing that we did on a whim) we decided to ride a bus to Bratislava in Slovakia, which is quite near to Vienna. This is because some of us felt that one day is enough to visit Vienna, and anyway, it would be nice to add another country to the list of those that we’ve visited so why not?

Bratislava isn’t really tourist friendly and it’s hard to find people who speak English, but one thing I noticed is that stuff are really cheap here (and it says that in the guidebook as well). We found a Tesco, but there’s no sign of my favourite tea so I bought a Lipton Orange Jaipur instead, which was recommended to me by my friend. Afterwards, we visited a castle and paid a visit to the river Danube.

On the last day, we walked around Vienna. Unfortunately at the time I was freezing cold and couldn’t be bothered to figure out the names of the places that we visited so I’m afraid I won’t be able to tell you much about them. Anyway, here are some pictures:

Like Germany, Christmas markets are everywhere here too

Right, so now I've seen the river Danube in three different countries: Hungary, Slovakia and Austria. Guess it must be huge.



Guess that's all. Have a Happy New Year!

Yaz.