My Curriculum Vitae

I've survived until my 4th day here, woohoo! I've gotten a little bit more familiar with the city, as I walked around half of it with some international students I met. Liverpool is quite an interesting city to look at, because it has such a contrast architecture-wise. There's a fine mixture of old, beautiful Victorian buildnings, and just generally old brick buildings, along with modern simple, colourful architecture. Although unfortunately, there are also quite a few old, yucky, cementy block buildings from the post-war period.

The people of the city are all rather friendly. I have become more used to people, men, women, old, young, calling me "Love". It's quite vomit-inducing if used by the wrong people, yet quite nice and warm if used by the right people. The people here seem to be typical examples of friendly small town people, although the city is pretty big, which is great. However, there seems to be a quite a lot of poverty here too, people who seem poor and uneducated are a common sight on the streets.

There have been two days with events for the international students, which I think is great, as many students have only just arrived without any idea what to expect. I have only met one international student who will also study medicine, I hope there are plenty more as I don't want to only be surrounded by British medics.

Talking about the British, yesterday night, there was a freaking house party in our kitchen. The Brits in my corridor seemed to have invited every other Brit living in the same building, especially girls dressed up like effing whores. They drank until about 6am in the morning. I managed to fall alseep sometime after midnight as I was tired, but then woke up a few times in the middle of the night. By about 6am, there was finally peace, it became sooo quiet and nice. However, the kitchen and stairs outside suffered considerable damage, as the kitchen currently looks like a warzone, and the anti-slide black patch on one of the stairs has been kicked off.

I don't have time to write more right now, as I'm meeting up with a few international students in a minute. Need to get dressed, so will write more next time!

Yo, guess what! I've moved into my university halls! Yesterday was the move-in date, so I travelled from London to Liverpool in the morning. The journey went quite smoothly considering how much luggage I had. I was annoyed by the businessman who sat opposite me on the train though, he had such a grumpy expression on his face!

Well, where to start? I have acquired so many new impessions and thoughts. Prior to moving to Liverpool yesterday, I hadn't really given the whole thing much thought, or actually, I hadn't devoted much effort or time to think about it. Because of something quite serious that's happened to the BF recently, all my anticipation, nervousness, excitement, dread, uncertainty, and all the other mixture of emotions involved with moving, have been obscured and drowned by his situation.

However, on the night of the 17th, I couldn't fall asleep. I suddenly felt terrified of leaving everything behind. I've become used to and very comfortable living with my BF in London, and even with my parents in Sweden. All of a sudden, I desperately wanted to grab on to either of those lifestyles, I didn't want a foreign one surrounded by strangers. I'm of course grateful of this opportunity of moving to a new city and studying in a good university. At this moment though, all I feel is how I overwhelmingly just want to live in London with the BF again. I feel lonely here.

I live in a flat with five other flatmates, who are all British. After one and a half days with them, I can sum up their lifestyle in 6 words: seize-every-opportunity-to-get-wasted! I feel very different from them, and their world. Just look at the contents of the fridge: I have carrots, tomatoes, avocados, olives, fresh fish etc. They have beer, coke, vodka, more beer, rum, wine, even more beer, and juice. Freaking fluid diet! They seem to be cool and nice people though.

Tomorrow morning is the first official Fresher's Week event, it's a Welcome Fair for international students. I'm looking forward to that, as the British drinking feast is kind of getting repetitive. I hope the international students have a more exciting lifestyle than getting drunk night after night. In the afternoon, the international students are all going to go and have afternoon tea in a hotel, very British ;)

I will take some photos and write more about Liverpool and everything else later. Bye for now!

The other day, I saw this quote inscribed on someone's front door, and I really loved it: Do what you like and like what you do.

I found a saved file on my USB earlier with a list of random thoughts I had saved from a website a while ago. Here're some of the funnier ones:
- Are the children who act in rated R movies allowed to see them?
- Who was the first person to say "See that chicken over there? I'm going to eat the first thing that comes out of its butt"?
- Why do we wash behind our ears? Who really looks there?
- If a missing person sees their picture on a milk carton that offers a reward, would they get the money?
- If scientists were ever going to figure out how to travel through time, wouldn't we now be seeing people from the future?
- Since bread is square, why is sandwich meat round?

Hihi, there are some more, but I'll post them some other time!

P.S. I just arrived in London again this afternoon. My friend called me a globetrotter, I guess he does make some sense eh, I do get around quite a lot. I'm currently back in my BF's flat, alone. He's not back from Hong Kong yet, so I will be here without him until I go to Liverpool and move into my Uni halls (on Saturday). Anyone wanna come here and keep me company until then? :)

I captured some photos of some interesting, random, quirky, cool, beautiful things and scenaries in Canada that didn't really fit into my previous two posts about my visit. So here's a separate little post dedicated to these photos:

1) A horse-owner dyed his/her beloved pet's mane a lovely streak of bright neon pink. I wonder whether the horse had any say in the choice of colour...? Freaking animal abuse!


2) This must be the oldest couple I've seen holding hands, and when they sat down on the bench there for a break from walking by the sea, I had to snap a photo of their backs. This simple photo expresses all we want in life eh? Someone to grow old with, to chat to, to be there for each other in happiness and sadness, health and sickness.


3) My sister found this heart-shaped little stone on the beach of the whale-watching location. She called it "the jealousy heart". I thought the stone and its colour (despite the jealousy) were beautiful :)


4) Now this photo, ladies and gentlemen, is the Canadian countryside. After I have done a lot of convincing my BF, that white house (white spot on the left) shall be mine ;) The scenary was truly breath-taking, this photo doesn't do the place justice! Imagine growing small orchard of apple and pear trees there, ahhhh, heaven. I preliminarily invite my blog-readers for apple pie in x years :)


5) I forgot to mention that we also went to the Niagara Falls, the Falls that border USA and Canada. The Falls were beautiful and huge, and there was a ship tour that took me into the middle of all that foggy, misty, watery thingy you see in the photo below. I got totally soaked, but it was so worth it!

Besides whale-watching we headed for Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto, all the major cities. Quebec City was a lovely place, a place where I can imagine spending maaany lazy vacation days in the future! The old town of Quebec City is how Paris would be like in my imagination: there are cafes lining the narrow cobbles streets among small botiques and restaurants; people speak French, have horrible English pronunciation, and greet me with "Bonjour!"; above all, there are sooo many delicious, mouth-watering pastries and cakes displayed along the cafe windows. This place has really made me want to vacation in France! Besides gaining this desire to visit France, I bet my head I also gained lots of pounds around my tummy, arms and legs, grr!

(Below) So worth dying for!!!



Old Town of Quebec City (lots of tourists!).


I didn't particularly like Montreal, Ottawa or Toronto much. There's nothing special about those places, despite the fact that they are major cities. Quebec City was special because of their "French-wannabe" aspect, but the remaining three cities really felt quite bland. I suppose Montreal was alright, but it felt like a dirty and old place (and not old in a good way, unlike Quebec City). Ottawa was just utterly boring, and it was freaking impossible to find a shop that sells fresh fruit! I really craved for an apple, but we just couldn't find a single place selling fresh apple! There were plenty of apple beverages, apple sweets, and other stupid apple-flavoured shit, but no damn simple fresh apples, freaking ridiculous. The only reason Ottawa is the capital city of Canada is because of its location, being in between the province Ontario and Quebec, so that it would be fair (I think). In reality, Ottawa has very little things of interest, and their Parliament building is a Big-Ben-Wannabe-Replica-but-uglier construction (photo below).


Toronto- there were a hell lot of Chinese immigrants. Apparently, one in six people is a Chinese person, but it felt more like every other person was Chinese! I believe Toronto is very similar to a typical American city: there is a downtown where the financial district and some shops are located. However, most people live outside the actual city in suburbs, which makes the city centre seem kind of dead. I hate this kind of city layout, especially because there were thousands of huge chain shops, like Wal-mart, McDonald's, Starbucks, and other gigantic malls lining both sides of the highway in the suburbian areas, where most people do their shopping and seek entertainment. This means that people have to rely on their cars to get anywhere, especially since public transportation services were quite inconvenient. Urgh, I can't imagine having such a car-suburb lifestyle.

Toronto from above (I was in the CN Tower).