hello from uk!

I know, I know. I should have brought a camera with me, or at least a phone equipped with one so that I could camwhore left and right and put up pictures of my room on Facebook for the pleasures of whatever weird voyeurs that might lurk out there, like every other Joe in my course. So much for me and my basic phone eh.

Oh, and if it wasn't obvious already in that picture my balls were slowly dropping off from the cold. Summer my ass. When I heard that it was summer in the UK I went "Oh that shouldn't be too bad perhaps a cotton hoodie will do. After all, summer is all about the FUN IN THE SUN and PLEASANTLY WARM temperature, right?"

Wrong. We actually had hail yesterday. It felt like God was pissing kidney stones on us.

It had been two weeks since I landed in the UK, and well, despite my complaints about the weather, I am really starting to call this place home. Oh suuure, there were that two major assignments we got on the first week itself, or that series of vaccination we were subjected to (I am extremely terrified of needles, because they seem to go into the flesh like a hot knife through butter okay how could you not be terrified of that), but Sheffield's charm is starting to get to me.

And what charm, you may ask. Well, first of all, 7 out of 10 women here are HOT. And I mean Megan Fox hot, not the Malaysian (meh) Dreamgirl hot. When I dropped by one of the clubs I actually felt intimidated by their sheer number and hotness. Like okay ohmygawd she looks like Emma Watson meets Kate Beckinsale okay okay act cool why the fuck are you holding your beer like that stop crossing your legs ACT COOL you wuss!

(For those of you who might make the likely conclusion, I swear that is not the reason I'm getting a job at the clubs. A senior offered me that job, cross my heart)

And the lecturers! They are so friendly that it scares us okay. Back at TARC the typical engineering lecturer would be a balding old man with inch thick glasses walking about with a frown. Okay lah there is one guy here who is something like that but he keeps on giving us tips on how to increase our marketability as engineers next time so that makes him pretty alright.

I have another lecturer who brought in a football during the first lecture, declared that she (yes, a she) is a Sheffield United fan (whooo Sheffield!!) and then started tossing that ball at us so that the person who caught it would have to stand up and introduce themselves. You know lah TARCians all damn shy wan so some actually ducked in their seats to avoid catching that ball. Damn funny. Then there is another guy who has a killer CV, ex-Boeing engineer and all. He actually calculated how much we are paying for a minute of his time, which is 20 pence btw, and then triumphantly declared that, and I quote, "For every five minutes you come late to class, you wasted £1."

I think it had some effect on us, because everyone is penny-pinching here and £1 is a big deal to us because you could actually buy a can of baked beans and live on it for half a day! I survived on microwaved food for a week (do not attempt that because I found out the hard way that a diet of irradiated food is extremely bowel-unfriendly) before I summon up the guts to go within a five feet radius of the oven and cook something by myself without burning the entire building down.

I ended up with a reasonably edible chicken sandwich and omelette. My skillzzz has greatly improved since then, because I just made an awesome chicken and egg salad for dinner! And the day before I made grilled chicken breasts and scrambled eggs! Ha! The best chefs in the world are men, didn't you know?

...

Okay lah maybe I need to use slightly more diverse ingredients. The pork shoulder at Sainsbury's look really, really yummy :)