Moving house!

Every year in London, we move house. I've lived in 4 different places already, in the 4 years that I've been in London. Come June, the tally will be 5.

When I was a student, in my first year, housing was guaranteed by the college. i.e., we had a dorm (also called a house or hall) to live in. It was relatively cheap, about 85 pounds a week - but we had to share toilet and kitchen. Living in a dorm was definitely a great experience.... but lets not digress.

In my second year I lived with four other flatmates. We rented a flat from an Egyptian landlord. The place was relatively cheap, at 400 per week, but the place was fairly run-down. The carpet and the curtains were very dirty, the heater wasn't working when we moved in, even the beds, tables, chairs were all the cheapest furniture from Argos. Worst of all, the landlord would say "Anything you want, I will give you..." But nothing he promised ever happens. We learnt not to trust dodgy Egyptians from then on. We decided to shift house the next year.

For the third year, L and I very luckily found a superbly cheap place at 325 per week (for 4pple). The landlord was British, owned a few other units along the road, and didn't go through an agent to let out the flat - thus saving us the agency fee. The furniture was old, but good quality, and we pretty much loved the flat. Unfortunately, my third year was to be my last year in London...

And then as you know I went to the States for 1 year... and found a job back in London.

I didn't have much of a choice over the place I'd live for my fourth year in London. Thankfully I had a friend who'd be working in London too, so I asked him if he would accept me as a housemate. The househunting basically involved me looking at photographs of the place over email and agreeing on the conditions... I'm pretty happy with the place I'm living now, though I'm paying about 130 a week.

My newest home would be pretty good too! My rent will go up by 5 pounds a week, but I guess its worth it, for the nicer toilet, kitchen, and humongous lounge. I'll post some pictures when I move in.

Answers to the personality quiz...

If you haven't done the quiz yet, please see this post first.


** Warning! Spoiler for the quiz in question ahead. If you really don't want to do the quiz before reading, its your own fault! **


The rabbit in the quiz represents love, and the key represents your career. the bridge/river is an obstacle. thats it.

My story was that I was holding a key and crossing the bridge when a cute rabbit jumped up, took the key away from me and hopped across the bridge. You can interpret it either as I gave up my career for love, or that my love interest helped me with my career. haha.

I got another friend whose bf told her the story was: He was holding this very cute rabbit, crossed the bridge, and exchanged the rabbit for the key. haha, upon being informed that the rabbit represents her, he changed his answer and said he exchanged the key for the rabbit. glib tongue neh?

Yet another story I heard was that she was carrying the key across the bridge, when she saw this cute bunny swimming in the river. She ignored the rabbit and walked on. haha.

i think this quiz is so cute.

Soccer, after one whole year.

Never thought I'll get a chance to play football (soccer) again, but yesterday my colleague asked me to join him and his HK friends to play. I was so happy that I went down to Lillywhites and bought a brand new pair of astro turf boots just for that.

I thought it was a 40min game initially. We all thought it was. So we went all out.

40 mins later, nobody chased us away so we continued playing. Before we knew it, we had played almost 3 hours! At the end we were so tired we couldn't even walk properly. I suffered several blisters (blame it on the new shoes), and a black toe.

Before the game:














After the game:



























Actually I took the above pictures at the same time. The top picture is my right foot. Yeah, I know I have two left feet...

Little personality/life quiz...

I don't know if we can call it a quiz. You know when somebody asks you this sort of question "you're walking along a path in a forest when the path branches into two. do you take the left fork or the right fork?" if you answer left you're so and so and if you answer right you're so and so...

well i've got a similar question. you can either jot your answers down in the comments or mentally. i'll reveal the answers in about a week.

Question.
Form a story using your imagination and creativity using the following nouns:
River
Bridge
Rabbit
Key
Yourself (i.e., "Me" or "I")

Have fun!

Ba1-Shi2

Ba1 shi2 means eighty in Mandarin. its also a very complicated bridge-like game.

You know how people like to modify games when it gets too boring? well, i think bridge has the most modifications... lets see, besides the normal fixed partner bridge, there's floating partner bridge, german bridge, spades, and now bashi...

its damn complicated. i will not be able to note down all the rules here. like bridge, there are 4 players, 4 suits, and the same kind of trumping process. but thats where the similarity ends. Besides playing with 2 sets of cards instead of 1, there's a trump number (that changes almost every round) in addition to the trump suit, there're jokers, and you can play more than one card at a time. further, you don't just try to win sets, you neet to win "points", and points are just 5s, 10s and Ks.

thats just the gist of it. of course there's more to it, including the number of points you need to "shang4 tai2" (climb onto the platform)... it took me 15 minutes of listening and two/three rounds before i could manage to play it - but even then I was still very blur and inexperienced and caused my partner to lose a few times...

anyway, i played with a bunch of friends from 6pm. and the game wasn't completed until 11pm. and we didn't have dinner. so i'm starving right now.

but its very fun. i don't mind spending my sundays playing cards...

The cutest girl I met, ever.

I'm risking making my gf jealous with this post...

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Today I had dinner with a super cute girl. She pointed at my head and said, "Your hair, your hair..."

uh huh?

"so messeeeeeeee!"

haha, i guess its true, my hair was a little messy. But the way she said it was soo cute, I didn't feel upset at all.

"Very messy meh?" I asked her seriously...

She shook her head this time. haha.

Throughout the whole dinner she'd keep me smiling: like when she pointed at the fish and said, "I don't like that"; or when she told me she went up to tower bridge (didn't actually go up, as I found out in the end).

The best part of all, was when we left dinner. She said, looking coyly at my feet, "Thank you for joining me."

*oh* , so cute.


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she's 3 years old, by the way, and I had dinner with her parents.

I think I hate myself.

I'm such a lazy bum. Given the time and space, I'll just sit at home and rot all day. I'll consider doing laundry as doing something.

I'm such a bad socialite. I can't keep up conversations for long, and I'm super damn uninteresting, i think. If you put two of me together, they'd probably run out of things to say in 3 minutes...

I give up easily. I don't fight for the things I want... which brings me to another point...

I don't really know what I want.

I think I'm in a quarter-century crisis...

Pros and Cons of 24 degree celcius weather

Pros:
- It feels warm enough to not wear a jacket.
- The sun is usually shining. I love the sun.
- The surface area of female skin exposed usually goes up in correlation with the weather. This is never a bad thing.

Cons:
- The gym stinks...

New York Trip

I was at NY for a week, on a "business" trip. It wasn't really a business trip of course, since I didn't do any business, but it was paid for by my bank. Cool huh?

For the first time in my 26 years of life, I sat First Class on a long-haul flight (not exactly that long either, cus it was only about 7 hr flying time...). Man, it was so exciting. Now I know what priviledged means...

But enough about the flight, lest you people start thinking I'm bragging... haha..

New York was s-p-l-e-n-d-i-d!

You know how it snows in NY but not London? So I assumed that NY would be colder than London. The weather over here was starting to get warmer, but still required a fleece jacket. Naturally I thought I should bring an overcoat to NY.

BUT, when I exited the airport, instead of the dreary cold weather I was expecting, I found sunshine and a nice cool breeze! Yoohoo!

The good weather persisted all the time for the entire 7 days I was there. How can the weather be so good for so long? Had I gotten so used to London???

I spent the weekend by myself in Manhattan. And guess what I did?

I walked down to Central Park, found a nice patch of green grass, took off my shirt and photosynthesized (vitamin D and melanin that is).

There were a couple of times when I thought to myself "life is good...". Once was when I was in the California sunshine, driving this huge-ass SUV with my gf beside me.

This time in Central Park, I found myself thinking again, "life is good". In case I hadn't told you before, that was one of the most pleasurable things in life (in my opinion of course): Lie in the sun on a patch of green grass with a Jamba Juice (really nice fruit smoothie) in hand.

== on a side note ==
there are a couple of things which I deem to be really enjoyable (not exhaustive list)
- hanging out with a bunch of good friends at a beach BBQ.
- lying on the sand/grass/air mattress at a beach/park/pool under the sun with a nice cool drink. a partner to share the joy would be highly desired as well...
- soaking in a hot tub / jacuzzi (again the cool drink and partner would be nice to have) at a spa or resort
- snowboarding followed by a nice hearty steak and wine
===

hmm.. come to think of it, I've sort of done all of the above. Except the air mattress part...

The only regret in that trip was that I was alone.

"Rone-ry, I'm so rone-ry..." (its one funny song from the show Team America)

Man, I could go on and on about the trip, I think I'll reserve more for later. Seeya!