hakuna matata

wonder if anyone still reads this. it's been a month! wow.

anyway, crazy europe trip! i didn't understand why cheukka only wanted to travel for a week or 10 days at most, but now i do. it is tiring to not have a real home for too long. and the irony of it all... while i'm thinking of a room to come back to, the storm is busy wrecking it. well, not exactly, since the storm happened like 5th jan or something, pretty near the end of my trip.

i'm glad i got to see so many places though! we had some hilarious times... i still need to type out those quotes. and i don't know if not bringing my macbook along was a good idea or not. i guess i'm glad i didn't have to carry it around cos it IS kind of heavy.. but i could've done my resume stuff and all that. maybe.

so.. london. it was cold. and i don't really remember what i thought of it. maybe big cities just don't have as well-defined characters? or maybe we didn't do enough walking around to get a sense... took a lot of tubes. haha. while poor tracy was trying to keep warm. anyhow, cheukka met us at the airport! phew:p and got to meet kahli one of the days, which was fun too.

rome. been there, it was fun going thru the market and i was so tempted to buy lychees/clementines! lychees reminded me a LOT of vietnam and PV07... and the discovery that we should google good places to eat instead of settling for crappy food wherever we happen to find it. i don't even know why food has become that important, it must be jackie's fault :p

florence. i don't know why but it looked like what i thought prague would look like! the architecture of the church and the dull colors... prague was so not like that. oh well. nice quaint little town. and when i say little, i mean little. i'm still wondering where the stanford in florence campus was. but i was always fascinated with the word "firenze" and am glad i finally found out it's florence. haha.

venice. always wanted to go see! sea-town always fascinated me. pity we arrived in crappy weather (cloudy and cold), but thankfully it cleared up (sunny but still cold). the idea of boats as "buses" is so novel (to me, anyway) and refreshingly different. it takes forever to get to places though, sometimes i just wish we had a speedboat. being near the sea is lovely though, always liked water. very peaceful.

paris. been there too, but now i actually knew where i was (navigating) and that's a nice feeling to have. as opposed to just following people around... and now i can speak! kind of. haha. and i love patisseries. although i think i unfortunately ate too many sweet things. ooh, met liangsi and yanghan and qinghan and kevin! that was fun. yanghan looks a little different from what i remembered from JC... and when i saw qinghan i was like hmm she looks slightly familiar. then when she introduced i was like oh! ... haha. cool. and kevin looks so much like jipson, i don't even know why. well ok maybe not THAT much, but somehow or other.

prague. yayyyy i finally got to meet ting after 2 years! maybe 3. hm. and her boyfriend. haha. they're so cute. we had a lot of fun times though, despite freezing. and i got to go shopping on my own for one day, which was nice... anyway it was a pity serene wasn't there, would've been even funnier i think.

back to london, where i try to figure out what i'm doing on 6 jan. so i was supposed to have lunch with tapiwa and then shop... but he gave me the wrong phone no. and so while i was trying to figure out wat his no. was, hk and jiahui persuaded me to go down to cambridge. i guess it was hk saying that it would be nice for me to come when people are there to show me around that clinched it. since my whole point of coming to europe this year was to see people before they graduate. pity i didn't manage to see aud/puee/yunlei. silly pple. anyway, cambridge is so pretty. i guess it's more landscaped than stanford... and i got to play a pipe organ! wish i knew more about how it worked.. and i should play piano more often. haiyah.

so... sat is my disaster night. when i realize i forgot to pay my credit card bill, and i see this email w subject "flood damage to room 211" and at first i'm like is that spam.. then i realized that IS my room number so i'd better read it. at first i'm like is this a joke... such a horror.

anyway the long and short of it is that there were huge storms in northern california on 5 jan (i think, or maybe 4th?) and water clogged up the drainage pipes on the 3rd floor balcony, which is directly above my room. so.. the water seeped through the ceiling, collected on the floor, and seeped through the carpet. thereby destroying all our bedding (which they sent to laundry but i am most certainly not accepting the laundered stuff) and various other things.

spent most of this week packing up and moving in, my boxes are still in such disarray and i've been so bad with emails and things. it's sad how i can't really get stuff done unless i have a to-do list. else i just get distracted and forget things and blah.

having hell deciding what to claim and all that... and buying stuff this weekend at heavenly.. man. such a pain that i almost hate snowboarding, which would be terribly sad since i now have a new board. but i hope stuff works out.