once upon a december

You know its already week 9 of term when your last update is from week 2 and everybody’s wondering if you’ve died in London.

On the contrary, my dears, I have been living it up

As I think I’ve said on a previous incarnation of this blog, the length and frequency of posts on this blog is indirectly proportionate to the number of events going on in my life. And you know how it is once things accumulate, you feel like you can’t start on the most recent event/insight until you’ve talked about the one before that, and then the one before, and then before…etc. So you tell yourself that one day you will properly sit down and note down the nth amount of amazing and wonderful things that have happened to you, which of course, never comes. Until you go for an absolutely moving talk like the one I was at today.

S in conjunction our main media theories course, POLIS, the media think tank that is a part of LSE, organizes weekly forums with industry people to talk about various issues relating to media and identity across a geographical span, such as media in the Middle East, coverage of the collapse of communism in Central Europe and closer to home, perspectives on UK community media outlets. Just this evening, and in the final instalment of the talks this term, we listened to Serge and Patrick, two survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide give their take on it.

Patrick shared generally about what he thought of media coverage of the event, how journalists could have done more and still can for reconciliation. But I thought the better speaker was Serge, who spoke very movingly (I even got goosebumps at some points!) about having to watch his parents kneel before the perpetrators, just narrowly missing death; watching his best friend getting killed right in front of him while he was spared because he was disguised as girl; watching dogs tear at his former neighbours’ rotting flesh on the streets; hearing women scream as they were being raped on the doorsteps of a church; and watching a pregnant woman writhe to death with the feotus in her belly exposed after being brutally slashed. Imagine having to go through all this, at only primary school age! Though he works as a tour guide at the genocide museum in Rwanda now (and probably has to share these accounts quite regularly), you could still see his genuine pain recounting these events with his small pauses between each account, and his constant repetition of “but we don’t have to share everything..” (as though some psychology counselor fed him that line) before starting on the next anecdote, his heavy stress and repeated mention of 21st April (the day he last saw his father and elder brother, who were taken away by the killers before his very eyes) and little slips about how these images still appear before him regularly.

The third speaker was Lindsey Hilsum, currently Channel 4’s world news editor but formerly a freelance journalist cum Rwanda-based Unicef staff member at the outbreak of the genocide in April 1994. She spoke about the difficulty of getting information on the ground at the time, having to live in constant fear of roadblocks and drunken men and having to hear her Tutsi friends’ last words as they telephoned her in desperation when the perpetrators came knocking on their doors. What particularly struck me was how boldly she admitted that she “got it all wrong” in her coverage of the whole affair – that the world genocide was only used much later in international news coverage; how little coordination between the newsdesk and the bureaus; how nobody knew what a scale it would grow to or even what a ‘war crime’ technically was; and how the international press were all turned towards what they wanted to watch, the first democratic elections in South Africa, rather than the atrocities happening just further up the continent.

What a thoroughly stimulating one and a half hours! Though I’ve read repeatedly about the genocide, it doesn’t really hit home until you watch and hear first-hand accounts of people who were physically there – and watch how they painfully but bravely struggle to move on and reconstruct their lives by educating themselves and others.

My previously withering hopes of one day being a foreign correspondent in some exciting ‘don’t tell my mother’ locale have been reignited! All my efforts the last few weeks in setting myself up as a (luxury) travel writer now seem so flippant in comparison. I am utterly ashamed!

PS:

Bits and bobs of other updates on how much I love London to come soon, although the globebunny moniker is starting to urk me slightly. Expect some revamps in the near future (when I have the time, of course, which is kind of er, never.)

liver life to the fullest

you know you have transitioned to week 1 of school when the icebreaker questions change from “where are you from? which course are you in?” to “so what did you think of that lecture?” and “which modules are you taking?”

academically, this week has mostly been about shopping for courses and sitting in way more lectures than i can handle (but i guess i shouldn’t be complaining. seminars only start next week so that’s when the real stress and pile of readings start to weigh in). the LSE campus is much smaller and much, much more congested than i imagined it to be – but i guess that’s a good thing in a way because your chances of bumping into familiar faces are very high as well! something which i did not like at penn – after you meet someone interesting you almost never get to see them again, unless you specifically call them out for coffee!

aside from the shock of finding out that i have to do a statistics course ON TOP of a compulsory quantitative research module and a day later, finding out that the stats lecture was TWO whole hours and not one as i had understood, the rest of my courses seem pretty engaging and relevant to my interests. in fact, i am having so much trouble trying to pick two out of three optional courses (the citizenship and media, journalism practices and regulation and media modules) that i think i might just take all three! obtaining readings are such a problem though as the library is always packed with people and the books are always loaned out. no wonder that at every induction meeting i have been too, i have observed a repeated emphasis on registration for courses, lectures, talks etc being on a first-come-first-served basis (“but don’t panic, there will be spaces for everyone!” they always seem to assure, as though anticipating a blood bath.) a call to sharpen my fingernails, perhaps?

school aside, week 1 has been full of lovely liquid discoveries! on wednesday night, i braved the soggy weather to meet a new friend for a drink at angel, a lively little neighbourhood which i had an immediate deja vu upon seeing, i’m so sure i must have visited the place when i was on exchange at oxford 2 years ago! we were originally meant to drink at this bar called embassy but apparently it was next to empty, so we ended up doing a mini bar-crawl through the neighbourhood. we first stopped at elk in the woods, a woody little place with large leather sofas that felt a little like a ski resort and served up healthy-sounding cocktails like elderflower martinis and grapefruit mojitos. then we went to the old queen’s head, which reminded me of a posh frathouse nicknamed “the castle” at penn – right down to the moose head in the middle of the room and its painted portraits of old important men, though the crowd was young and pretty chilled out.

angel by night. cred: www.theoldqueenshead.com

our final stop when everything else had closed, and by some dude-on-the-street’s recommendation, was at slim jim’s liquor store (really a dive bar, despite its name), an american-themed, lowly lit place with ripped leather seats, neon lights and a largely male population. still, mostly because of its size i think, we had quite a good time there and spoke to a few other random people, including three lawyers who kept asking where all the girls in the bar had gone? (i was one of about like, three.) the reviews for the bar are hilarious too.

then last night, greg, a friend i had met in singapore when he was working as a bar manager in clarke quay but who has since relocated to london temporarily, invited me to a party held by some of his former business associates in london (he was involved in the nightlife industry here for several years before singapore). the party was held by the people behind monkey shoulder whiskey and the place was amazingly decorated to theme!

a badly, swiftly snapped picture because i didn’t want to seem nooby. heh.

show me the monkey!

loved especially the invitation card in the form of a golden key, the high-ceilinged poker rooms and monkey-themed cocktails like “show me the monkey!”. had such a kick out of saying that to the bartender. apparently the venue is a mansion owned by a rich aristocrat who regularly rents it out for parties! check out the dude via the house’s website, he looks like something out of madame tussaud’s

the theme for the night was 1920s but greg regretfully did not tell me about that earlier so all i could do was gawk and ogle at the people who did dress up – and strike up conversations with them via compliments! one girl had just moved here from dublin and another spent a whole year in thailand – it’s amazing how easy it is to meet people in london and i am totally loving the diversity (i even recently had a nice long conversation with someone because we were both lost trying to find our way around the oxford circus tube station! oops!)

with all the drinking i have been doing for orientation, i’m also relieved to have found a hot yoga studio i can attend in london! i haven’t been for about a month because of all the travelling and settling into london that i was doing in september, so it sure feels good to be detoxing again. the facilities and the studio are not as nice as pure yoga’s in singapore, but at least they have flexible 10-class packages (as opposed to the pricey monthly ones at pure) so i won’t kill myself if i get too busy to attend it twice-weekly. at least that’s the target for now. also, where the classes at pure are taught by instructors who gently coo out the steps and rhythmic counts, the instructor at my trial class today reminded me of a car saleswoman! all miked up and spewing a non-stop fiesty flow of encouraging words! rahr rahr rahr!

so for now, a quiet friday night in (although i feel so restless about it, maybe i am still not used to the student life in which friday nights lose their importance because any night can be a party night!) and tomorrow, i meet the school rowing team at 9am when we’ll head to the river for practice!

week 0

my, my, how i procrastinate. i had this post written out in my head, but somehow i’ve just been too busy (or lazy) to get down to typing it out.

anyway, a recap of last week, or week 0 at LSE!

on thursday night, i met up with cuifen and we went to check out a swishing event held by the friendly ladies behind refashionable. basically how the swap event works is like this: you select at least 5 items in your wardrobe that you would otherwise chuck out, bring it to the swap and pay 7 pounds for entry. the organisers then sort out all the clothes, shoes, accessories, bags that they have received while the donors help themselves to some cake and wine. about an hour or so after the start time, the organisers will signal the start of the swap and all the donors can help themselves to as many items as they have brought (ie: if you brought 6 items, you can only bring home six items.) i’d been to one in singapore before but the london one is slightly more organised and systematic, or maybe because their crowd was much smaller and hence far more civilised – about 20 people compared to the 50 or so back home.

cuifen and i had initially expected not to make away with much because as much as i love secondhand/charity store-shopping, i always have the problem of not being able to find my size in the land of larger angmos, but we were quite pleasantly surprised! there were many size 8 items and some were quite cute too! not just the run-of-the-mill giordano t-shirts that i had seen at the singapore swap.

unfortunately we were quite slow and non-vicious in our grabbing so we missed out on a few nice pieces that we had originally set our eyes on, but the interesting thing is that there is still hope yet. some nice items do make it back to the up-for-grabs table after people who have first swiped them try them on and realise it doesn’t fit them so it does pay to linger around for abit. eventually i made away with a chilli red dress (cuifen’s, in fact! haha!), some wood earrings, two cute tops and a clubbing top – and with one unclaimed credit left for next month’s one too! can’t wait!

after le deluge, les bargains!

cuifen and i with our finds!

later that night, i joined lionel, my “childhood friend who i met playing catching at a birthday party when we were 12″ (or so we have been introducing each other to our new LSE friends ), kevin, another singaporean postgrad, and some of their friends from hall went to SE one, a club near london bridge, together. the club was nice – at least 4 large industrial-looking cavernous rooms playing different music – but the crowd was extremely disappointing. granted we went on student night for all london schools and at the start of term, so it was full of first year undergraduates dancing around awkwardly in a circle. hmmm. i also met a chirpy malaysian st martin’s student in the queue so it was nice to hear a familiar accent, but it later turned out she and her friend were more interested in finding guys to hook up with more than anything else. gua gua gua.

on friday, a good half of the students from my programme went away for a weekend retreat to cumberland lodge, a formal royal residence turned residence for students to hold conferences in, which – get this – lay on the edges of the queen’s backyard. windsor castle was literally a 45 minute stroll away, which we did on our last day. check out the pictures for that! so the weekend was essentially more orientation-like activities and mingling opportunities, which was really nice because i can now recognise at least 20 other people in my programme!

the lodge and our programme coordinator jean

bettina, my roommate for the weekend, and i in our cute little room that had an entirely carpeted bathroom O_o

windsor castle!

a bit on my course so far, so essentially there two tracks to my global and media communications programme. one part of the programme, with about 55 students this year, goes to the annenberg school at the university of southern california for their second year while my half, with about 25 students, goes to fudan university in shanghai. i’ve only met about 10 or so people personally in my programme, mostly those who went to the lodge weekend, but all of them seem really, really interesting! i think we’ve got a really diverse crowd, many western europeans who have lived, studied or worked in hong kong, singapore, tokyo and china, as well as many dual nationalitied people who grew up all over the world and lots more others i have yet to meet!

and best part of our programme: the school is arranging for us to take extra chinese lessons for free from the confucius institute! (which would cost 360 pounds a year otherwise.) i was planning to learn some russian which would help me on the transsiberian trip from london to shanghai i was hoping to pull off this summer, but perhaps i should shelve that for some advanced chinese classes – since i was disastrously poor at speaking with the dean of fudan graduate school who was with us at the lodge too! 真丢脸！

do not pass go

i have to do this sometime before i leave london. who’s in?

all’s well that ends well

before i recap on helsinki – where should i begin? the amazing food? the kindness in the hearts of many i’ve met? the better-than-expected weather? – let me fast track a little to the present: london.

so i’m finally back from all the travelling and got settled into my flat again two days ago. yesterday i did my registration and et cetera administrative hassles, as well as endured the nightmare that is fresher’s fair (100s of student clubs squashed into tiny seminar rooms across 6 floors of a building! couldn’t they have used a large hall instead??) it’s also weird that you have to pay membership fees for these student clubs before you can become a member, or even attend the induction meeting! but at 1pound for the year, they seem like a good deal (by flashing the membership card of the asian students society, for example, you can get 10 to 20% discounts at over 20 chinese restaurants in london – how asian to dangle such a good deal!) but after lionel and his friends and i trawled the compounds and collected stickers indicating our membership intent, our cards came up to about 30 to 50 pounds each! :S things on my list: visual arts society (weekly life drawing classes!), dance club (thinking of starting ballet), china development society (to get my bearings for my shanghai year), coxing for the rowing team (have a funny story about how i passed the compulsory swim test when i did coxing for my oxford college’s team two years ago – ask me about it sometime. in brief, i can’t swim ) and lionel’s favourite, which i joined for a kick, the SCHEME society, which organises things like free hugs day and dress-up-as-an-animal days (i am as “huh?” as you are.)

later at night, after meeting cuifen to catch shakespeare’s all’s well that ends well at the national theatre (free student membership and only 5pounds a ticket thereafter!), i went for the graduate students party at the underground at the LSE, which by day is some nerdy students cafe, but by night converts into an industrial-looking party space that almost looks like a proper club! hongcheong, a friend who did his undergrad here, had previously told me that the waitresses at the bar are all pretty hot (he also suggested i work there, so i shamelessly read that as a compliment ha ha!) but he left out the part about them being rather bitchy to girls, so i always had to ask a guy friend if i ever wanted to get a drink at all! o well.

anyway, the most interesting part about last night was the walk home. so i discovered that i have a 24-hour bus service that takes about 5 minutes to school and i was planning to hop on that bus when i bumped into a friend’s friend sebastian who was walking in the same direction as my home. he kept me company for half of the way till we had to part, then i figured “what the hell i’m just 5 minutes away, i’ll just walk the rest alone.” (i think i must have glared too suspiciously at anyone passing because some guy who i thought had walked past me and turned around to walk behind me because he took a wrong turn or something even called out laughingly “don’t worry, i’m not following you!”)

but just when i’m two units away from my place – after stopping outside a pastrami sandwich shop along my street to drool – a guy gets out of his car and calls out from the opposite side of the street. he said he saw me going past the pastrami shop, and would i like to go for supper? now normally i would not entertain street yells but i was indeed craving greasy cheese fries and i was afraid of letting this guy know where i live exactly so i decided to respond for a bit just to suss him out. he says he’s just dropped off a friend and she would probably love to go too, and to my surprise, he calls out this amazingly gorgeous indian woman from a really pretty building just 100m from my flat (who i find out later to be an acting student in a theatre school further down my street). we walk back to the pastrami shop, where i was disappointed to find did not have greasy fries so my new friend offers to drive us to a place nearby where i can satisfy my craving.

again, normally i would not do this but these people seemed genuine and 5 minutes of zooming through twilight london streets later, we arrive at tinseltown, an american-style diner with – get this – two huge black bouncers at the door!! i joke with them about whether this is a black-tie diner and they said apparently it gets madly packed on weekends for it’s killer milkshakes. (mars, snickers, bounty – they can make a milkshake out of any kind of chocolate bar you can think of!) so over fries and milkshakes, sabeeka, abid and i discuss life, london and dramatic relationships (she’s an actress, dating an actor, what can i say.) and i returned home alone, safe and sound, at 4am, pleased with a little risk worthily taken

falling for fall

my favourite season of all time is fall. there’s something about it’s morning air – so crisp it tingles the nose! so fresh it excites one with the possibility of new beginnings! (even though technically it is the season to die for most plants.) but what a pretty way to leave, not by palely fading out but blushing their richest gold and yellows.

being stinky in helsinki

(because i couldn’t really find any other word that rhymed. heh.)

you know you’re a true tropical girl when it’s 20 degrees outside and people are lolling about on grass patches enjoying the sun while you’re shivering your ass off in a jacket. or maybe scandinavians are just way too sun-deprived : P

so apparently i arrived in helsinki on the last sunshiney day of autumn. ville hosted junko, a japanese friend of our mutual friend, and i and we breezed (literally. the winds were killer.) through a tour of the city and the old fortress suomenlinna the whole of yesterday. this is my third time in helsinki, if you count the day trip from estonia xueying and i did in 2007 when we volunteered at a summer camp in tallinn, so i have officially seen the city in 3 different lights now: on a chilly 10 degrees celsius day in the middle of summer, on a sunshiney day in autumn and covered by a blanket of ice in wintry february. i have to say this time’s looking the best so far. it so happens that university orientation season is on now so drunk, young people in fugly mechanic overalls and sailor caps with huge-ass tassels (apparently a compulsory uniform for traditional university events) are spilling everywhere on the streets. people seem happy and the streets are lively, such a change from winter that i almost could not recognise some of the streets we walked down regularly when i last visited!

ville’s at work, facebook is down and i can’t access anyone’s numbers to call them out for coffee so i’m staying in today to paint my nails, work on correcting my jetlag/sleep debt and figure out my trip to st petersburg this weekend. here are my tentative travel dates for now, shout out if we might cross paths!

helsinki: 9 to 13 sept
st petersburg: 13 to 16 sept
helsinki: 16 to 22 sept
back to london for school registration and london fashion weekend (!! thanks zhongyang for the tip-off!): 22 sept

four floors of chores

hello from london! some updates:

after hauling more than 60kg of my crap (32kg+++ via Singapore Airlines, 30 kg via my junior college senior benkoh who has relocated here for work) across a continent and up four flights of stairs and a whole day channelling my inner domestic goddess to spruce the whole place up, i am now more or less settled into my new flat! (my room sits unfortunately on the top floor of a two-storey apartment on the third floor of an old building along leafy grays inn road – boohoo to that but whoohoo to nice legs by the end of a year! : D)

i was told that many law firms are located here, and true enough when i stepped out of my apartment around lunchtime yesterday, the whole place was congested with smartly suited office-types! what a change from the sleepy street it was when i arrived on sunday morning. my nearest tube station is chancery lane (if you want to holler at me for lunch) and LSE is just a 12-minute walk away. the latter was, of course, my topmost househunting criteria – i simply do not have the constitution to put up with the irregular and unreliable london tube on a daily basis. it breaks down more often than it actually works! how DO people live here! (or did you just spoil me, Singapore?)

so i live with two other girls, a recent LSE graduate from sweden who works at Citibank and a Russian phd student at UCL. the second one (who lives on my floor; the other lives downstairs) has yet to arrive so we’ve yet to get our shared living routines sorted but that should be done by the end of the month when school starts! by the way, sainsburys is selling a toaster for just 5 pounds, and with the existing flatmate offering to split it, that should work out to about 1.5pounds (~S$4) per person! and people are offering television sets on the online classifieds site gumtree.com for anything between 50 to zero pounds (but most of the free sets are located far, far from the centre and are on condition that you collect it yourself.) maybe the impoverished student life isn’t going to be so tough afterall… options for cheap living are aplenty, and even charity/thrift stores here like the salvation army, british heart foundation and my favourite oxfam look just as hip, if not hipper, than the overpriced vintage stores.

besides a stinky toilet and a shower that dribbles, and the lack of common social space in the flat, everything’s going swimmingly. okay minus the Incredible Idiocy that is British bureaucracy: for example, phone companies need to get a statement from the bank before you can register a line, but before you can set up a bank account, the bank needs proof of address, which you can only get via a phone bill sent by the operator. all i can say is “…”. how did these people ever run colonies in the past if they can’t even run their own country right?!

anyhoots, i’m happy to have friends here who’ll go homeware-shopping and hanger-hunting with me and lug back full-length mirrors from bargain stores in camden AND as an added bonus, also show me where the aldo outlet shoe store is – thanks hong cheong! (but maybe not so much when the time comes to move out next year and i suddenly realise i have 120kg worth of shoes…)

more soon, and pictures once i locate my damn camera cable among all my junk!

6am

the only good thing about jetlag: watching the sun rise over london and russell peters in bed!

on Dance Dance Revolution machines:
“it was the only time i’ve ever seen an Asian guy open his eyes really wide…O_O”
- russell peters

舍不得

despite all the grousing, it’s harder than expected to leave singapore.