update from cambridge!

hello all! sorry for not updating so regularly, it's been busy as you might already know. so in chronological order for your sake and mine, here goes:

Friday 29th September
i arrived in cambridge! finally after 10 months of waiting and dallying... took the bus from heathrow station all by myself as there was some mix-up at the ticketing booth. yep quite weird how my family was sitting with all the other singaporeans and i was by myself on the next bus but no fear, jay chou kept me happy and occupied. :) it was a 2.5 hour bus ride from heathrow and i wish i could say the scenery was fantastic but really, it was just fields and red brick houses the whole time. nonetheless, i got to cambridge safely, got my room keys and heaved my 5 luggages up to the second floor (which the brits call first floor.. ) with the help of dad, pers and uncle george.
went the the bank and got my account settled, which has surprisingly encontered with NO problems whatsoever! all my other friends are complaining about hsbc, but i have none :) pay as you go phone line also settled today.
the singaporeans met up for dinner and we went on a room crawl to assess which end of the straw we got. i apparantly got the long end! yay.. my room has a wonderful view and it's nice and big, "straight out of the ikea catalogue" as christina puts it. I now have stuck loads of stuff on the wall and it actually looks lived-in already.

Saturday 30th September
day off with family. we walked around and I packed my room. Daddy and uncle george wanted to follow the river on foot, so pers helped my by sticking all my pictures together to put up on my wall.
Went for the international student’s gathering and dinner at the old library at night. Oh ok sidetrack a bit, pembroke’s campus is BEAUTIFUL! If you ever have the chance to visit, I’ll show you around. The lawns are manicured, the trees grow just nicely, it’s straight out of a fairytale!

Sunday 1st October
Sunday was the start of fresher’s week at Pembroke. It was also the day that daddy and pers left for London.
Tea in the old library was ok, I left like after awhile cos it was just tooo many people and it started getting stuffy. So we went to zoe’s room to sort out some of her stuff (zoe’s another medic from Cambridge itself)
Dinner in hall, our first dinner as a cohort! 3 course meal which was IDENTICAL to the meal I had the night before. Cheater bugs!
The senior tutor gave a talk after that which was so sleep-inducing I think quite a few pple succumbed to it. haha basically he told us to study hard (!) to maintain pembroke’s high academic standing.
I met my college family after that and went to Becky’s room for chocolate cake and wine. It was nice. I’m glad I didn’t get like drunks in my family or anyone tooooo wild. They were fantastic!

Monday 2nd October
Happy birthday Tee! Oh dear I didn’t wish you at all did I? I hope you read this cos I was planning on sending an email or something to you but I just kept thinking I’ve done it already. So sorry!
Well, there was a self-defense class which I didn’t go to cos…
I had to meet my Director of Studies (person in charge of my academic progress) and my Tutor (person in charge of my welfare). They were ok I guess. Can’t really say much about them since I wun get to see them often. It’s prob just going to be once at the start and once at the end of term just as a formality.
JP (Junior Parlour, the equivalent of student’s council for undergraduates) had a societies bonanza in the afternoon, and I signed up for wayyy too many societies. I have to sift through all the emails now.
The three-legged (literally) pub crawl which I missed cos I wanted to chill out on the night punting, was quite a disgusting affair. Thankfully I didn’t go. There were weird cream and cracker games with honey smeared on faces and stuff. But the people that went had fun, or so they say…
The night punting was the event that I had wanted to go on, however, because Nicole’s mum treated us to a nice Chinese dinner at JinLing, we ate so much and so slowly that we missed the punt entirely. We just saw it floating away into the darkness. L so in the end we had a nice chat in Liu Rui’s room at Newhnam.

Tuesday 3rd October
Matriculation day today! Took the picture with an ancient camera, the type that needs to pull a black cloth behind the camera. I also signed my name into this huge bound book in the old library with a fountain pen and with that I’m “now and forever a member of Cambridge and Pembroke”! haha that was amusing…
Fresher’s fair at Kelsey Kerridge (some sports hall) where I signed up for even more societies like rowing, CUMSA, softball (!), badminton with the Queens’ people. And then there was the matriculation dinner. The first time I had to wear the college gown for formal dinner! I HAD to buy it for 45 pounds! Bah. It’s nice and important-looking though. This was supposedly the nicest dinner during a student’s life in Cambridge… that must mean their standard is not very high. It was nice, but not fantastic.

Wednesday 4th October
My lessons started today. Was allocated a cadaver today during FAB (anatomy) lecture. Spent the day shopping mostly for groceries and pullovers. I didn’t bring enough warm clothing I think. I have clothes for winter and summer but not autumn. First supervision today, my anatomy supervisor’s v nice! We had a real vertebral column in front of us as she went through all them all.
In the evening, there was rock night held in the new cellars. This is basically just an excuse to come out and party. There was a live band which was not bad, although I thought they could use a better vocalist. But hey, it was nice and I actually know most of the songs they played so hooray! :) I had fun tonight.

Thursday 5th October
My first dissection room experience! We saw our cadaver today, and we almost fainted at the size of him! He was very plump and our demonstrator warned us how much work we will be doing in the future during dissections cos there will be layers and layers of fat to cut through to see anything.
It was family night and we trooped down to watch Twelfth Night at the ADC after a stir-fry dinner. There’s 4 of us children in my college family and they are all super nice. Yue, the HK guy kept laughing at my accent, and I kept laughing at his! Haha that’s mostly all I can remember during the dinner… just laughing.

Friday 6th October
Proper lectures started today. So nothing much happened in the day other than me trying to find my way around town to get to my lectures on time. I am so glad that my college is so centrally placed with respect to the lecture sites. I literally just have to walk out different gates of my college to get to the different lecture sites! No other college can beat that man!
It was Mid-Autumn Festival tonight and a few of us tried to go to this restaurant to have a nice Chinese dinner, but ended up getting Chinese takeaway instead cos it was wayyy over our budget. But the food was good! And we had a nice time after at Ceilidh in the hall, which is a kind of Scottish dance that nobody knows the steps to and just kinda learn on the spot. People kept banging into me and stepping on my toes but then again, I think I trod on so many other people as well.

Saturday 7th October
The sporty day today:
Pembroke’s big rowing day! I went down to try rowing out and it was great fun! It was so fun that I went for my second outing today and I think I shall try to continue with rowing for the first term and see how after. Apparently, it might require lots of commitment if you are on the first boat (ie, the pro people) but other than that, there are boats for recreational rowing as well. The Pembroke ladies are the head of the waters last year (which means they won the inter-college rowing competition) so we have a high reputation to keep. Hahha. I think I’m not bad at rowing! :)
Badminton in the morning as well. I now have a new racket thanks to Yao Yu. All I had to do was to re-grip it and it was mine!!! Haha.
CUMSA Fresher’s Squash next at Magdalene. it was nice seeing all the Singaporeans again and made friends with some other people.
Then the legendary Cambridge Bop, which loosely translates into a party. It’s funny how the brits dance to cheesy songs and not all the shitty R&B and hip-hop we have in Singapore. Hahha. Ancient songs were playing as remixes and so we had a good time dancing to the funny lyrics! It wasn’t as wild as I thought it would be.

Sunday 8th October
I had to take a rest day from all the activities of Fresher’s Week. Consolidated all the lectures I’ve had, bought files and more food. Organized my notes. Housekeeping day.
Went for the bar quiz at night, which was crap in my opinion. The geography questions were really hard, I couldn’t answer any :( the scientific ones though weren’t as bad.



And now that Fresher’s Week is over, I have more time to do stuff that I wanna do, although I dun think this week will be less tiring than the last. I foresee tons of work coming my way.

Ok till next time. This is too much to read. Thanks for reading all the way to the end, although I doubt anyone managed to sit through all that above!