Under Where?: Paris, STOP Signs and French Taxi Driver.

Week 7 of exam term.

3 days after the last of my exam papers. And I lost count of the number of times I said that I neglected UnderWhere. No excuse this time, not that I ran out of them, but I rather keep them for some other time.

Think I left this blog idle for more than 2 months already. But even I couldn’t help it, and to say that what I covered this year is a million times harder than what A-Levels had to offer isn’t a pleasing statement at all. But anyhow, let’s update you guys on what’s happened, what’s happening and what happens soon with this micro-blog post again, compiling short stories that were well hidden in my HDD over the past have-little-monkey-idea how many weeks.

So, let this begin.

“Some week in the middle of the holidays.

I lost my sense of time, and have no idea how long I left my blog idle. There are good reasons for it: late night outings, an unforgettable holiday, odd trips to the library, stuff like that. I know, I’m full of excuses, but I can’t help it either.

And its even more odd now that I am blogging from the library. Mind you, I didn’t walk 10000 miles here just to write a handful of nonsensical sentences with a touch of humour and sarcasm, just taking a break. From my work. And the crazy mother and kid sitting next to me.

Ok, enough of the sad stories, and lets blog.

The final day of the term was epic, and when I say epic, I really mean EPIC. Held in Copper’s Room that night was Foam Party. I have little idea what was that, hence I didn’t get the tickets for it. My bunch of friends did, and little did they know they were about to burn 5 pounds into thin ash, but more on that later.

So, the plan was that, I join them for pre-drinks to the party at about 9pm, and as they head to the party, I grab one of my friend’s guitar and head back to the land of the ducks. Then I sit and wait and once they are sick of the foam, we head down to Coventry for another round of, err, social event.

So far so good, and I headed to their place for some drinks. Expectedly, soon, everyone started saying weird stuffs, and their faces were as red as STOP signs. Unexpectedly though, one of the red-faced guys decided to get more drinks, drinks that can only be bought at the counter, not off the shelf. Fast forward the story by an hour, and all you see by the end of the day are people answering the public phone, people looking for non-existent keys and people who couldn’t walk in a straight line. Surprisingly, perhaps too pre-occupied with the guitar, I manage to stay in shape throughout the “event”, only to act as THE emergency worker of the night, keeping my friends off the streets and back to their room. Didn’t go home with the guitar though.

Since then, its night after night of gatherings with my future housemates, and the earliest I manage to get back to the land of herons was at 1....am. I also discovered that sunrises in the Duck’s Pandora can be breathtaking, as I manage to see them on 3 consecutive days, one of them when I was on my way back from a whole night of cheesy jokes. Breathtaking it really was.

And then there was a trip to a job fair in London, where I suggested we wear formal. They chose to think that I was making some donkey jokes, and we ended up being the only people at the fair not wearing formal. But lets not talk about this now, I know I don’t want to.

Ok, now for some news. Remember the time when you read about the public transport strike in Paris a few weeks ago? I can tell you now, it was called off. Cos the French taxi driver told me so. “No, no strike, all transport still go....” or something like that, he said. And that’s all I have to say about my trip to Paris. No, I’m not kidding. Let’s put it this way. Imagine, you are gracefully riding on a horse, galloping across the Grand Canyon with maximum bounce and at speed of a, err, horse. Then imagine, that the horse is a wooden one, and there’s no padding between the horse and your big brass buns, and the wooden piece of junk is bouncing so hard your nose just became your eyes and your kidney stones fell out through your ears. That was how my trip went. We massively overspent until all that’s left in our wallets were dust and some more dust.”

So, yeah, the holidays. So much happened within that 5 weeks that if I have to tell them to you over coffee, we’d be better off drinking in Costa Rica just in case we run out of beans. But I’ll try to stay within the 25,000-word limit.

So, when we were not in Paris or London, we did picnic around the campus area, one of the more epic one was set in front of my friend’s place, where we placed the mat down and suddenly, weird stuffs like a pot of soup, bananas and Econs books (!) started appearing out of nowhere. We’d then took it a step further, bringing the party all the way to probably the nicest place in Uni : Heronbank. Good weather, great view of the lake and even more swans and ducks. Epic.”

Then, the “exam” term began. I name it the exam term for something that even I found interesting: there were almost zero classes altogether in this term, which is the total opposite from home, where classes increases by the factor of three thousand and twenty-twelve as the world inches closer to examinations. A fresh approach, and one which I wouldn’t expect to happen at home anytime soon, for cutting classes meant cutting attendance as well. Moving on:

“Week 1 of term 3. The exam term.

Good to hear that we have virtually zero classes, that equals to more time to do the right thing. Or maybe not.......”

So what happened? That you’ll have to wait til the next post (or else the 25,000-word post will become a health hazard).

And now that summer holidays officially begin, and I have a few more weeks before leaving for home, allow me to briefly brief you on what to expect from the coming posts. There’s going to be a handful of full product reviews, stuffs that I lived with for the past 9 months. Also, hopefully, there will be some updates in the car and business industry (I hardly touched a car magazine in the past 4 months and recently stopped my Economist subscription, but will try my best not to disappoint). And to end this post, I will continue my effort to put up more photos onto this photo-non-intuitive blog.

Until then, let’s look forward to a better tomorrow.