Coming soon!

Hey,

So... long time no see, eh? I have been really busy with school, and sitting down to write something like a blog entry seemed like a huge commitment in terms of time and energy. So I never did... But I haven't forgotten, and I did read all of S and C's posts. And my own post will be coming soon - as soon as school is over (that's right, the American schools end later than the Canadian ones, I'm done in about 2.5 weeks now!).

Just letting you know that I'm still alive and well, and talk to you soon!

Britain Grounded

It was a sunny, albeit mildly chilly, Thursday morning, and I was sitting in the hostel lounge, trying in vain to revise for exams. A few French people, all armed with massive backpacks, had just walked into the hostel. They looked like any other group of backpackers, except they had something interesting to say: they went to the airport early in the morning, but were sent back because their flight got cancelled. And to add to that, all flights in the UK and Ireland that day had been cancelled.

What was this? And would my flight, scheduled for the following evening, be able to take off? I asked the girl at the reception, and was told that a volcano had erupted in Iceland, and that the ashes were covering the skies of Britain, posing a safety hazard. It sounded like a joke, but having seen the people that had just returned to the hostel, I decided to believe this.

It was no joke. More flights were cancelled, and there were talks about booking ferry tickets out of Ireland. To make things worse, the internet stations at the hostel were down, so I couldn't even check live updates on the spot. All I had were updates from people that were scheduled to leave Ireland that same day.

Time went by. My flight hadn't been cancelled as of lunchtime, so I went out for a tour as planned. When I got to the Temple Bar and was about to dig into my dinner, however, some people standing next to me flipped out a newspaper with the Icelandic volcano story on the first page. They noticed that I was trying to read the article, and asked if I was supposed to travel anywhere today. These gentlemen were from Birmingham, their flight had been cancelled (I forget their destination), so they had decided to take a ferry to Dublin instead. After a half hour chat with one of them, I was advised to go and book a ferry ticket.

Upon returning to the hostel, I found out that all flights leaving up until 1pm on Friday had now been cancelled. Most people were taking advantage of free rebooking services or were looking for alternate ways out. Most guests at the hostel were panicked, but in a sense, things were normal. People were still bringing cans of beer to the kitchen to drink together, complaining about how expensive everything is in Dublin.

If anything, this chaotic situation gave guests an excuse to bond with each other. All you had to do to start talking was to ask, "Are you travelling today?" We were all in it together, and strangers were helping strangers so that everyone could get out of Ireland in due time to their next destinations.

I found myself saying "Good luck! See you tonight if my flight gets cancelled." to the group I'd just met the previousn ight. Maybe I jinxed things -- at around noon today, I got the following text message from Ryanair:

URGENT-Your Ryanair flight has been cancelled - please visit www.ryanair.com for free rebooking/refund

And now I too was stranded in Dublin for a while. In an hour and a half at an internet cafe, I managed to notify my dad of the situation, cancelled a dinner appointment in London, and after multiple tries, rebooked my flight. All the weekend flights to London were fully booked, so the earliest I could get was Monday morning. That would leave me with a mere 1.5 days to explore London. So instead, I booked a flight straight to Edinburgh for Sunday evening.

News reports say Scottish and Irish skies are clearing up gradually, so hopefully I won't need to reschedule a second time. It's a pity that I've had to give up London, but I do appreciate that the industry cares about passenger safety, especially after what happened to Poland a few days ago. Plus, at least I'm stuck in a city where I am fluent in the language. Not to mention accommodation is decently cheap here... (It's one of the few cheap things in Dublin)


Update: I shouldn't have spoken too early. My rebooked flight also got cancelled, so now I have a ferry ticket and a bus ticket. All I need is a bus or train ticket from Dublin to Belfast, and I'll be on my way home, safe and sound.

Anyone have a Paypal account?

For those of you who don't know, I am moving in the next month. One of the perks of moving into a nicer, bigger place, is that we bought newer, nicer things - including a TV. So now I am in the process of selling our old TV and TV stand.

I decided to give Facebook Marketplace a shot. I lised the TV stand for $50, with a photo of it. It's in great condition - I even decided to wipe the dust off it!!!

Within a few hours, I get this:


xxxxxxx xxxxxx March 29 at 3:50am Report
I am interested in purchasing your listing as a birthday gift for my immediate sister schooling in a private university in Africa Nigeria. So i will be paying you $500 for the item and $200 for shipping to him in Africa and am paying via paypal, do get back to me with your PayPal id for the payment as i will be paying via a secured method of payment. Hoping to hear from you ASAP!.

So....anyone have a Paypal account? =P I'm so eager to ship my TV unit off to Nigeria. I'm really curious about this private university in Nigeria as well, and how the gender of her sister changed in the second sentence. Another interesting thing to note, is that the person who messaged me claims to work for Disney...does Disney have any connections with private Nigerian universities?

Miscellaneous from Edinburgh

#1

There are some things that I can make do with ASDA Smart Price or Sainsbury's Basics products. Recently I learned that jaffa cakes aren't among them. At almost a third of the price of the original McVitie's brand, they seemed quite harmless to my budget... though after a month or two of indulging in at least two or three boxes a week of the original stuff, it becomes pretty obvious that the price difference is there for a good reason. Actually, just laying one of each other would already give it away, since the ASDA Smart Price jaffa cakes are significantly flatter and poorly shaped. Even the taste isn't quite the same.

#2

It seems that my neighbourhood is a favourite for ice cream trucks, some of which could possibly be ghost trucks at the same time. Since September, I'd hear the familiar sound of an ice cream truck at odd times of the day. 3pm, 7pm, you name it.... around 10.30pm seems to be a common time too. The oddest thing was that I didn't actually see an ice cream truck with my own eyes until February.

When I was growing up, I don't think I ever saw or heard an ice cream truck after 5pm. Do kids in this area actually buy ice cream at such a late hour? Especially when the area has a reputation for being a little dodgy?

#3

Recycling seems to a relatively new thing here. Most houses don't have recycling bins. And the ones that do, there are two options: 1) cardboard, and 2) glass and tin. As an unintentionally avid user of plastic containers in various forms, my heart breaks every time I have to throw a plastic bottle into a regular rubbish bin. Given the abundance of plastic out there, it's a pity that the option to recycle domestic plastic waste doesn't exist yet. Unless, of course, I bring in a bunch of bottles to campus, where there do exist recycling bins for that very purpose.

#4

In a fair number of cities, public transportation stops running after a certain hour, somewhere around 2am in general I believe. Edinburgh has night buses that run through the night, though even with a bus pass, there is an extra charge. A flat fare of £3 for a ticket that works on all night buses on that same night, £1.50 (half price) for those that have a bus pass. With a few late nights out every week, that quickly adds up to a fair amount of money on top of what I already pay for my bus pass. And the night buses start leaving the city centre just after midnight, which is still very early for a night out. Oh well, us students (and most other bus riders) suck it up because it's still cheaper than taking a taxi.

#5

Despite the fears at the beginning of the academic year, haggis is quite tasty, and a lot of people seem to agree with me. Just avoid the canned stuff like a plague. No comments on deep fried haggis yet, that's still on my list of foods to try.

#6

To quote Granny Weatherwax from Terry Pratchett's The Wyrd Sisters, "Things that try to look like things often look more like things than things." And sure enough, apparently Glasgow looks more like Edinburgh than Edinburgh itself. The movie Trainspotting, based on the novel of of the same name by Irvine Welsh, is set in Edinburgh, but was mostly filmed in Glasgow. Only two scenes were filmed in Edinburgh. No wonder I couldn't recognize much more than Princes Street!

#7

Scotland isn't exactly known for its ethnic diversity. And most of the Asians in this town are clustered around Edinburgh University, not near Heriot-Watt. So is it a surprise that someone like myself is a rare sight in my neighbourhood? Once in a while, little kids (maybe around 10 years old?) walk up to me and say "Hi, how are you?" or "Hi, my name is Larry." Now that's still cute. But when kids see me and start saying "Ni hao, ni hao" in a disdaining manner, I start wondering what will become of these ignorant brats.

Not all Oriental people are Chinese, and even if they were, it just doesn't sound nice when kids say that the way they do.

Curry Call!

Ah, reading week.

The one time every two years where I refuse to look at homework, midterms, or course material and spend the week either eating, shopping, or lying on a beach. Despite my hatred of all things cold, this year I opted for a Montreal/Ottawa trip. Needless to say...I ate and shopped. It was heaven.

After my week of real poutine, crepes, chocolate, and different food varieties, the one thing I didn't get was a curry. Now, I LOVE curry. But the problem I have with it - no matter how many times I try, I can't seem to make a curry that tastes as good as it does in a restaurant.

I remember the first time I did a butter chicken. It was yummy, but the amount of oil I scooped out before eating it was...yeah. Then, the first time I did a 'basic' yellow curry, I kind of burnt the curry powder (yes, lol, just the powder itself), and the place smelt like it for weeks. In fact, my boyfriend's parents came and visited us the week afterwards, and his mother asked if we made curry recently (this was a full week later =P). I've tried the store bought curry jars and stuff...but they just don't taste the same! The one time I made a decent curry, was when I found a random on sale spice pack at Winners, of all places. For $2 + cost of chicken and coconut milk, it was yuuuuummy. But I would love to be able to create that without 'cheating'. =P When I say cheating, I say I'd rather mix the spices myself, then using a spice packet with unidentifiable yellow and redish powders.

This is where you come in. Does anyone have any good curry recipes? I'd love to try them, and post the results. Since curry is a lot of work, I might eventually end up just resorting to spice packets in the end...but not before saying I can cook a decent curry from scratch!!

Either post in the comments or e-mail me at foodmathlife.s@gmail.com. I'm looking forward to it :)

-S

The perils of travelling with Ryanair

From travel books and well-travelled friends, I had heard of many European discount airline myths. Fly for a mere pound. Could this be true? Apparently it was, which was a concept hard to grasp as a person that hadn't even managed to take the Megabus for $1. At the heart of these myths was one name: Ryanair. And one year, a representative from Ryanair was on television, proudly announcing that it had made a decent annual profit. Cheap flights, but still making profits... it sounded too good to be true.

When I got to come to Europe for myself, I was finally exposed to real people that used this airline to travel. The most recent of these people was a friend of mine that I will refer to as "Neo". Neo is a seasoned traveller, having spent time in a large number of cities in three continents over the past year. However, even he was not prepared for Ryanair's little quirks when the time came to leave after visiting me for a day in Edinburgh...

1. Boarding pass

We had to fit in as much of Scotland as possible in a mere 24 hours, so naturally we forgot about printing Neo's boarding pass beforehand. Luckily, for most airlines, there's always the option of printing off the boarding pass at the airport. Ryanair is no exception... just with a catch.

"It will cost £40."

That's right, 40 pounds, spelt f-o-r-t-y, for a single sheet of paper. That's over $70, for you North Americans. The only sheet of paper I've seen that's more expensive than that is a university diploma. Being his student self, Neo wasn't just going to give into that. And the search for a printer in/near the airport began, so we could get Neo off to Frankfurt on his 11.15 flight.

Edinburgh Turnhouse airport does not have any printers available to the public, and our best bet was to go to the nearby Hilton Hotel, a 10 minute walk away. We took the courtesy shuttle, posing at first as travellers "flying in from Frankfurt", then as travellers "flying back to Frankfurt". In retrospect, it must have sounded mildly fishy, given that I wasn't even carrying any luggage on the way there. But that aside, the hotel trip did the job, and Neo walked away with a $5 boarding pass. A much more reasonable price to pay.

2. Check-in luggage

Before going off to search for printers, we had also asked about luggage policies. Neo had one backpack, a laptop bag, and a mini duffel bag of sorts, and was planning to check two items in. The initial assumption went along the lines of: 'I could probably check the first item in for free, and either pay for the second or haggle to get that in free too.' But who are we fooling. This assumption was far off what was actually demanded:

"£35 for the first checked baggage, £70 for the second."

This meant that Neo would have to pay a whopping £105 (around $180-190 CAD) with his luggage the way it was. As he aptly put it, "it would be cheaper to buy a second seat or a new ticket elsewhere". There was no way Neo was going to fit everything in his hand luggage anyways (especially not with a bottle of whiskey), so there were two options: a) buy a small suitcase that would fit the contents of two of Neo's current bags, or b) "wear, like, 8 shirts".

Upon returning from the Hilton Hotel, Neo frantically rearranged his bags for a good half an hour, and ended up wearing 5 shirts and his newly purchased Scottish hat.

3. Delay

And as we thought everything was finally fine, we learned that there were problems, and that more details would be announced at 11h. At the airport, it sounded like the problems were due to inclement weather - the people at the desk didn't really know. Yet when Neo got on the plane, apparently a different reason was provided by the pilot, which had to do with air traffic, rather than bad weather.



In the end, Neo was able to reach his destination at a reasonable time, but only after hours of unnecessary hassle right before his flight. Nothing we can do about different reasons given by different sources for the same delay, but save yourselves any additional trouble by printing your boarding pass beforehand and minimizing the number of bags you travel with!

One Month in the Life of a Jobmine Student

For those of you who don't know, Jobmine is the online horror that co-op students at the University of Waterloo have to endure in order to find jobs for upcoming co-op terms.

I am, thankfully, embarking on my last co-op term of my degree in the summer term. After the freedom of not having to use Jobmine for more than a year, my adventure back into Jobmine reminded me what a nightmare it can be. To illustrate, here's my shortened version of One Month in my life as a Jobmine student.

January 9:

Thankfully, in my rare moments of non-procrastination, my resume has already been completed. Looking ahead in the coming weeks, the weekend of the 16th is when Round One of Jobmine opens, and the week after just looks awful, I figure this is my only chance to take some time and get a new suit.

3 hours later: While my wallet is $260 lighter, I am consoled by the fact that at least I'll look damn good when interview season comes around.

January 16:

Round One of Jobmine opens. (Again, for those not from Waterloo, Round One is the first time jobs get released for applications. The majority of jobs are released now, if you don't get a job in Round One, it means many more months of painful Jobmine sessions.) We have 4 days to scan through jobs, add some to our shortlist, and then finally apply.

They always tell you to start early, in case something happens and you can't access Jobmine later on in the period. So I start on Saturday night, 9:00pm. Considering I thought that other people had lives, I didn't expect the servers to be that busy and I could go through all the jobs that night.

It was awful. Clicking on a job description - 3 minutes for it to load.

Clicking "Next" - took 1 minute to load.

How many jobs to go through? 1360.

ARGH. I went until midnight. If that's how long it takes all weekend, it doesn't matter how early you start, 4 days to apply is not enough time.

January 17:

Thankfully, today wasn't as bad. I was able to shortlist 13 jobs.

January 18:

While in my painful CS 371 class (where the professor thinks 12 is the same as 1), I managed to write up most of my cover letters and submit. Now the waiting game begins...

January 20:

As usual, I get an e-mail, Jobmine had a nervous breakdown the night before with the number of students who were trying to apply the night. As a result, deadline is extended one more day. Glad to know that I submitted early enough to avoid this rush.

January 22:

A few more jobs get posted. I find one more, and apply.

January 25:

I slowly start to develop OCD, as I check Jobmine 3 times a day to see if I got interviews for any of my jobs. Nada.

January 26:

I am slowly going crazy.....no interviews. I got my first rejection =( I ponder why I got rejected...I have more than a year's worth of good solid experience in the field I applied for. Oh well, there's always one that gets away.

January 27:

Rejection #2. This time, I don't even remember applying for this job, so I don't feel bad about it =)

January 28:

Officially, this is the first day of Interviews. I am really starting to get nervous now, with only 2 rejections. My OCD starts getting full blown - I have the urge to check Jobmine every 20 minutes or more. Basically, if I am near a computer, I will check. And check often. ARGH.

January 29:

*contemplates leaving the computer at home, so I don't check Jobmine so often. Na.* People around me getting interviews left and right - or have already done an interview. In a word....depressing.

Febuary 1:

The interview session is only 2 more weeks at UW. I get rejected from one more job. Now...I'm getting really antsy. At least more so than before. My thought process:

"Why does no one want me - especially in marketing? Come on, I helped with a freakin national commercial. That's got to count for something. "

"What if I don't get a job? What are my options? I could go home for the summer. *thoughts of boredom* Hmm. Maybe not the whole summer."

"Wait a minute, who needs jobmine? Psssh. I'll google jobs. *30 minutes later, and no good results later* Er.....crap."

"What's wrong with my resume? What about my cover letters? *I ask a friend. After finding out that I have 3 different resumes depending on what position I apply to, and write individual cover letters to all of them...he's at a loss.* Argh shit. I could go back to school in the summer...but I don't really have the money for that. Hmm."

4:00 pm, at the end of the day: Got my first interview. HUZZAH, I am NOT un-employable!!!

*sigh*

Excuse me...while I check Jobmine again.

- S