Spring is Here!

It's my dream to visit Japan during cherry blossom/ Sakura season, but unfortunately I'm just a poor university student- and it would cost loads to get there!

 

taken from tohokutomo.com

 taken from lifetoreset.wordpress.com

(oh, what I'd give to have a picnic under those trees)

It's alright, though. Manchester has its own charm. In the last few weeks, the pair of trees right outside my uni accommodation have bloomed and the effect is simply gorgeous!

(*ˊૢᵕˋૢ*)🌸

A photo posted by Eveeee (๑´ㅂ`๑)♡*.+゜ (@evangelskies) on May 5, 2015 at 5:03am PDT

You can definitely tell that spring is here~

I may not have made it to Japan to see the cherry blossoms but I think this is pretty too ( ˊ• ૢ·̫•ˋૢ) Makes me happy whenever I walk back to my accommodation

A photo posted by Eveeee (๑´ㅂ`๑)♡*.+゜ (@evangelskies) on Apr 28, 2015 at 5:58am PDT

(*ˊૢᵕˋૢ*)(*ˊૢᵕˋૢ*)(*ˊૢᵕˋૢ*)

A photo posted by Eveeee (๑´ㅂ`๑)♡*.+゜ (@evangelskies) on Apr 28, 2015 at 6:01am PDT

Today, we woke up to find flower petals everywhere- in our kitchen (the windows were open), spilling out into the corridors, and it was so surreal. The moment I stepped out of my room to see petals strewn about the hallway, my day felt instantly magical. I felt like a princess.

How pretty is this oh my gosh am I in Japan

A photo posted by Eveeee (๑´ㅂ`๑)♡*.+゜ (@evangelskies) on May 5, 2015 at 4:46am PDT

As I walked to lectures, the petals were flying in the wind, coming to rest in my hair, drifting past me aimlessly... if this is what Disney princesses conjure up everyday, where do I sign-up as one?

🌸🌼🌻🌱

A photo posted by Eveeee (๑´ㅂ`๑)♡*.+゜ (@evangelskies) on May 5, 2015 at 5:02am PDT

Hope you enjoyed these pictures! Do you have any spring sights as well?

🌸💕

A photo posted by Eveeee (๑´ㅂ`๑)♡*.+゜ (@evangelskies) on May 5, 2015 at 5:30pm PDT

Kitchen Troubles

Ah, student dormitories.

You get the odd quirk in your kitchen that you tend to get a little fond of, never mind how annoying you thought it at first.
In ours, we had a dented oven door that just wouldn't shut. It would creak open relentlessly and let all the heat out, and in the end we gave up trying and propped a chair against it.

It was annoying at first, definitely, and we complained about the 'shitty oven' whenever we used it.

It became a conversation starter for us too, when we were just standing about aimlessly waiting for things to cook.

I admit to using it a few times because I am a boring person and a complaint always gets the conversation going, then we could proceed to grumble about the state of the rooms, the dilapidated old building (I hear it will be knocked down soon), and conclude, in the end, that ours was better than the other buildings because of the en-suite facilities.

 We wrote in to the accommodation team, appealing for them to come in and get it fixed but somehow they never got about to doing it, and we gave up emailing them.

The chair became a handy place too, and I enjoyed sitting down there with a book and I could keep a very close eye on the pot instead of walking to and fro from the table to the stove/hob.

One morning, I was woken up by the accommodation staff for their routine health and safety inspection check (which took no more than 4 seconds, I swear I'm not exaggerating- they just marched into my room and took a look at my shower and probably gave the room a quick once-over during their march-in and out, because they thanked me and left immediately after)

And apparently they got the oven door fixed as well because my housemates were sitting about the table at lunch talking about it, and we each took turns to open and shut it, marvelling at how it was working again.

We kept the chair there for a few days, though, forgetting it was completely pointless until it was moved away during a late-night drinking session because there wasn't enough chairs.

Just today, one of my housemates commented that it felt a little weird having the oven door fixed. 

"I miss kicking the door shut and propping the chair against it, haha."

"Mmmm, same! I keep looking for the chair, and a couple of days back I dragged it over and propped it against the door because I forgot the oven's fixed now."

Well, at least the dent is still there.

Wonder if they can fix that too?

Halloween

In retrospect, the best part of Halloween is dressing up- and becoming someone you would never be normally.

It's also a time for the shy ones to break out of their shell and wow us all in a very Taylor Swift-esque transformation from shy nerd to cool beauty (You Belong With Me, anyone?)

Or am I mixing that up with prom?
Hmmmm.

I went as Alice from Alice in Wonderland (can you spot me)

As you can tell, I'm not really one for the scary option XD

It was also a time of half-hearted costume options (I probably saw a million 'cats'), where people went as low-budget as possible or simply forgot about Halloween, or just couldn't be ars*d to spend time on a costume.

Some of my housemates eventually went to a Halloween-themed club event, while I bounced between the various house parties around the dorms- some of the Houses really put in a lot of effort in terms of decorating- with cobwebs, smoke machines, spiders and bloody handprints on the fridge (Security wasn't amused when they came 'round)- and some were magnificent zombies with guts spilling out of ripped shirts (all home-made) which made me quite ill.

Weather Skirmishes

Just last week, I told my mum proudly:

"You know, I think I've gotten used to the weather here. It's 14 deg C and I'm just sitting in my room with just a shirt on and I feel perfectly fine!"

And of course, Mother Nature just has to come back and slap me in the face for making such a bold statement.

If you've read the news about Hurricane Gonzalo, you should know to expect strong winds and showers over the next week or so. I brushed it off in that apathetic way Singaporeans are so prone to- but I realised my folly when I stepped out for my weekly grocery run.

In Singapore, I've always read the news, marvelling at the reports- but that was it. It was very rarely relevant to me and I took the news as some sort of foreign, detached extension of my country.

I'm not saying that Singapore does not have crime or that it rarely happens. What was true, though, was that it did not affect me, and that made all the difference.

Murder? Kidnapping? A break-in? They were broken down into no-nonsense reports, plain text on grey, and I would be suitably horrified but none of the locations were familiar places to me, and I would dismiss it as just another incident, just another crime statistic.

Don't look at me like that- you know a crime is so much more terrifying when it strikes close to home.

Just the other day I read about a brawl at Baa Bar that was so violent they set up police blockages. And you think-

I could have been there. I could have been in danger.

 -and does the prospect of you being harmed seem very real now? That, my friends, is the terrifying bit.

Brave New World Out There

I've recently moved over to Salford, Manchester for university and I must say, there are so many things that I need getting used to.

People who know me well enough would think that I would be the last person to head overseas alone for university, and they are absolutely right.

My housemates have been telling me that I am extremely brave to do so, but honestly, I have been nothing but afraid and disoriented (for the first few days, at least).

I've been taking things like heading down to Tesco and taking the train alone (hey, I have no SIM card- if I'm lost, I'm a goner) as little achievements. Baby steps, I say.

Managing to make rice in a pot was a huge boost to my pride (as an Asian, especially so) and will probably serve me well as an important life skill when I'm hungry and craving food that isn't instant, microwaveable, or canned.

It's amazing how basic you get when you are a poor, hungry student with little or no cooking skills to speak of, and you start thinking:

"Hey, I think I can just fry an egg and heat up those oven chips and then chuck the canned soup in a microwave.. and it's pretty much a meal!"

You know, you start selling yourself- your food choices- short because you can't cook, or you're too lazy to try and don't want to because you're afraid you'll burn the kitchen down, and you've only got enough money to cover living expenses for this month so you can't pay for the damages.

It's so easy to give yourself excuses and pick up canned soup for 3 for £2 or those lifesaving one-pound frozen pizzas (which is, incidentally, how one of my housemates have been surviving the last two weeks).

We've all been bemoaning the lack of 'proper' food and how amazing Christmas will be (except for me, I will unfortunately be staying in the dorms because plane tickets are so expensive) and how the 2-hour train ride would be totally worth it because of the Christmas dinner. 

Let's not get started on the weather, shall we? For a few frightful days, I shuddered every time I stepped out of my dorm- and my first step out into the open air at Manchester Airport was an icy arrow through my heart.

My word! The cold!

It wasn't the kind of cold you experience in an air-conditioned room- it's the sort that goes through you and chills you to the bone.

And the winds... my housemate, J, told me that that's why they've affectionately nicknamed Manchester 'Windchester'- and I say nothing could be more fitting.

After a full week here, I'm alright with the cold- but nothing can ever prepare me for the strong, cold, gusts. Nope, nope, nope.

let me just say this is not true at all