Hello from the UK!

Hi everyone! Greetings from my side of the world! :D

My first term in Imperial just ended last week; what I assumed would have been a routine traipse through redundancy (seeing that I've already completed a term in melb) turned out to be a freakin' nightmare! From the 4 subjects I had all the time to play with back in Feb, I've been slogging away with NINE subjects! Academically, it's a bloody hell-hole here. I've gotten used to leaving lectures without half a clue about what had just transpired in the past period. Mechatronics, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics - all the bamboozling shit just won't stop coming. Not exactly the proper thing to say for someone who's used to being  conscientious, but it's gotten routine to get mind-f__ked in this place. Yeah, we pay 21,000 quid to get screwed like that. D:


On the bright side, I guess the biggest discovery of the past 11 weeks is the fact that I'm actually pretty fond of messing around in the kitchen! As a student here, one either learns to cook to keep the costs down and belly full, or burn cash by eating out every meal. Quite surprisingly, some people do choose eating out because they'd rather suffer the ache in the wallet than the embarrassment of screwing up technically un-screw-up-able stuff like pasta or fried rice. The bloody miser that I am, I chose to pick cooking up from scratch and I haven't looked back since! Cooking's cheap, not exactly fun if you screw up, puts your organisation skills to the test, and makes you extremely efficient at time management. I end school at 5 on most days, and I usually have to rush out enough chow to feed 5 in under an hour. Anyway, enough chatter, here are a few pictures of what I've been doing:

Virgin attempt at something presentable

My own take on carbonara

Japanese Curry

Fried noodles wrapped in an egg

Pork Katsu with Mushroom Sauce and Mashed Potatoes

One caveat though - cooking burns A LOT of time. So I've done a Singaporean thing and I've pulled a cooking group of 5 together - each of us takes turns to cook for the rest for 1 weekday, and twiddle thumbs for the rest of the week. That's why there are multiple dishes in the pictures above - I usually do the plating nice and pretty for the rest and eat out of the frying pan myself (saves on the washing, heh).

Okay, other random things to display, look what I did on the last day of school!

Dismantled a gear box from a 1990s Ford Fiesta

Dismantled a Ford Zetec Inline Engine

Geeky and nerdy as it sounds, it was a FANTASTIC way to end the term!! I was messing around in the workshop with the technicians till dinner time just tearing all these beauties apart piece by piece and toying with their gorgeous innards.

more nerdy work-related things:

Messed around with a lathe  / turning machine too (go google it).  We were given a raw tube of steel to cut into specific dimensions. Fun as hell! :)

Dismantled a drill too. Yeah they take the mechanical in mechanical engineering very seriously.

That's a glorious spaghetti of logic gates, transducers, latches and flip-flops courtesy of the Mechatronics lab. Almost tore my hair out making sense of this. Which isn't exactly my fault because electronics belong to the electrical engineers. -shrug-

and more of other non-nerdy things:

Celebrated my 21st in my own room.

Being the thick-skinned fool that I usually am, I baked my own cake and invited people over to enjoy it with me. It was like playing How Many Asians Can You Squeeze in [insert tiny contraption, e.g. sofa, mini cooper, washing machine, whatever]. I managed 27 in my room! About my room - I'm a single occupant of a double (the admin screwed my room allocation up, to my benefit of course heh heh), so that explains the relatively luxurious space I have. Can't hold a candle to Roland's main building room though... space here is expensive!!

Did a bit of touring as well. (This was at the Seven Sisters in Sussex)

Watched a live tennis match at the O2 stadium (Andy Murray vs David Ferrer)

Cooked a bit more. (This is omurice, which surprisingly turned out okay!)

And to end this post...

I was given a hideous mankini for my birthday (they had another surprise party for me...)

Yeah. disgusting, memorable shit. That's me "ARRR screw it guys do whatever you want with me" look.

Alrighty, till next year guys! ENJOY THE HOLS! (I know I won't. I have exams on 10th of Jan. FML.)

- Leonard