TheLazySong-inspired

Ironically, the funky tune that says "...today I don't feel like doing anything *whistle whistle*..." makes me wanna do otherwise.

. :

Ergo, I was pepped up by this song to do a bit of tidying up in my topsy-turvy room. :)

From time to time, my maliit na room would look something like this - a complete disaster, à la Payatas.

I just need to open up my curtains, see the light (by light, I don't necessarily mean the bright shining sun in England...if you know what I mean), and listen to the right song to keep me from lazing around. After-cleaning pics next time. ;)

The good, the bad, and the ugly

How did I end up having two notebooks and one monitor??? Thanks to my good friend, Alex, who wanted to save a summer's worth of rent. Because he had to spend the summer back home in Lithuania, I was kind enough to adopt some of his stuff and in return I held his monitor, speakers, and woofers hostage. Bad-ass, huh? ;)

The other notebook was from my thesis adviser. Because I needed a software that doesn't function well in my vista-operated notebook, he didn't want me to go through all the trouble of installing a virtual xp machine on my notebook. The quickest way he could think of was to lend me a notebook, which was not bad at all.

I now label my three screens as the "good" (entertainment portal), the "bad" (all other web-related stuff), and the "ugly" (dorky matters). Now I get to multi-task even more! Wicked, init?!

Magda-drive ako hanggang...

…Paris! Sabi yan ni Ate Budz oder? :)

I never would have thought that I’d finally pass my driving exam on my second take, aber zum Glück habe ich es ja geschafft! Woohoo! Real luck! I’ve only done 6 hours of driving lessons before my first exam last April and 4 hours before my second exam last June. I haven’t practised driving since September last year and I’ve only been driving since January of last year, so I wasn’t positive about it. Luckily, the police examiner was so nice to us two girls who took the exam. (You bet, yes, it was our charm!) No seriously, they were all nice — my teacher, the examiner, and the other girl whom I did the driving exam with. They sort of worked together to let me pass the exam. To my dearest future riders, don’t freak out, though. I am not that bad in driving. It’s just the loads of street signs in Vienna that I unconsciously ignore sometimes (well yeah, that’s quite dangerous, eh?), which is the most important part of the driving exam. I failed my first one because I entered a one-way street from the opposite side. I mean, I know the signs, but for some reason I just don’t notice them sometimes. Also because the examiner at that time asked me to turn right in an apparently one-way street going to my left. Busted.

My Q&As were about the car tires.

Q: How would I know if it is a summer or a winter tire?

A: A winter tire would have the letters M/S on the tire suface.

Q: How would I know if I need to change the tire?

A: If it has deep cuts or if the tire depth is less than 1.6mm and 4.0mm in summer and in winter, respectively. Measure the tire depth with the tire depth gauge or check the tire depth indicator.

Q: What risk should I be careful of when there is road flooding? What should I do in this situation?

A: Aquaplaning. Hold on tightly to the stirring wheel. DO NOT BREAK!

Some mistakes during the actual 30-minute driving exam:

- watch out when driving in narrow streets with bicycle lanes

- failure to do oscillating glances in one of the intersections with a priority sign

- use of clutch

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The next day, we went to Therme Wien for R&R and to test my driving skills. Here’s Mom riding shotgun, with Wynn, Kuya Carlo, and baby CW in the backseat of Dad’s car. (Photo courtesy of Wynn)

Namatayan ako ng makina mga tatlong beses (yikes, fail) at naligaw konti dahil nag-inarte si TomTom Nav pero still…we survived!

Song of the moment: Wide Open Spaces - by Dixie Chicks

Who doesn’t know what I’m talking about
Who’s never left home, who’s never struck out
To find a dream and a life of their own
A place in the clouds, a foundation of stone

Many precede and many will follow
A young girl’s dream no longer hollow
It takes the shape of a place out west
But what it holds for her, she hasn’t yet guessed

[Chorus:]
She needs wide open spaces
Room to make her big mistakes
She needs new faces
She knows the high stakes

She traveled this road as a child
Wide eyed and grinning, she never tired
But now she won’t be coming back with the rest
If these are life’s lessons, she’ll take this test

[Repeat Chorus]
She knows the high stakes

As her folks drive away, her dad yells, “Check the oil!”
Mom stares out the window and says, “I’m leaving my girl”
She said, “It didn’t seem like that long ago”
When she stood there and let her own folks know

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I first heard this song back in college (final year), basically the same time when I first discovered Dixie Chicks. Whenever I play my Dixie Chicks playlist, it always brings me back to my thesis days. Their songs kind of inspired me and made me keep going, along with the Japanese dramas (‘Orange Days’ and ‘Honey and Clover’, among others) that I was watching in between experiment and thesis writing days.

I haven’t internalized the lyrics of this song until now…

She needs wide open spaces
Room to make her big mistakes
She needs new faces

Growing up with my grandparents, I felt like I have always been sheltered from the “cruel” world. I remember how my grandma wouldn’t let us go out most of the time when we were kids because she’s so scared that we’d bruise our knees, so I’m almost always just playing at home with my brother (which was a good thing in a way). I even remember playing guns with my brother and later on, WWE and Mortal Kombat on playstation. And when I started high school, that’s when I stopped playing (and being a child), I guess. I’ve grown to be that nice, boring person until I finish college. Now I realize that I regret the fact that I haven’t done so much when I was an undergraduate. I was all focused on my academics (not really focused, but that was all that I was worrying about). I haven’t even gotten myself into any shenanigan of any sort.

After the board exam, I decided to move to Europe. It was a big leap and I’ve passed up a couple of job opportunities because of this. But moving with my family turned out to be good…for a while. But then I wasn’t growing as a person and everything was always the same and felt like being inside a box with boundaries. I believe that the world should be borderless in all aspects. So after a year, I was convinced to take the slot at a university in England, one of my spontaneities where I didn’t know a thing about the place and didn’t even had an accommodation prior to my arrival. Now I know that it’s a crappy place up here, but as a friend said, it’s not about the shittiness of this place but how you make the most of your stay. We should not dwell on its flaws. Instead, we should use every opportunity to meet and learn from people, which I did and am still doing. The good thing about this place, especially the university, is its being multicultural. The university prides itself in having students from over 100 countries, mainly because of its Peace Studies programme. You’ll occasionally meet people from Latvia, Lithuania, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, America, Ireland, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Poland, China, S. Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Brunei, Philippines, even people from Nepal and Ethiopia (I’ve never met anyone from these countries before), and a looot more!

If it’s a good thing or not in general, I don’t really know, but I always want/need new faces and a new environment every time. You really learn a lot from people and places. I can’t say I’m a changed person, maybe a slightly improved one.

Fish and chips and by the sea

June 15, 2011

Because we’ve got nothing better to do, we went on a 9-hour long road trip along the British East Coast (North Sea, Yorkshire and the Humber), stopping by four small towns — Whitby, Scarborough, Filey, and Bridlington — to eat, take pictures, and just get a breath of fresh (sea)air.

First stop: Whitby. You can’t say you’ve been to the UK if you’ve never tried Fish and Chips! Typically, a Briton would argue that “chips” is not “French fries”. It IS chips. Period. There’s even racism in food! Well, “chips” are technically thicker strips of French fries. They also have straw fries, the less popular one, which are thinner strips of French fries. Although this wasn’t my first Fish and Chips, I figured it was still worth taking a picture. This is me impatiently waiting for my cod and chips with mushy peas at Quayside, the top Fish and Chips shop in Yorkshire in 2008. And when our plates arrived, whoah were they massive! But gluttons that we are, we managed to finish them all. No sweat.

The main attraction in Whitby is the Whitby Abbey in ruins. An abbey, by definition, is a Catholic monastery led by an Abbot or an Abbess. Whitby, including this abbey, is said to have inspired Bram Stoker in writing Dracula.

More pictures at the port of Whitby, showing one of the two lighthouses of Whitby’s twin piers.

An exhausting walk to the top of the lighthouse, scaring ourselves to death.

And who rule the (seashore) world?? Seagulls! They’re everywhere — from Whitby to second stop: Scarborough.

At Scarborough and third stop: Filey.

Fourth and final stop: at a closed fair in Bridlington.

Lucky for us, it was not a bad day (like it always is in England). It was alright, nice and sunny, but not too warm. If you fancy the seaside, these places would be awesome to go to, especially during a proper summer. Not as lovely as the beaches back home, though.

Donauinselfest 2011

Literally the Danube Island Festival, it is Vienna’s annual summer (music) festival. I’ve never been to this event before so I decided to just take a peek last Saturday. It wasn’t that heaving (at least not as I expected it to be) probably because it was still too early and the weather wasn’t that good.

There were a lot of activities for families and for kids like wall climbing and beach volleyball, among other things. Definitely loads of food stalls AND beer stalls couldn’t be missed. Some of the popular foods in Austrian fairs and festivals are Wurst (here, Grillwurst or sausage BBQ) and Langos, a deep fried flat bread made of a dough with flour, yeast, salt, and water (more like a massive flat doughnut).

Feeling pathetic being by myself, I treated myself to a pint of Ottakringer and spent the rest of the time watching a game at ÖBB’s (Austria’s national train company) booth. I would have joined the game because the price is a summer train ticket throughout Austria all summer long!! But before you can actually play the game, you have to play the air guitar first for a good 30 seconds or so. For me to do that, I’d need to take 3 pints, I guess. :) So anyway, the game’s quite straightforward. You just need to NOT answer any question with a “yes” or a “no” within 1 minute of the host’s questioning. Maybe it’s harder than it sounds because not many people won the game.

I enjoyed it, but it could have been better if I weren’t on my own. LOL, lesson learned re festivals.

Singing big

I haven’t been to the choir since Manami left and that was 3 weeks ago. I’m kind of missing it. Since joining the choir November of last year, we’ve been attending practices almost every week and sang at their Christmas concert two weeks after joining the choir. The choir is called the Jubilee Gospel Choir, which is organized by a Christian church but is basically a community choir in Bradford. This is a picture of us singing at last year’s Christmas concert. It was a black/red-themed concert, so we had to wear something black with a splash of red.

Here’s Maria, our lovely choir coach and conductor from Liverpool. :)

And this is me, passionately singing a song. :)

Imagine how we had to learn and memorize the lyrics of more than 10 songs in two weeks, considering that the choir was the least of my priorities back then since it was just a form of relaxation for us to channel academic stress into something productive. Obviously, we weren’t able to learn all the songs so we just hummed, smiled, and pretended we were singing in some parts. :) That’s one good thing about singing in a choir, moreso in a laid-back one like our choir. Mostly it’s just about having fun singing in a group. At 9-ish in the evening, we always walk home with big smiles on our faces after the practice.