Filed under: Lifestyle
It’s called a spöka in Swedish. It’s inspired by Jehhal’s favorite movie, Casper. It’s shaped like Aaron’s incredibly enormous genitalia (which is ironic, considering in year’s past Aaron has had the tendency to “dick” people with his gifts). It will make you feel safe at night when nightmares about said genitalia invade your thoughts. And your pants. It also includes bonus gifts.
Definitely didn’t find too many punks in the Mormonville, USA. Or mormons for that matter, so maybe that statement is unfair. The second day at Snowbird, right after a couple inches of snowfall on the 24th that made a 20 mile drive last an hour and a half, was a great Christmas present. Unfortunately, all the fresh powder tempted me to wander off path a little bit too often and i ended up getting stuck in the woods on a cliff once. Or twice.
My Christmas lunch consisted of a cup of chili while I was watching Juno over the shoulder of some lady. It made me smile. Unfortunately, nobody really ever snowboards with me. The one time that I followed my parents down the mountain, I decided to record a video of my mother falling and stumbling. She was upset. The one time that two other family friends followed me down, one of them lost their pole and the other crashed into an invisible snowmobile. Strange.
Large asian family gatherings tend to consist of hot pot, asian card games, and questions about if I had a girlfriend. Then things got a little racist and homophobic. Not too big a fan of that type of conversation. Oh well. At least I have my health.
Filed under: Lifestyle | Tags: dj decryption, duke basketball, europe, juno
I spent a lot of time coming back from Stockholm. The bus to Vasteras. The flight to Stansted. The easyBus to Baker St. The 205 to Mile End. Dinner at 2am and further packing. The walk down my five story flat with 25 kg bags in each arm. The District to Victoria with those same bags. The Gatwick Express. The flight to Charlotte. The fact that my flight got “rescheduled” and it was impossible to get the direct flight to San Diego. The flight to Vegas. The flight to San Diego. Stupid US Airways. At least they didn’t lose my bag.
On the way to Charlotte I met this guy sitting next to me who was struggling to fall asleep on the plane as well. Right before he landed he introduced himself and I found out that not only was he a Marshall Scholar working on his PhD, he also found spare time to produce music. He described himself as a cross between Chali2na from Jurassic 5 (whom he met as an undergraduate at Wake) and Sage Francis. Yep, broke the don’t compare white people and black people rule. Whoops.
There are elements of San Diego food that I have missed, especially now that I don’t feel nearly as poor. Korean food, Santana’s, In-n-Out, not to mention a good home cooked meal for once. Of course, it’s the conversations that make the meals: my nice, quiet high school friends now have stories of what it’s like to live surrounded by drug dealers or share their experiences of trying absinthe after Thanksgiving and why you really should be careful if you’re taking a flaming shot so you don’t burn your face or the nearby table. Also, you realize how important it is to watch what you drink because even boys can be roofie’d when they venture into a gay bar. Oh, and World of Warcraft. I hate World of Warcraft, so much.
We watched the Duke game the other day, and I skipped the first half of the second half because we were up by so much, only to find out that the score was tied. I thought Henderson was incredibly clutch, slashing twice for easy buckets and then again for an assisted three to Singler during crunch time. A good sign for our team. Of course, Scheyer was pretty much the opposite of clutch and despite conflicting reports from TBL and TBZ, I still feel like Scheyer’s taken a huge step backward since last year and really needs to shoot to pull his weight because he really has no other discernible skills. I’d rather have King out there for his size and his touch from outside than Scheyer’s bricks. Blah. Our athletic intensity really carried over to the soccer field the next day, and despite our horrible conditioning we were stride for stride with UCLA crew boys. I know, so intense. Don’t laugh, I’m really sore today.
Finally, I really couldn’t wait to see Juno. It was easily the cutest movie I’ve seen in a long time. That’s a compliment, even if I shouldn’t use the word “cutest” to describe a great movie. Despite an awkward beginning that tried too hard to be “wizard” and some narration from Ellen Page that didn’t actually fit that well, I thought it was great. The soundtrack fit the movie perfectly and the trailer didn’t give away any of Michael Cera’s best moments in the movie. Babies are swell, especially ones named Panda.
I’ll be in Snowbird the next couple of days, and I’ll try to make sure I know how to get a job in the upcoming semester as well as finish my work. To sum up my semester, I went an entire 12 weeks without a problem set and only spent two total hours taking exams (half an hour of that was an oral exam too). I met great people from England, from Europe, and even one from Africa. I went through ten countries, eight European capitals. My favorite city was Vienna, which is beautiful. My favorite experience was Madrid, which lasts all night. I managed to get as far South as Casablanca, as far North as Oslo, as far West as Tangier, as far East as Stockholm. And everywhere in between.
Things that I will not miss:
- The word “yeah” at the end of every sentence. Wow, how can people actually talk like that yeah? Don’t they get annoyed, yeah? I thought I would have gotten used to it yeah, but no, yeah, no. I have decided that because I can’t stand the way some people talk around here, I guess the “slang” part, I will not pretend to do an English accent. Ever.
- Indian/Bangladeshi/Pakistani “bruvs.” Seriously where do these people come from and when did they think they were such thugs? I get a little depressed every time I overhear a conversation or listen to them ask a question. Not a single one of any of the friends I have made here want to be friends with one of these people
- The terrible way that my flat is designed. Who thought it would be a good idea to build a flat that is actually just a long hallway with rooms. Why are the lights in the hallway motion sensing? Why are there four freezers in the kitchen, but no refrigerator? It also makes me miss simple things like a toaster oven. Very sad sometimes.
- The Hammersmith & City Line. Particularly dodgy. Despite being the best public transportation system in the world, I hate the tube on Sunday’s. It is impossible to get to Mile End on any line but the District Line, which unfortunately is the slowest line in the city.
- How socially acceptable it is for Europeans to smoke everywhere. How my hallway always smells like cigarettes. How my roommates find a way to always have an empty nutella jar used as an ash tray every time I come back. Particularly, it was upsetting when my roommates figured out that the smoke detectors weren’t actually smoke detectors, just heat sensors.
- How I have to plan ahead thirty minutes to go out anywhere in the middle of London. I hate the East End. So much. Though I hear because of the 2012 Olympics the road that is adjacent to campus is actually going to be closed off to cars and completely renovated. So maybe if I came here in… 2011, this would have been an awesome area. Unfortunately, the Olympic related highlight has been a fire at the Olympic site that cause the sky to darken.
- How the sun sets at around 3:30 in the wintertime. How it rains every other day intermittently. The lack of daylight makes the days seem so much shorter. I stopped running a while ago, because I hated running in the sketchy east end when it was all dark. Though, this did give Ray an excuse to run with his shirt off so “bikers could see him better.” It’s fun being white, innit?
- How difficult it is to cross a street. Instead of crossing once, you generally have to cross three times just to make it all the way across a main street. That’s ridiculous. It also doesn’t really have any good pattern or anything, but I guess in any street you just cross when there are no cars and don’t care what cars think. Too bad those cars driving in the city already pay an 8 pound congestion fee. Ouch.
- The crash of the US dollar. Nominally, everything is the same price. However, in actual money everything costs twice as much as it does. Because of this I feel even more poor than I ought to, but it’s misleading because you don’t feel that bad paying some prices. Especially because there is no sales tax and the prices aren’t misleading. But paying $4 for a load of laundry? (Just the washer mind you). Kind of depressing. Purchasing power parity my ass.
- Ah, who am I kidding. I really am going to miss living in one of the world’s most incredible, convenient, culturally diverse, and totally awesome cities. A lot. Not to mention it’s a springboard to the rest of Europe. Oh well, back to Durhole I go.
So the Craven Cottage actually has a cottage. It’s pretty cool. It’s on the bottom right corner of the pitch from this angle, and it has a nice balcony where I assume only the select fans can watch it. It’s also in a really cool area, just off of the Thames. It’s such a small stadium with ~30,000 seats which you can compare to University of Michigan’s “Big House” which had more than 100,000 fans see Appalachian St. kick their asses.
Anyway, headlines everywhere read about how Fulham conceded a late lead yet again to only come out with a draw – however, considering how terrible their defense is and how many blown opportunities they had in the first half. Especially Kamara, holy crap. I know he scored but that was the easiest tap in I’ve ever seen. Basically he would get the ball all alone on one side of the pitch and dribble it out of bounds or take way too long to take a shot or shoot one right over the post or make a horrible cross to no one. And yeah, their defense is terrible. If Blackburn had anywhere near the opportunities that Fulham had – the score would have been like 5-0. Also the foul call for the first Fulham goal was pretty dodgy I thought. Oh yeah, and they play Song 2 after a goal. Obviously.
So tracking American soccer star Clint Dempsey, they really hounded him because I think they knew Kamara was terrible. Numerous times Fulham would still throw it into Dempsey even when he was doubled. The funniest thing I think about soccer is this ridiculous play where Dempsey and a defender were chasing down a long pass in the corner. But the defender goes ahead of him, and you can see Dempsey is slowing down and basically has his arms in front of him when he is. And then the defender just rolls and tumbles forward over the ball as soon as he feels Dempsey’s hands graze him. Ah, the Europeans. They are such pussies. At least on the soccer field. This would never happen in rugby.
The Blackburn fans were definitely intense, dancing and chanting the entire games a la Cameron Crazies. Except I really couldn’t make out what the hell they were saying, whether it’s because their accents were terrible or the fact that I didn’t know any of the Blackburn players. Still, a pretty entertaining game due to the fact that it barely met professional football standards.
- An interesting article about being libertarian and how that affects Ron Paul. I think it’s really cool how he managed to set a one-day GOP record of $4.3 million on the internet alone, just because it was Guy Fawkes Day. And the crazy thing is he didn’t even organize it, some supporter did. More of a comment on how the two party system is completely failing this country in the eyes of every college-aged citizen.
- The thing about Ron Paul is, it’s admirable that he holds onto his strong, non-interventionist-support-the-constitution beliefs, but I’m scared about how someone like him would react when some things could go wrong. For example, I personally don’t think the private market is a solution for social security – nor can the government cease to regulate things related to the environment (Al Gore would freak). Would Paul be flexible and relinquish his small government principles? I don’t think so.
- I cracked a couple of eggs on the way back from ASDA yesterday and decided that I had to make something with them, to go along with the leftover turkey from the Thanksgiving Zach had organized on Thursday. So I made korean pancakes. Actually they turned out to be just fluffy omelets due to so much egg and not enough flour, but still, pretty good. I didn’t think San Diego would be a place that I missed for its Asian cuisine, but Southern California really had some good stuff.
- The thing about two story clubs with multiple dance floors is – it really just gives an excuse to play the same songs in multiple locations over and over again. It’s ridiculous. I mean, I guess you can’t go wrong with playing Beautiful Girls three times in one night, but I’m sure other people tend to get upset.
- Josh McRoberts, I hope you’re happy sitting on the bench for Portland playing behind the likes of Raef Lafrentz. That second round contract feels good doesn’t it? I’m glad the rest of the NBA is smart enough to see what Duke has seen all along: a marginally athletic power forward who wishes he was a point guard. Well, at least you look happy.
