so i'm in a hostel in DC, which is pretty decent, except that i have to lock everything up before i go to the toilet all the time, which can get pretty annoying at times. washington is a nice place, especially near the monuments, because there're so many cops and so much security, you kinda know it's the safest place in america to be, unless someone feels like bombing it.

so i'm short of sleep, doing my essay, and got bored. met dee's friend esther, had a great tour of congress, and wandered around town, checked out monuments and holocaust museum (there's a story in that). and you realise why they're so big on liberty. symbols are powerfully persuasive sometimes, so even though you're cynical enough to think that human rights and liberty don't exist, for that brief period, standing at the top of the washington monument or lincoln memorial, or where martin luther king jr. made his speech, those doubts are suspended. and you kinda believe in the possible salvation of mankind. and begin to hope. at least, until you pop by the holocaust museum and realise how screwed up the world was, is, and always will be.

okay. but it's always nice to believe in human rights and freedom. after all, countless wars have been fought over and for it, and we don't want all those bloodshed and deaths to be for nothing do we? this whole human rights issue reminds me of something i read somewhere before. our greatest tragedy is that we're ultimately doomed to failure, yet our greatest triumph is that we never stop trying.

sigh. the lack of sleep must be screwing with my brain. 20 hr bus ride on greyhound to kingston tomorrow. somebody save me.

oh. and my breaking heart (still unrecovered from little mermaid) is broken yet again. apparently serendipity has been shut down indefinitely because of roaches and rats! i can only hope it opens in time for christmas. sigh.

alright. back to my essay. been overeating and enjoying life a tad too much in nyc.

edit: i just realised that serendipity used to have a US$1000 dessert (Golden Opulence Sundae) that required 48hrs advance notice to prepare, and now just recently came out with a US$25,000 dessert (Frrrozen Haute Chocolate), a week before they were forced to shut down. fwah. anyone feels like treating me to chocolate for my birthday this year?

just for fun:

The Golden Opulence Sundae consists of five scoops of Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream infused with Madagascar vanilla, covered in 23-carat edible gold leaf, rare Amedei Porceleana and Chuao chocolate, American Golden caviar, passion fruit, orange, Armagnac, candied fruits from Paris, marzipan cherries, and decorated with real gold dragees. The sundae is served in a baccarat Harcourt crystal goblet with an 18-karat gold spoon. Apparently the cafe sells approximately one of these every month.

and:
The Frrrozen Haute Chocolate (or frozen hot chocolate) is a frozen, slushy mix of cocoas from 14 countries, milk and 5 grams of 24-carat edible gold topped with whip cream and shavings from a La Madeline au Truffle. It is served in a goblet with a 18-karat gold bracelet decorated with 1 carat of diamonds and served with a golden spoon decorated with white and chocolate-coloured diamonds. Both the spoon and the bracelet are for the diner to bring home. The restaurant has yet to sell one, having closed down shortly after showcasing it, but since the truffle comes from France, the cocoas from all around the world, and the gold from Switzerland, they estimate about two weeks for an order to be processed.

so i was fool enough to think that it'd be cool to visit new york during thanksgiving, check out the sales and especially woodbury, and get really cheap stuff. i have since learnt better.

firstly. never go woodbury during thanksgiving. thanks to my friend, i didn't. from all reports, you go there at 10pm, spend two hours trying to get through the jam, make it past security, find a lot, and then fight tooth and nail to grab an item that fits you. then if you go there past a certain time, it's sort of like how things would be after a pack of hyenas ravaged the poor dead animal...picked clean (at least, when i went to macy's at 6pm, that's what i saw, and i can only surmise woodbury was worse)

secondly. don't shop during thanksgiving if you can help it. the crowd is disgustingly insane. like. throng is a good word, that i'd never though i'd see. if christmas is going to be like this, i think i will hide somewhere far up north.

thirdly, new york has a lot of nice food, so spend your money on it rather than shopping! why buy a pair of shades when you can eat dim sum and krispy kreme! (btw, i..uh..bought oakleys because i was bored)

so. yeah. enjoying new york. A&F and touristy stuff tomorrow, haven't really taken ANY photographs at all yet after two days, which is kinda new for me. and i still want a trenchcoat for christmas. impractical as it is.

so i decided to do something rare, which is to blog about my travels. no photos yet though (which means never), because i'm travelling and lazy to upload.

day 1 of philly was...interesting. left kingston at 11pm, drove to philly. amazingly enough, the approximately 700km journey only took us 6 hrs, which was surprisingly fast. which i attribute to the fact that the roads were totally empty because of thanksgiving (more on that later). first time ever that i cleared US customs so quickly and efficiently, mainly because my friend driving was american. then came the 6hr drive which passed really quickly because of the awesomely good music (please go listen to passafire, is nice!) as well as the fact that i got to drive! nobody died, so yeah, i'm not that bad a driver. and it was an exciting first drive, through rain and wind, fog and darkness, i think we commented that the only things lacking were sleet and snow. and random roadkill of course. talk about a memorable first drive in US.

then, arriving in philly at 5am, i realised it was a tad bit early to be waking up my friend, so we stopped by for, can you believe it, PHILLY CHEESE STEAK! (joel lim i dunno what philly cheese steak you eat but the one at Geno's was pretty damn good! well, except for the hot sauce, which i suspect contained jalapenos) an excellent introduction to philly. that and the hoagies. basically think subs, but with meat, cheese, onions, oil and maybe vinegar. unhealthy, but tasty. and the bread is damn nice too! oh yeah, and my friend didn't wake till 7 so i spent my first few hours in philly outside the house napping and reading law notes. abit the sad. luckily it wasn't as cold as in canada, otherwise die already.

daytime nothing much, usual touristy stuff, then my american friend invited me for thanksgiving dinner! awesome. my first ever authentic american thanksgiving. although giving thanks at the table was kinda strange. but the family was really nice and friendly and the atmosphere was fun. (the beer and wine and alcohol helped a lot too) no photos because i was too busy eating/drinking/playing foosball. food eaten includes several rounds of ribs, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, bacon, ribs, and much discussion over whose ribs recipe is better over the dining table, which led to a scheduled showdown in december ala iron chef. alas, i will not be there to judge. oh, and i sat through 2 NFL games. uhh.

and that results in where i am now, in my friend's very big room with the guitar and the TV, watching leopard seals eat penguins on animal planet, having missed my last bus to NYC, and having to wait till tomorrow morning. which means that i kinda missed the 4am black friday shopping. so sad. but the RIBS. omigosh.

p.s. eh philly is quite nice la, joel why you make it sound so sian.

basically the story's about the director who decided to go film sharks underwater. to do that, he teamed up with an eco-terrorist to go chase down poachers in Costa Rica, fighting on the high seas and battling death and infection every step of the way.

and if you want the official story, underwater filmmaker Rob Stewart did a documentary in order to showcase the plight of sharks around the world, travelling to the shark-rich waters of the world to expose the exploitation and corruption surrounding the shark-fin industry, especially in the marine reserves of Cocos Island, Costa Rica and the Galapagos. he spent five years on this, and nearly got himself killed several times.

He travelled with the crew of the Sea Shepherd, fought with poachers and got rammed by pirate boats, had a run-in with the government and tried for attempted murder, gunboat chases, mafia espionage (this is all from the synopsis off the site), and caught necrotizing fasciitis (flesheating disease for all you house and grey's fans).

Catch your attention yet? oh, and it has fantastic underwater videography (i.e. sharks galore)

For the uninformed, the Sea Shepherd is sort of a renegade arm of Greenpeace (since it was founded by one of their three founders), and they take a more confrontational approach towards environmental protection (such as sinking whaling ships). It basically fights poachers around the world, and its members are accused of maritime piracy and attempted murder (well, i suppose sinking ships and ramming them kinda kills the crew), but because of international law and differing jurisdictions, convicting and extraditing them sometimes poses a problem (and you wonder why i took a course in international law AND conflicts of law).

1) Sharks are killed largely for their fins, thanks to the whole shark fin soup fiasco. 100 million sharks a year die to fuel the demand for fins. Many of these sharks are finned then discarded into the water to die. It’s like killing an elephant for ivory or a rhinoceros for its horn, and because of this, shark populations have dropped 90% in the last 30 years.

2) Sharks eat fish. Life on earth depends on life in the sea which sits below sharks in the food chain. Phytoplankton in the sea convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, providing us with 70% of the oxygen we breathe. So, sharks eat fish, fish eat plankton. We kill the sharks, many more fish around to eat plankton. Less plankton = less oxygen and more carbon dioxide = global warming = no white christmas in new york.

3) No sharks means i'll be very bored when diving. Also, it means that the sick fish survive and breed so next time all you'll have to eat are sickly dying fish. Which by logical extension will kill you one day. okay maybe not (since i have no authority on it), but who wants small sickly fish anyways.

i think i just found my research topic for environmental law. and people bitch on about the lack of human rights and starvation and war crimes. humans can be so self-absorbed sometimes. sigh back to my essays.

today, amidst my boredom whilst essay writing, i was surfing flickr and chanced upon an autumnal photo which was really pretty. following the link, it led me to this guy's photos. which are pretty....well, pretty. shots mostly in toronto, as shown below.



same place, entirely different time, focus, and objective (skill level also very different). which makes me wonder, are we all just too busy being caught up with our lives to pay attention to what goes on around us? if we look hard enough, a good photo, some beauty, can be found in almost anything. just that we hardly bother with the effort.

so while the argument can be made that looking at life through a lens cuts you off emotionally and prevents you from experiencing life to the fullest, sometimes, looking through those lenses also gives you an entirely different perspective, and lets you appreciate life anew.

so there i was, watching the raindrops splatter on the skylight, drumming a merry rhythm as the presentation went on (was it about TRIPS and AIDS, or falun gong, or some human rights issue again?) and desperately trying to alleviate my boredom (not that anybody's ever online at the unearthly hour of 12), when i realised that blogsurfing doesn't help, because everybody's more or less in the same slump of boredom, and the mood's infectious.

seriously. i'm on exchange, and i'm bored. granted, not as bored as i'd be back home, but the essays waiting to be written don't help with the mood. nor, strangely enough, do the upcoming holidays (although they are bound to be exciting and i will love them come december, but right now i just can't find the energy). it's wrong. i'm supposed to be having so much fun i forget to blog, instead, i'm doing the same thing i'd do during exam period back home. maybe it's cos i'm running out of cash. or nearby places to go.

and the funny thing is, while walking to school today, the thought occurred to me. why is it more fun to be snowed on than rained on? you end up the same degree of wet, and snow's a lot colder. but everyone loves snow. more than essays, at any rate. which reminds me, i should be getting back to writing them. but it's going to snow tomorrow. that should be interesting.

on a sidenote, chocolate is nice. hot chocolate is even better, but apparently you can't make that with non-fat milk. either that, or i need a microwave.

so until the snow arrives and i go photocrazy, i leave you with the view from my room (on sunnier days), where i've been merrily cooped up the past few days. and napping my afternoons away.


at least, until i hop over to philly and nyc next week.

so yeah. chicago. for most of you who know me, you'd already know that i thought it was frigging awesome. for those who need to know, nice clean streets, variety of food, and great cheesecakes. also, no homeless and criminals on the streets that i saw. plus the aquarium was welcome after such a long hiatus away from fish. and free zoos are always good. met up with karen, my lawr tutor, had a fun chat, and basically had a great time. of course, the bill was pretty painful too, 1.3k USD for a week in the windy city, but at that time, entirely justifiable. and in retrospect, i'd do it again if i could.


of course, the week leading up to it was rather messy, since i had to go to toronto and bum around and write essays. but at least i managed to get awesome autumnal shots. would have taken more but there was just this overwhelming lethargy to haul my ass down to the harbourside/lakefront especially considering the wind and cold and the fact that it was probably my fifth visit there.


also made a double pitstop to ann arbor and visited the umich guys, since a 10hr straight drive from toronto to chicago is usually considered mildly exhausting. their law school there is really pretty. and the guys were excellent hosts, even to the point of getting us drunk and concussed in their living room whilst playing bleach on wii.


so that sums up the last two weeks. and for once there aren't any food photos, although this week i've been experimenting on hot chocolate and cooking with garlic butter instead of olive oil, and will eventually move on to cooking lamb chops. more on this week, i've been holed up in the library doing essays, because i realise 4 essays do not just up and write themselves, and a pass/fail exchange mod still means that i kinda need to submit something to pass. and i must admit it sometimes scares me to look at the outline for a 25 page essay and actually see an end to it. like. oh, i just have to write this, and this and that, and argue maybe this, and hey, it's already 25 pages. or how 1hr presentations don't faze me anymore. or maybe it's just the absolute nonchalance that comes with knowing that i just need to pass and i can crap all i want about asia because the lecturers won't have much of a clue.

the nights are getting colder, although the way the temperatures work here baffle me. today's high (i.e. 6deg) can be tomorrow's low, and a -6deg night feels less cold than it does now in my room at 10deg. the world is a strange, strange place. but at least there's snow (or will be!) wind sucks though. big time.

so, till next time, i'll leave you with a picture, of my most prized purchase from the trip:

today, i woke up to realise i had the following to do:

1) make a 1hr presentation on human rights and religion which i hadn't prepared for
2) collect my cards from the post office
3) wash 2 weeks' worth of laundry
4) clean 2 weeks' worth of dust from my room
5) buy groceries
6) catch up on lost sleep

so after surviving the presentation and spending 2 hours uploading my chicago photos on facebook, and nearly dying from captioning as well as looking at all the food and realising i hadn't eaten the whole day, i went to get my cards.

the sun was setting, the sky was dark, the air was cold.

'tonight' by stars was playing on my ipod, and while i was walking to the post office, it started SNOWING.

this is why i love exchange so (well, besides the madcap travelling i've been up to)

note: granted, it was a light snowfall, more of a flurry, but it was snow nonetheless, and suited the mood perfectly. so now i'm freezing in my room and getting ready to prepare dinner. and loving the fact that i have a card at last.