Sunday and Monday felt like a single (long long) day. It just felt like the two were joined together and the day never ended. I think it's partly due to the flight.
Spent most of Sunday packing, frantically trying to get many things into the luggages without exceeding the weight. Too bad, in the end the weight was 33.5kg in total. Supposed to pay 3.5 X $72.50 = $253.75!!! But luckily we didn't have to pay eventually, explain that later.
And then si4 yi2 came to visit in the afternoon, so most of the time was spent talking to her. Or rather, just sit with them in the living room lor. Cos I don't have that many things to talk about.
After that we went to grandma's house for dinner. And then it was back home to get the luggage etc ready, before san1 shu4 and xiao3 shu4 drove my grandma and aunt down to pick us up. Somehow it felt like a very normal trip, as if I were travelling to UK for some band thing. At the airport I was sitting next to my grandma and she was constantly telling me the do's and don't's (again!). Later da4 bo2 and my cousins arrived and there was a spate of photo-taking, haha all of us whipping out our cameras. Sat there for quite long, and Guanyan was wondering about Popeyes so he and my dad went to buy some food. Ate a muffin (yum!) cos I know I'd surely be eating some more when I met my beloved section later.
Then it was time to say goodbye, everyone was wishing me all the best etc. Grandma was crying but weirdly I wasn't affected, even though usually will cry watching people cry in shows. Think maybe it also depends, like if I'm watching the show alone then I can really cry buckets but if there are other people watching then I won't be that affected. Sigh. Nevermind, she'll cheer up soon. And anyway she can always go to my house and see me via msn and the webcam.
Met my dearest section at Swensens. Thank you all SOOO MUCH!!! Where else can you ever find a section that's still sticking together since secondary school days... yay ET rocks! (Hmm Debbie, maybe I'll give you an 'internet send-off' haha. Too bad I can't fly back) Anyway, at Swensens, Debbie and I had two different kinds of "peaks", which is basically just lots of chocolate ice-cream, cream etc piled up in a tall tall glass. Mmmm CHOCOLATE!!! Jiehui and Shini shared some dunno-how-many-scoops-of-ice-cream thing, and Yiting had another chocolate thing in a shorter but rounder glass. Hmmm seriously I think my description skills are really bad hor, ok nvm. And since it was four ice-cream items, we could order some set thing which came with fries, the total costing $26. Thanks Yiting for your treat!
Thanks everybody for your present too! Haha the lantern is really hilarious! What am I supposed to do with it? Haha. And there's the butterfly-thing, which (sorry!) I haven't opened cos it looks very fragile and I think I'd wait till I move into my permanent accommodation so that it wouldn't break during the move. Thanks very much for the thumb drive, should be more useful than my tiny-capacity one heehee. What I really liked best was... the monday-to-sunday thing! (Hmmm were you all thinking it was the chocolate?) Now I know why you all said I have to flip it everyday (I will!) haha then I won't forget what day it is and what lessons I'll have ya. Well, so sorry about the chocolate actually, cos all of us didn't get to sit together on the flight to Dubai, and Poh Ning's mum was holding the plastic bag when we boarded the plane cos I had other things to carry. Later when we reached Dubai's baggage check for the transit... the chocolate had to pass through their scanning machine, which was labelled 'radioactive'. Argh. So sorry! *Sob* I didn't get to eat the chocolate! =( =( =( =( But anyway, I'm really happy and thanks again for all your presents! And the effort put in to make the monday-to-sunday thing!
Walked down to the check-in place together and took some photos. (Hey, must send me ok... can't wait till I move into my permanent accommodation and apply for the internet service in the room!) Sorry that you all had to leave so quickly, haha cos we all wanted to check in as soon as possible. Anyway, the check-in was quite bad, cos the guy at the counter was very irritating. According to Poh Ning's dad, they called Emirates in the morning to check whether her mum's luggage allowance was 20 or 30 kg. Apparently they said it was 30kg, but the guy at the counter refused to believe that cos on her ticket it said 20kg... 'if it was 30kg they'll have put it on the ticket, makes sense?' Argh, he said that with the very irritating kind of discriminating tone lor (he was also Chinese ok, hmmph we really have lots of things to bring what!) So we were 15kg overweight altogether. But in the end they managed to convince (actually not convince, he didn't look convinced but anyway, think he just didn't want to argue) the guy and he let us off without having to pay. (Thanks ah, Poh Ning! Otherwise I'd have to pay so much!) Second, when we passed him our ticket-holder (which contained next June's ticket also), he took out the wrong ticket for mine. Instead of taking out the Dubai-to-Birmingham ticket for 12 Sep, he took out one of the June tickets. Wah... luckily I realised when he returned me the tickets for next June. And I was wondering, huh? Why would I need to fly from Dubai to Birmingham next June?! Lastly, when people check in together usually they'd give you seats together lor, but he gave us seats that were quite separated, at rows 16, 19, and 38.
Oh ya, there was a small (ok not very small) glitch on my part too. Haha when they were scanning our hand luggage then the woman told the guy to check my bag. Apparently I put a sort of set of things like nail clipper etc in my bag but I thought I put it into one of the luggages. Whoa, mayhem! I had to take out anything that resembled the rectangular-shaped thing that they saw in the scan. Finally after scanning my bag three times over, we found the thing. They are so weird lor, they confiscated one sharp-looking thing but then they let me take back the nai clipper and some other things. Actually I think those that they returned me were still quite dangerous-looking leh.
Anyway, I wasn't very unhappy with sitting separately la. It gave me a little taste of what it feels like to fly alone. I took 38, cos at least 16 and 19 are nearer so they can be closer together. (But in the end they swapped places with some people and sat at row 39, haha I was so blur I only found out in Dubai!) My seat was a window seat, beside two Africans (Or African-something, I just don't want to use the term 'black' cos somehow it seems a little degrading leh). The baggage compartment was quite high up and I had to tip-toe a little to reach the handle and try to squash my hand luggage in. The plane was very big and of course stable, except one small part when we were having our second meal. Oh ya, the meals on Emirates are good! (Ok, please note that this is coming from a very sui2 bian4 person!) And I think it really depends on your choice when you order. Our first meal was two triangular slicles of bread, one with ham and pickles on top and the other with some sort of cream cheese. The cheese one was delicious!!! And there were other things, which I forgot. (See, the cheese one must really be so nice that I forgot what else came with it!) The second meal we had a choice of ommelette or noodles. I think I made a right decision with the noodles, cos I generally don't have a good impression of ommelettes on flights. They just seem too watery to me all the time, I don't like that. The noodles were yummy haha just normal noodles stir-fried and there was one rather big prawn sliced into half. For dessert (yay, dessert!) was a fruit tart. Yum. And of course there were fruits, salad, bread, butter, biscuits, cheese etc. Actually I slept for quite a lot of the flight, and so did my two neighbours, so I didn't really have to bother about them.
[13 September 2005 2150hrs: Aiya, think I should go sleep. Eyes starting to get tired and starting to feel sleepy. Actually, also cos my legs are aching... well wait for my post on today! Haven't really adjusted, now I sleep at 10 and wake up at 4! Ok, to be continued...]
[15 September 2005 1638hrs: Just got my wireless repaired, been getting disconnected all the time just now. See la, wasted 1.5 hours of my blogging time! *Sob*]
On the transit flight from Dubai to Birmingham, the three of us got seats together. Poh Ning and I sitting by the window and her mum sitting on the aisle seat in the middle section. The first meal was another bread affair. This time it wasn't as nice but still, it's nice! Haha. Somehow I had lots of appetite on the plane but Poh Ning and her mother were complaining that they were feeding us like pigs. The second meal was good too, I think we all took chicken. Cos I've experienced beef on planes that really taste bleargh. So I decided to get chicken. And the dessert was a creamy thing with berries on the bottom. Yum! Heehee. Yupz, so that's about all I have to say about the flight (actually it's quite a lot!). The coolest thing about Emirates is that they have one camera attached to the plane's nose showing you the pilot's view, and another camera attached to its belly showing you the downwards view. It's really cool during take off and landing and when we were low enough in UK we could enjoy the downwards view and see all the fields and buildings!
[15 September 1658hrs: wait, lemme just upload this before I continue the story...]
Then when we got down the plane, the customs was soooo slow. I think we waited more than half an hour lor. At first there were two queues, one for British passport holders and for non-British passport holders. Cos the British process is faster, they finished much faster than us. So they opened the other counters to us. But later another plane arrived and all the people on the plane were British! ARGH. One big group. So they had to give those counters to them again.
[15 September 1805hrs: this has been very slow moving, like I said, it's a long day. And now I'm chatting with lots of people on MSN so it's slowing me down quite a lot! Haha lemme publish again...]
[18 September 11:14hrs: using the wireless in the library now. Met Poh Ning and Shuying here cos they needed to fix their hallsnet. At first I didn't want to come but later I thought I should cos if the Arts Building was open then maybe we could book a room to practice on Monday. But too bad, it wasn't open]
When we reached the luggage belt it was really easy to spot our luggages cos most of the people were gone already, and only the last few people's luggages were left. Luckily we still managed to meet Shuying in the end (her flight arrived at 11+ but she said she would wait for us and also her parents were taking the same flight as us). At first the welcome team was already getting the group of international students gathered there to move out of the airport and we thought we'd have to wait for the next bus but luckily they managed to give us our yellow stickers (like we're tourists!) in time for us to follow the group.
It was a very sunny day, even in the plane the sun was shining so brightly we lowered the blinds for most of the trip. Actually we only raised it when we were nearing Birmingham so that we could peer down to see the scenery. I didn't know what to expect of the weather so I had my jumper in my hand luggage, and Poh Ning's mum was saying we might be cold outside especially me cos it was just a jumper (their jackets were a bit thicker), so she actually took out another three jackets from her luggage. But in the end we didn't need to use the jackets at all.
After the bus dropped us off at Prichatts, it became very chaotic. There were people everywhere, and everyone was collecting their luggage from the van. And then we were supposed to queue up in a line to store our luggages in the Social Centre. But it was so full they changed their minds and they told us to move back so that we could put our luggages on the grass outside the building. The whole thing was quite tiring cos I was carrying my super heavy hand luggage and my laptop bag too. My right shoulder was aching!
Tags were stuck on our luggage and we were given half of it so that we could collect our luggages later. Then we had to queue up in the Social Centre to get our accommodation contracts, and then our keys for the temporary accommodation. It took very long and all of us were very thirsty. Fortunately there were cups of water. There were many things to collect and everything was really messy.
The three of us tried to ask if they could allocate us to the same flat for the temporary accommodation but they said it was on a first-come-first-serve basis. But we still ended up in the same flat cos we were queuing one after another. The flat was non en-suite, but it was still ok I guess. My room was very dirty, there were little white bits of things on the floor and everything. So I was always either wearing my shoes or my slippers when I was in my room. Some photos of how the room looked like when we first went in... (actually I took these after I finished packing the day before we were moving to our permanent rooms)
The next few days were mostly just going around to do our registration with the university, going to the library to install the authentication certificate for the wireless, going to the finance office etc... Takes quite long sometimes, cos the queues are all very long!
The most irritating one was the bank. There were only two counters, and the people there could only do transactions and stuff, those with questions all had to queue up to ask another man. Only one man to answer so many people's questions! And he's quite racist... argh. When Poh Ning and I tried to ask him how we can set up internet banking, he explained the procedure and then he said, 'if you're not comfortable with English, translate the website into your own language...etc' Felt like boxing him. He says that to everyone who's Chinese-looking lor! Hmmph. Managed to get my solo debit card but can't really do anything with it cos obviously withdrawal got limit so can't pay my fees and accommodation in cash. Then we tried to pay through the epayment gateway in the the university's website but there was an error. We're guessing there's also a limit for such online payments. So now we just have to wait for our cheque books to come.
They are really weird. On Monday I went to collect my card and cheque book, but cos mine were supposed to be collected at the New Street branch, they said I had to wait a few days for them to be redirected to the university's branch. Then when I went back again, they only gave me my card. I was worried that they'd sent my cheque book back to Singpore, like Poh Ning's, so I asked them to check whether that was what happened. But then they said I asked for it to be sent to UK. So where did my cheque book go? Now I'm supposed to go back sometime next week. Sigh. And next week is Freshers Week, the whole university will be crowded with people trying to get everything done! Even longer queues than now! But we're hoping the banks won't be that bad cos if most UK students already have accounts they won't have to keep going to the banks.
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