Loot

Ok, so yesterday was my 22nd birthday and I got presents! I'll only mention a couple. Firstly, Mom and Dad are going to get my bike fixed so I can start riding again and build up my bad knee so I can start playing sports again next year. I'm really excited to get back on my bike finally!

Also, for a week I was staring at this massive bubblewrap King Kong-themed package that Vania sent me from New Zealand. I wasn't allowed to open it til my birthday, so I waited until she gave me a birthday call to open it while she was on the phone. And you know what was inside? A treasure!

There were two teeshirts and a pair of shorts that I accidentally left at Tom's dad's place in New Zealand, which I really missed - one of which Vania gave me for my 21st birthday and which I didn't even know I was missing! I just thought it was lost in my room here.

But she also gave me an electric toothbrush, because she knew that I was jealous of her one, so that's super cool. And she gave me two cool teeshirts which fit perfectly. And she gave me a little mirror to carry with me, because sometimes I need to see if I have food on my face and stuff when I'm out and there are no easily accessible mirrors. Stop laughing.

She ALSO gave me a really awesome card from her, Anna, Elliott, Mae, Jasmine and Kalinka with two photos inside, holding a Happy Birthday banner. And she sent the banner too! And a nice birthday letter, AND an engraved metal bracelet from her trip to Melbourne, from the very same stall where I got her a bracelet when I went to Melbourne last year. SO cool.

Check out the loot:

It's my birthday

I'm 22 years old as of today. And I'm lovin' it (partly because yesterday was my last final exam).

Check out my birthday cake from my 20th birthday. Dad put 20 candles on it, all in a clump in the middle, not spread out!




Also, I recently added some new photo galleries to this site from my year in New Zealand.

If you look in the left sidebar, the new ones are East Coast, Christchurch, Aoraki/Mt Cook, Queenstown, West Coast, Kepler Track, and Stewart Island. I'd love to hear any positive/negative feedback from anyone who takes a look.

And to all you stalkers (I know there are several because you told me yourselves) you should feed my ego and leave a comment every once in a while so I know you're reading this site. You don't need to log in or be signed up, anyone can comment.

Return of the Sis

Lisa came back a few hours ago from her choir trip, her first trip outside Canada. She had a blast, and I'm so happy she got the chance to go this year. She's only in grade 9, so she wouldn't qualify to be part of the Concert Choir at St Pat's, but she auditioned successfully to join the Chamber Choir, which usually only allows grade 10+ but makes a few rare exceptions sometimes.

They were at the Festival of Gold, a US national choral competition, and apparently both choirs were amazing. I believe it - I remember when I went to Utah with the choir for the same festival (there are multiple locations) and the amount of passion we had in our singing, because of our director's amazing ability to energize people like that. Apparently he pulled it off again, bringing most of the choir to tears with a story right before their adjudicated performance. And of course a choir sings best with that kind of emotional power.

The Chamber Choir placed 2nd and the Concert Choir placed 8th. Those are amazing feats, and go to show that the St Pats choral program is just as good, if not better, than it was when I had my 16th birthday in Utah with the Concert Choir.

In addition to stories and a big smile, Lisa also brought home a present for me. It's very special and so I decided to show it on here. It was hand-painted by a guy who specializes in this type of painting, and if you look carefully you can see all sorts of birds, fish, sunset, waterfalls, etc. I love it.

Exam stress...

Final exams are here again, and for many students at UBC they're already over. Not for me. Today was my third of four final exams. So far I've written my French Literature exam, my South Asian International Relations exam, and my South Asian Domestic Politics exam.




The problem is that the last one is the hardest - Canadian Foreign Policy. It was a really fun course to take, with a great lecturer - Dr Allen Sens - and good material. The problem is that there were 916 pages of assigned readings for a one semester course. These aren't novels or light reading, they're all journal articles and the like. For me, that means 20 pages of reading takes 1 hour, without taking any notes or highlighting. With a heavy emphasis on both readings and lectures, the final exam promises to be more than challenging for me, as I have not been able to read all the readings and have very little capacity to remember what I did read. For some reason, Canadian politics rarely stick in my head, while the politics of other countries are much easier to remember.

My goal for the exam is 70%, to get 80% as a grade on the course. This will not be easy. 39 hours until my last exam of the year is over.

I Got A Hair Cut

I got a haircut two days ago, after 3 months. It cost me $6.41 after tax, but isn't quite as good as when I get it cut by Donna, the person who usually cuts it. She's out of town though, and I really needed a haircut.

So now, I look like this:




Now it's time to head to the library to get my study on. It's super bright and sunny, I'm sitting in my bedroom with my south-facing (ie sun-facing) balcony door open and the sunshine streaming into my room and birds singing outside. It's awesome. And I'm going to go sit in the basement of the library, two floors below ground, and study until it's dark outside. While I really do enjoy almost all exams, the preparation is not always as much fun for me.

Words of Wisdom

Sometimes I feel like seeing what famous people have to say about a million different topics, and I'll spend an hour or two just reading quotations online. I put up some quotations on this blog a while back. If you look to the top left corner under the banner for this site, you'll see a quote. It changes every time you refresh the page. Today I found a quote which I think applies to me and some other people I know:

"When the morning's freshness has been replaced by the weariness of midday, when the leg muscles give under the strain, the climb seems endless, and suddenly nothing will go quite as you wish - it is then that you must not hesitate."

-Dag Hammarskjöld


You could interpret this as a message to middle-aged people, but I think it applies equally to anyone.

Lyrics

There are so many songs out there in the world that you're bound to find lyrics to suit any situation you find yourself in, at any given time of the day, week, year, or life.

Right now, the lyrics that come to mind are from a song called The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by The Postal Service:

The district sleeps alone tonight after the bars turn out their lights,
And send the autos swerving into the loneliest evening,
And I am finally seeing,
Why I was the one worth leaving

Really Cool People

I've met some really interesting people in my short life, and a few of them were, or have become, famous. I just found a newspaper clipping in my house that my parents cut out from April 10th. It was an obituary for a man named Rudolf 'Rudi' Vrba. He was the husband of Robin Vrba, a well known and very nice realtor in Vancouver who works in my mom's Re/Max office. I still remember meeting Rudi at a Re/Max function down at the yacht club by Jericho Beach about 5 years ago. He told me about Dansk, a town on the Baltic sea and although I don't remember the fine details anymore, I do remember that it was very interesting and since then I've always wanted to go there.

It turns out that Dr Vrba is a rather famous man. Not only was he a distinguished medical researcher and professor at UBC, but he was one of the two men who authored the very famous Auschwitz Protocols, sometimes called the Vrba-Wetzler report, after they escaped from Auschwitz in 1944. Vrba and Wetzler were the first two of only five Jews who ever escaped the death camp. The report was the first detailed information about the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and is considered one of the most important documents of the 20th century. You can read more about Dr Vrba, his amazing escape and later life at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Vrba or google his name.


Another, perhaps slightly less famous, person I know has recently started a petition which I think should be signed by anyone with a conscience. I spent a week in Toronto in 2002 with Nazanin Afshin-Jam and a bunch of other people, including my sister and Chris Kramer among others. Kramer may be familiar to some as the star of the TV series "The Collector." See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0380869/ for more on that.

Anyways, Nazanin became Miss Canada in 2003 and placed 2nd in the Miss World competition. She did the same two majors as me at UBC and even went to Herstmonceux Castle in her first year, like I did several years after her. Right now she has started a worldwide petition to save a girl in Iran, also named Nazanin, from being hanged for killing a man in self-defence. I was the 22,472nd person to sign so far. I encourage you to check out the petition info at http://www.petitiononline.com/Nazanin/ and sign it (and tell your friends/post it on your site).

If you've seen the music video for Bif Naked's awesome song "Tango Shoes" you've seen Nazanin - she's the girl in the diner in the snowglobe. If you want to know more about the Canadian Nazanin, you can check out her site and preview her upcoming album from Bodog Music at http://www.nazanin.ca/ or her MySpace site at http://www.myspace.com/nazaninmusic

New Photo Galleries

I haven't been able to study for the last few days, no ability to focus. However, I am able to do mindless work such as resizing photos and adding captions, so I've prepared a few new photo galleries for this site.

You can see the new galleries to the left of this post. Just click any thumbnail and it'll open that gallery. The new galleries are:

Old photos from crappy camera 3 years ago:
Scotland
France
Dublin
Uganda
Belgium
Italy
Switzerland
Austria
Germany
Prague
Budapest
Greece

Photos from 2005 with the good camera:
Dunedin 1
Dunedin 2
The Catlins



Enjoy! And if you like/hate them, please leave a comment to this post to let me know :-)

Kingston and Ottawa

A few weeks ago a buddy of mine sent out an email to all the students from our first year at the castle in England, asking us to show up April 1st for a few drinks at a pub in Kingston, where most of the castle kids go to Queen's University. On a whim, I decided I might as well make the trek out east, as I had never managed to go visit my old friends out there and had only seen a few of them since I left the castle three years ago.

I stayed at Bill and Alvin's place from the 31st to the 3rd. Bill was my roommate in the legendary room B120 in Bader Hall back in our castle days. Alvin was a good friend and student govt president that year.




Bill and Alvin have a really nice foosball table in their house. The players are all the same colour - silver - so it was hard for me to figure out which ones were my team but I got used to it.






The first night I was in Kingston was the formal dinner/dance event for the grads of the year, so a bunch of people were all dressed up when we went and did the rounds of the local residents. Two particularly crazy former Bader residents, now living in Kingston and preparing to go party, were Bunny and Amy.




On the 1st, we headed to Tir Nan Og pub to meet up with old friends. While Bill and Alvin see these people regularly at Queen's, I was excited to see them all again after so many years. They all looked almost exactly the same as in first year!

Bunny, Bill, Alvin, Janelle, and Christine (I see her all the time at UBC):




Luke, also known as Puke by some at the castle after one not-so-fun end to an evening of drinking:




Danielle and Lauren (I've bumped into her in Vancouver a few times over the years):




Paige, Amanda (visited me in Vancouver and I saw her in Australia), and Emma:




Andrei and Trini:




Ashik:




Bill, aka Beej, Billiam, William, possibly the best roommate ever:




Rob:




Rob's little brother, Johnny:




In Kingston I basically just spent the evenings out with friends and the days sleeping and eating... then at 7am yesterday Bill drove me to the bus station and I headed for Ottawa to catch my plane home.

I got to Ottawa at 9am and my flight wasn't til 4pm so I decided to have a look around. I was in Ottawa in grade 11 for a few days but didn't get to leave the huge school group I was with to explore on my own. This time I had to figure out the transit system, which luckily is a good system and wasn't too difficult to use.

Once in the downtown core, I spent about 4 hours walking around. Of course I walked past Parliament, on the first day back in session with the new Harper government:




While I was walking, I looked up and saw a plane carrying a message and laughed my ass off when I realized what it said:




The bell from the old tower is on display outside with a very interesting little description on a plaque:





I then headed down the road, past a memorial to peacekeeping:




I decided to take a tour of the Royal Mint, since the National War Museum was closed (Mondays are not so great in Ottawa). We weren't allowed to take any photos at all inside the mint. It wasn't a very interesting tour, but it helped me waste about an hour of my time.




It was a bit cold and somewhat windy, so the less fortunate in town were bundled up quite a bit:




Finally, I caught a bus to the airport, spent a couple hours there reading my book and sleeping, then flew to Calgary which looks like this from the air:




From Calgary I flew to Vancouver on a half empty plane and Dad came to pick me up and drive me home, and that's the end of my weekend adventure in Ontario.