Showing posts with label starting to like Cambridge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label starting to like Cambridge. Show all posts

Monday, March 1, 2010

SOLID Weekend.

Saturday

Basically, football dominated the day ...
Woke up pretty late, ate breakfast, read about macroeconomics for a while, then met up with the team to walk over to the pitches. The whole footballness from beginning to end lasted about 4 hours. yeah, FOUR hours, 1-5pm. Kinda crazy, but it totally brought me back to middle school club soccer days (or even weekend high school games - which were rarer since most varsity matches were on weeknights) where the large half of Saturdays or Sundays were taken up by games (changing, driving there, playing, post-game frivolities, driving back, showering). A ride down memory lane; it was fantastic.

The day started out rainy, then was perfectly sunny during our game, started drizzling as soon as we were done, and then proceeded to rain/pour/HAIL-for-15-minutes/rain/drizzle the rest of the afternoon. ... crazy English weather.

Anyway, so basically, met the team in the bar around 1pm, headed over to St. John's pitches 1:30pm, warmed up, kicked off at 2pm, sent John's home crying by 4pm, packed our stuff and dragged our muddy selves to The Eagle pub for a toast to our league semifinal victory! Onward we go to the Plate Finals next weekend!


[King's Women after 3-2 semifinals win vs. St. John's ... "muddy but ecstatic!"]
[photo credit: Christina]

I can't even express how happy I am to be playing football [soccer] again ... especially after being broken/not doing any physical exercise for an entire year (probably the longest consecutive vegetable state I've been in since what, age 5?). Really like the team too - much more of a unified team feel than when I rowed briefly with my college last term - though the inherent social/communication-intensive structure of soccer as a sport is probably an important factor, haha.


Sunday

Churned out my economics essay in 5 hours, then King's Voices took up the rest of the night.

Rehearsal at 5pm, and somehow I'd been oblivious to the discussions we'd had in previous rehearsals about this concert, because I thought it was just some small performance in the chapel, like any other Monday evensong service.

Wrong.

I walked in to the chapel, ready for rehearsal, and what else do I see but a full orchestra and stage?! My 14 years of piano evidently didn't teach me too much outside of performing very well ... I didn't know "Mozart Requiem" referred to a 16-movement choir composition complete with orchestral accompaniment until I walked into the chapel that afternoon, 3 hours before the concert. lol. I mean, yeah, we'd rehearsed and everything, but our rehearsals are always rather cursory and quick in terms of how much we [don't] belabor the practicing.

Anyway, so, no pictures, but here are two of my favorite movements that we performed, sung by another choir in similar orchestra+SATB format:


Dies Irae


Confutatis & Lacrymosa

(Links: Dies Irae and Confutatis/Lacrymosa)

That pretty much took up the entire evening, and there was a decent audience turnout. Imagine singing 45 minutes of Mozart in D minor inside here:


[King's College Chapel]

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Uncharacteristically Busy Cambridge Week

10 hours of lecture
1 Macroeconomics essay
1 Organisational Behaviour essay
1 Human Resource Management essay
1 Engineering lab report
Macroecon supervision
3E6 supervision
3F2 supervision
Valentine's Superformal
Football practice
King's Voices rehearsal
Churchill Spring Ball
Football match
King's Affair meeting
King's Voices Evensong
... within the same week, when Britni also happens to visit for 3 days and Ted for 4.


This is more like it.


(The Friday before this week was uncharacteristically packed too:
10-11am 3D7 Lecture
11-1pm 3D7 Lab
1-2:30pm Pick up/confirm King's Affair hoodie order
3-4pm 3F1 supervision by CMS
4-5pm 3E5 supervision at Trinity Hall
5-6pm 3D7 supervision at CUED
7-9:30pm iCusu formal at Queens
9:30-11:30pm finish King's Affair launch paty decorations)

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

American Breakfast Sundays

Since the first American Brunch Sunday with CMEs who craved old fashioned American-style sweet breakfast food, we've started a brunch revolution.

I mean ... gotta make good use of this huge set/room I've got for this year and this year only :)

Therefore, brunch parties every weekend. Solid.
It's always potluck-style with ingredients - Alexa's getting bread, Jade's bringing juice, Chris has got eggs, etc.
and works amazingly well. Each time we end up having a bit of variation, although you can't really go wrong as long as you have bread, eggs, and some sort of fruit. Oh, powdered sugar and syrup is a must - until Alex and Anna introduced nutella and whipped cream into the equation. Now I've got an accumulating stock of King's cafeteria silverware/glasses, plus two jars of maple syrup, a box of powdered sugar, and three containers of nutella in my cupboard. Looks like brunch will be happening every weekend from now on ...



Sunday, 11/8




Sunday, 11/15




Saturday, 11/21




Sunday, 11/22










Saturday, 11/28


aw, we finally all fit around one table!

Holiday SPIRIT

Alexa, Michaela, and I, being Americans, have been raised in the overly-commercialized, Hallmark-monopolized, decorations-ridden, color-explosion world of HOLIDAY SPIRIT ... and WE LOVE IT.

So, when we come to Europe, we DO NOT let the lackluster "yay .. er .. Christmas .." (spoken in ~5dB) stop us from our (somewhat premature) festivities.


We could not WAIT to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas, so we got a little headstart mid-November.
(oh, and Halloween too.)


PIES. Pies are essential. We have ovens. Why not make pies? They're easier than cooking an entire turkey. Plus, we'd been severely craving pumpkin pies since Halloween. So ... we embarked on our cooking adventure, the entirety of which ended up being a 4-hour endeavor. YESS.


[all the tasty spices ... smell the HOLIDAY SPIRIT!]


[making pumpkin pies ... from scratch]


[pumpkin pies, fresh out of the oven]


[pies, milk, whipped cream, roasted pumpkin seeds ... check]


[DELICIOUSNESS]


[festive pies with the Americans]


[PIE TIME]



[Market Square Cambridge city Christmas lights "Big Turn On"]


[11/15 lighting of Christmas lights in Market Square :D]


[Market Square with a ... sheet? of lights]


See, even people in overly-holiday-eager America would say 11/15 was a bit too early to light up the town with Christmas lights ... I say it's never too early.

In my book, the existence of each year is simply 10 months of waiting for October to roll around so we can start GETTING IN THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT AGAIN!!!

King's Toga Party

The weekend following the Communist Party, King's bar had a Toga party to celebrate the imminent opening of a Kingsman's play "When In Rome" ...

An unsurprisingly large number of people own white bedsheets and went to the effort of haphazardly (in some cases, quite intricately and impressively) wrapping themselves in them before coming down to the bar.

Good times.



[King's Toga Party - bar, cleared area for dancefloor]


[Louisa, Juan]


[Nadia inherited a sheet and I found one abandoned on the ground = Greek for the rest of the night.]


[Greeks at heart]


[hahahahahha]


[King's Bar = dancefloor with live DJ]


[aftermath, or what it must have seemed like to any townspeople still awake: people running around Cambridge streets in the middle of the night, chasing each other while wrapped in large white sheets. wtf?]

Sunday, November 15, 2009

King's Communist Party

11/07 Saturday night ... college party!

Basically last Saturday, Shayne, our bartender (all the colleges here have their own college bars), threw his pet project - the King's Communist Party.

Maybe because we're all communists at heart at King's ... or maybe simply because Shayne had an outfit that looks pretty commie. Either way, it entailed 8pm-midnight live DJ, dance floor, lots of drinks, costumes, face paint, and entertainment galore. A BLAST. Loved it. I'll let the pictures do the talking.



[Went over to Jade's before the party and we went to town with the face paint. Flipped my only red tee inside out, cut out/painted/taped the hammer/sickle, and then spent 10 mins in front of the mirror ... communist ready.]


[Workers unite.]


[Capitalist pig (with money where his handkerchief should be ...) and his "bourgeois" wife.]


[authentic posters! what!]


[Alice and me]


[ran into a couple of guerrilla fighters from Cuba ...]


[Shayan, me, Juan]


[armed and ready for attack! Alexia and Juan.]


[red-tee yellow-paper buddies.]


[guest appearance by Che.]


[reppin' the Commie gear.]


[King's College bar --> dancefloor]


[haha. such a picture you would see on a club publicity site or something. the lighting, sloppiness, laughs, "whaaa?"-ness, everything.]


[Everyone still on their feet ... Roman, me, Nadia, Jon, Peter, Anna.]


[Shayne, King's bartender aka brains behind the party.]