Maple syrup and Jello

This past week was I was fairly busy with school, especially since lately I've been finding myself up until all hours of the morning trying to watch the Olympics :P But it was a good, just did the normal class stuff. Had an assessment in my Ophthalmic Lenses Lab which was on hand neutralization where basically we were given a trial set of lenses and using them had to figure out the prescription in the glasses. I'm not really sure how or why this was really useful, but I guess i won't bother to question it, since I did well on the assessment. Aside from that it's really just been business as usual although I'm starting to get a bit more stressed, with these essays/assignments which are mainly due in about 3 weeks and I've barely started, but this week I'm cracking the whip by actually doing some work while I watch the Olympics.

On Tuesday as I hope many of you remembered it was pancake day (in North America and the UK, and pancake WEEK in Russia!) So for breakfast I made some North American pancakes with back bacon and maple syrup for myself and some friends. Then for lunch another batch of North American pancakes (although these were more US style hot cakes) along with more syrup for even more people! Unfortunately I had planned to go out for British pancakes for dessert, but the only place I knew of was closed ... so I had to settle for some left over pancakes from breakfast :(  Ultimately I think I got my fill of syrup to last me until the summer, but next year I'm going to see if I can do around the world in pancakes :o

Aside from school the only main thing that I did was I went out with some friends on Friday. We went out for dinner downtown and we found a relatively inexpensive Chinese buffet, which is easier said than done since downtown dinner is usually around 15pounds! So when we saw all you can eat for 8pounds, we figured we had to give it a shot, and it was okay. For the price it was good and there was a great selection of food, but just tasted okay (yet the Mandarin or Kings Buffet are still much better). With that said I'll probably go back again since you can't beat the amount of food for the price plus they have JELLO (it's the first place that I've found so far where I can actually get Jello). After dinner we then went down the road to the REP Theater where we watched Dancing at Laghnasa.

There were two shows currently playing at the theater and this one looked the most interesting. It was set in a rural area of Ireland (County Donegal) in the mid 30s and was about a family of five sisters, one brother and a 7yr old kid during one summer. I didn't really know anything about the play prior, and it turned out to be pretty decent after all (bit slow, but not too bad). It would probably be classed as more of a chick flick type of show, yet I found the cultural and historical parts interesting. My friends didn't seem to mind it too much but I know they didn't enjoy it quite as much as I did, since for both of the people I went with English is there second language, so it was a bit of work for them to understand the Irish accent.

The best part of the night though was the price. They have a special deal in the UK where through the Arts Council of England which in there mission to provide great art to everyone they have a set up a program where anyone under 26 is able to see a certain number of shows for free each year. It sounded too good to be true at first, but now I believe it, and it's even good at theaters all over the UK (although different restrictions apply at different theaters). Since the tickets were free we ended up getting seats in the middle but second row from the back, yet they REP theater is laid out so well, with such a great slope that even where we were we still had a great view! Needless to say I plan on taking advantage of this program while I can see several performances.

Now that was my week last week,

Jeff

Word of the Week: "knackered" means "exhuasted" or tired ... basically what I am in the morning lately after watching Canada's Olympic team.

A Busy First Few Weeks of February

It's been a fairly busy last couple of weeks.

My classes have been very interesting but there's a bunch of work to be done, since we have four essays/assignments on the go currently. One neat thing that we are learning about is a test called the “Fan and Block”, which is an older type of subjective refraction (getting the patient's prescription using their input). The weird thing about it is that I asked our professors when we would use this method and apparently we will rarely if ever, but they said that if we ever go on a mission trip to somewhere like Africa then we would come across this method, since it's a technique that is commonly taught to technicians in 3rd world countries because it's very easy to do and is relatively accurate.

Of course classes have been interesting but over the past few weeks my friends and I have had a great time taking in different experiences.

On the 5th it was my friend's birthday, but since they went home that day to see their family we all decided to go out on the Wednesday night for dinner. We ended up walking downtown and had no real idea what type of restaurant we were looking for, but just that we wanted to be somewhere near the canal. We ended up in a part of town called Brindley Place, which is a really nice fancy block downtown.

We are all very indecisive, so we ended up finding a map of the area which listed all of the restaurants and we had the birthday girl randomly point to one. We went the place she randomly choose, but it turned out to be probably the most expensive restaurant in Brindley Place, so we decided to go to a Thai restaurant across the court yard called Thai Edge.

The restaurant was basically empty when we got there, which was good, since we weren't sure if we should have made a reservation ahead of time or not, especially since there was six of us. Although I know that some people might have wondered if it would be any good at all, but since it is open in a fancy area of town, then we figured it must be good (but it also helped that shortly after we sat down it started to fill up. The food was fantastic and we ended up having a great time.

Afterwards, we took a leisurely stroll back towards campus and ended up seeing a completely different part of the city than we had seen before.

After the outing on Wednesday, we decided we should go out more often and do something different, since usually after dinner we just sit around and watch DVDs. On Monday night we decided to take baby steps and start by going out to see a film, so after dinner we decided to go see the film Sherlock Holmes. We looked online and the theatre and show time that seemed like it would work best for us was about a 45min walk from campus. Normally we don’t finish dinner until around 8:30-9ish, but since we were going out we tried to have an earlier dinner, so that we would have plenty of time to get to the film. Yet as usual nothing usually goes to plan, so the dinner took a bit longer. We decided though to still see if we could make it, so we walked briskly all the way to the theatre and actually made it right on time. The nice thing was that the film had been out for awhile now, so there were plenty of seats and a bunch of previews, so it turned out to be the perfect time to arrive. The movie was really interesting and you never really knew what was going to happen next and it turned out to be a fun outing.

As many of you may know this past weekend was Chinese New Year. On Friday my school had a celebration for the New Year with various Asian societies on campus serving food and preformed a few traditional performances. I ended up staying and watching for a few hours over my lunch and tried some Chinese noodles and Malaysian BBQ chicken with a peanut sauce. The food was really good and it was neat to see some of the acts. While I was there I had realized that in my time at Waterloo they had some of these celebrations, but I had never gone to them.

Friday evening I ended up going back campus to watch a talent show which showcased people taking part in various cultural performances. The acts ranged from poetry, to belly dancing and to fashion shows. It was really neat to see some of the acts and get an idea of the various traditional outfits they wear and traditional dances and songs they sing.

Sunday I then went to Chinatown where they were holding a big Chinese new year celebration. It was held at a place called the Arcadia, which is an open air shopping centre in the heart of Birmingham’s Chinatown.

I had never been to this Chinatown before, even though it's literally just right behind the bullring. There were a bunch of really nice looking shops and restaurants and in there was like a central area where they had set up a stage and did some of the performances. Aside from the traditional dragon dance they also had some musical acts, acrobats, jugglers and magicians.

The best one was this one guy who was wearing a mask and he was dancing to some music. When he then moved the fan in front of the mask then it would change the colour and shape of the mask. Eventually he did it so that the mask disappeared and you saw his face and then the mask would reappear.

After an hour or so of watching the performances we ended up going to check out a bunch of stalls that were set up outside selling various things and we grabbed some lunch at one of the stalls. It was great food, but was kind of weird since in Canada it seems that most food tents/vendors at various festivals we have a line, but here in the UK they have official lines at bus stops but no lines at vendors during festivals. Instead of a line here it's just get into the mad pile of people and you have to squeeze your way to the front. But when I ended up getting my food I just good some noodles and a spring roll, since most of it was sold out, I actually ended up getting the last portion of noodles, but just missed out on getting a fork, so I had to use a wooden French fry stick, but it works. Now that I think about it, it was kind of odd that they didn't have any chop sticks.

Over the past weeks though it wasn’t all eating out stilled cooked as a group for dinner. We started with Reena cooking dinner on Monday. Then I ended up whipping up a few things. This past week I ended up cooking twice and both times I made stuff with chicken. I ended up making some smothered chicken and then the second time I did stuffed chicken wrapped in bacon and everyone said they really liked them, but we'll see if they ever let me cook again.

Now as if all that wasn’t enough, I have also been watching the 2010 Olympics which began on Friday.

I ended up watching the opening ceremonies and so far I've see a decent amount of the actual events, including Canada's golden performance on Sunday night. The hard part though is that most of the events take place starting around midnight my time, even the opening ceremonies started around 2am and went till 5, so I probably wont get to watch as much of the Olympics as I'd like. Plus CTV's website doesn't seem to be working in the UK, so I can't even watch it there, so I have to watch it on BBC, which just isn't the same, (but then again it could be worse). It is definitely kind of odd in this country how little attention people give to the Olympics, even if they have a chance of winning a metal. See I was in the pub the other night and they had the sports channel on, and it was showing a football (soccer) match, then when the football match was over it went to just sports news and all they had was rugby, cricket and like 3 different football leagues! I would have thought that as a country that England at least would get more into the Olympics, especially since in two years time they will be hosting the games.

That's all for now,

Jeff

*Word of the week: the word "NICK" here means to "STEAL" something. For example I would say "the US skiier stole the gold from the Canadian" but in britian they would say "the US skiier nicked the gold away from the Canadian"...but well then again they would only say that if they were actually watching the olympics, but most are too busy watching football :P