Right, catch-up time…

So I’ve been in Leeds for over a month now and still haven’t made any posts…too much stuff has been going on! It’s not that I haven’t been recording my adventure (I’ve been doing it through video on the 1 Second Every Day app and privately by writing

It’s just that I haven’t posted, and every time I think about don’t so I am struck with the overwhelming amount of stuff I need to cover that I haven’t yet.

So this is just my quick way of quickly blasting though all of the different things I’ve done so that I can actually get back to posting regularly (well, semi regularly) without forgetting or feeling guilty about forgeting anything.

If I do eventually get back to writing full posts on these things, I’ll link the post about it back here, just so we can have some semblance of chronlogical order here. I might also add a few photos here or there within this post in the future so that it doesn’t feel so wordy.

Oh, and I’ll probably back fill the last few weeks with some posts I started but never finished about general exchange things (what to bring, what to remember etc). But back to the topic at hand.

So without futher ado, here is what I’ve been up to (the big stuff, checking emails, calling parents, reading books, shopping for groceries etc are a given that I do every week at least)!

January

• Vacation with family in London, take bus up to Leeds cus train tickets super expensive last minute
• City museum and town hall visit – cool stuff but nothing particularly noteworthy
• Visiting the Royal Armories Museum in Leeds (fantastic fantastic museum & I really need to go back soon, so much to do and see there!)
• Leeds trinity shopping mall – cool food trucks, tasty food, really pretty looking skylight
• Amsterdam for a day (needed it to sort out my visa, took train to city center, lots of pretty snow, bikes and ferries, didn’t get the chance to go to any museums cus I needed to get back to airport quickly)
• Standard welcome to university orientation stuff – including a joke about brexit by some pretty welcoming and funny international student affairs people 😛
• Registration, moving into Monty B, finding supermarkets, doing some shopping etc…
• Met up with a professor here to do plan on doing some research while I’m here
• Group dinner with HKU people at a local Chinese restaraunt (kinda overpriced but the food was good)
• Classes start: I get lost quite a bit and figure out the MC Escher-esque building that is Roger Stevens
• Complex class schedule messiness I need to work out since there are several timetable clashes and I’m over the credit limit + trying to transfer credits etc

February

• Quidditch Give it a Go session with the Leeds Griffins + tons of weekly practice afterward
• Fall in love with the Brotherton Library, which is so much fancier than the E Boyle library I had been going to
• Treasures of Brotherton library  & the art museum – really cool that it is just on campus with pretty interesting books and paintings to see
• Chinese New Year hot pot with a bunch of new friends from different schools in HK
• Start contacting and chatting with my HKU mentor in London
• LUU rooted rooftop garden volunteering – planting, pruning, composting etc
• Cookbooks through time talk- 6 really cool cookbooks from Leeds Library (one of largest cookery collections in world) brought to life by a great historian walking us through them
• Visit Kirkgate market (Brilliant place, tons of super cheap produce, great food, fantastic building, world’s first Marks and Spencers etc)
• Start my own compost box with flatmates – 2 move in at a later date as they swapeddue to their old accomodations being in the middle of nowhere 😀
• Leeds art museum visit – liked the Leonardo special exhibit they had going on at the time
• Cottonopolis V in Manchester (My first Quidditch tournement in England) – fun time taking the slow train and joking about the different names for little towns like Todmorden
• Voted in the Leeds Student Union elections
• Thackery Medical Museum visit as part of a class – great little one, price a bit pricy if you aren’t going on someone elses dime XP

 

March:

• Staying on top of my responsiblilities back at HKU & planning for which positions I want to run for when I get back (Senior Equal Opportunity Advisor, Quiddtich Team ExCo, Sci Peer tutoring payment stuff, Green ambassador, etc.)
  • Just cus I’m on exchange doesn’t mean I get a free pass lol
• Visited Bradford using First in West Yorkshire day pass (really cool city! visited the media museum, art galllery and was going to visit police museum or peace museum but closed by the time I got there)
• More Quidditch – mainly focused of stratagy and tackling (training for the British Quidditch Cup)
• Dinners with flatsmates who are amazing at cooking so I mainly help with the shoping and dishes
• Vegan wine and cheese tasting night – where I learn that not all wine is vegan
• British Sign Language with a friend at a Give it a Go night
• Finishing a couple of assignments and other things due for my various classes
• Meeting with professor to discuss possible summer projects and my application to the ORF that HKU science has

So that catches you up to where I am now, as of March 6th. I’ll probably put another post out on Saturday about the stuff I did the day before, since I’m turning 21 on Friday and have a bunch of stuff planned!

Here’s to more posts in the future!

-Rebecca

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🍀🌞A Strangely Seasonal Update…🍂❄️

So my 2-week-or-bust deadline is here, which means another post as promised.

Problem is I have a ton of vague ideas in my brain but nothing concrete to write about… which means another round of what I like to call…

“Things in parts bingo”.

Basically, you:

1. Pick a random number between 2 and 12
2. Look up “things that come in [xyz number] “
3. Assign attributes or find symbolic meaning to said parts
4. Write about something that is related to each of those attributes
   
5. ?????
6. Profit (with a blog post that seems more cohesive than it actually is)

In the past (on a different, older blog) I have done Avatar the Last Airbender elements , Fates of Greek mythology and sorta for Blossoms as well, all to relative sucess.

So in honor of the last few weeks of my summer break, I’m doing the four seasons – starting with spring!

Spring (春 chūn) – New Beginnings & changes. Planting the metaphorical seeds for a better future.

Daily Diary progress & Habitica

I’ve been working a bit more on developing better habits, since… well let’s face it.

I’m 20 years old now and have NOT acomplished anywhere as much stuff as I wanted to do by this point in my life.

Earlier in my summer break, I decided to start keeping a diary about my life and goals. It’s not the first time I’ve done so (I have diaries dating back to when I was 12), but this is the first time I have kept at it for more than a month or so without giving up.

I honestly really liked doing it and will probably continue into the school year, since writing acts as a nice way for me to reflect on my day. I might post a bit more about it in the future!

In other habit news, I’ve also been experimenting with different apps to improve my productivity for the upcoming school semester. If you have any suggestions for apps I should check out, feel free to comment below or contact me!

Photo Source: Maddy Zen on Pexels.com

Summer (夏 xià) – Joy, Vitality & Enthusiasm. Watering the positives and weeding out the negitives with whole-hearted enthusiasm

Ecology field work with Oriental magpie-robins

Over the summer, I have been doing some field work with a HKU professor’s lab, studying Oriental magpie-robins (Copsychus saularis).

Essentially, I have been going around to different nest boxes around HKU campus, checking on their status by taking photos of the nests, eggs and chicks. Unfortunately, all the chicks in the nest box this year didn’t survive, so we weren’t able to “ring” any of the juveniles. 😦

I have one last check next week (since their breeding season ends around the end of the summer), then I might continue to work with the lab doing some literature reviews, or helping out with the playback test data collection (essentially isolating the recorded OMR songs with a program called Raven).

Either way, I’ve loved the work I got to do over the break and can see myself making it into a long term career. So glad I picked ecology as my primary major! 🙂

OMR Male (left) & Female (right) Source: Shantanu Kuveskar via Wikimedia

Fall (秋 qiū)- Transition & culmination. Reaping the harvest from what has been sowed.

End of the first year of HKU quidditich, and the start of year two!

Basically the subtitle. So HKU has this rule that in order to become a full fleged association with the student union, you have to comply with a whole list of stipulations.

One of the requirments is that the club must have existed for 2 years without funding from the union itself, another being that at least 40 HKU students must be members. So in an attempt to make quidditch “a thing” in HK, the team have partnered with the university’s Equal Opportunity Unit (EOU) and gotten a some of scholership money to create the “Fly for Equality” project.

We’ve gotten a bit of media coverage in our first year, and are hoping to recruit lots of new people through the EOU Ocamp or the exibition match that will happen at the start of the semester. Exciting stuff though!

(unrelated side note: possible future post idea – explaining HKU/canto slang terms like “ocamp”, “chur” “dem beet” etc?)

From our latest practice. Source: HKU Quidditch

Winter (冬 dōng) – Rest & reflection. Storing what was gained before and contemplating what is to come.

HKU -> Leeds exchange plans & updates

Finally we come to the bit that I’m assuming 80% of the readers skimed to. To be frank though, not much has happened since I last posted.

I’ve contacted the International Affairs Office (the people incharge of outgoing exchanges) and they gave me the advice to register for semester 2 classes in case the thing falls though, and that more information will be provided later.

Bit nervous though, since I have to do everything from register for classes to get student visas all within the span of a few months during the school year. I’ve asked my other friends about it and they said the IAO focuses of sem 1 and full year people first, so I shouldn’t really panic until October.

But yeah, I’ve been doing some research about Leeds and the surounding area, specifically on museums, historical sites and botanical gardens (yup, I’m both a history nerd + ecology geek, and dang proud of it!)

So if you know of places I should visit, again feel free to comment below!

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So yeah, hope this entry was somewhat interesting…

Missed my self-imposed deadline by a few minutes due to an internet issue and not saving often enough, but hey close enough!

Until next time!

-Rebecca