Saturday, September 30, 2006

A Quick Note to Say I Am Okay

I am okay!
I am sitting in my new room (which is very big, and includes a sink, two easy chairs and a coffee table as well as the usual stuff) surrounded by mess, but I just wanted to let everyone know I am fine and not as nervous anymore.
I am on free wireless yet again, haha, which is good because I cannot find an internet point in this room. Also don't know whether I will be able to have a phone yet... The only thing they do have is a TV outlet, and that's the only thing I don't need: even if I do buy a small TV, I have a set-top box so don't really need it.
My room is on the ground floor in the front of the house on a reasonably busy road, but at least I have a room so I won't complain.
bye for now!

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Gross Mythen: The Queen Mushroom Story (Or, I Was Very Sweaty Today But I Showered So I Am Not Anymore)



This is the mountain I climbed today (at least, the part of it you can climb from the cable cart station which isn't in the picture because I am standing in front of it taking the picture). It is called Gross Mythen, and yes, there is also a smaller one called Klein Mythen next to it. The climb involved a lot of blood, sweat and tears (actually, only sweat but the amounts of it more than made up for the other two) but I made it in 2 hours, and when we got to the top there was a man playing an Alpenhorn:



When we descended, the man was playing the horn above us, and below we could hear the cow bells. This made it an ultimately Swiss experience, and I also realised I don't actually have a fear of heights so that was great! The view was absolutely stunning (but pictures of the view don't work out well so I didn't take any and just enjoyed it) and while walking down I could really look at it at my leisure, and it still only took 1 hour and 15 minutes to get to where the cable cart station was. Damn gravity pulling you down when you dont want it!

And another very nice thing was that when I had just started to descend again, I had sjans from a really cute guy. I don't know how to explain sjans in English, but it's basically when someone looks at you in a way that means they sort of fancy you. And that while I was sweaty! I was less sweaty than him though, having just had a half hour rest whereas he'd been climbing a mountain.

Done with the story of sweat now. It was a good day.

Previous Installments Of Awesome Lady

This is the first one
This is the second one
and yay for me for finding out how to link!

Saturday, September 23, 2006

The Importance Of An Alter-Ego (2): The Start Of Awesome Lady

Claire put both her feet firmly on the ground and looked The Prison Guard in the eyes. Inside, she was trembling and terrified, but she knew better than to show her fear. Her opponent, on the other hand, did not expect much of a struggle from the young woman in front of him and just wanted to make her suffer until The Gentleman of Justice would wake up, just in time to see her die.
Claire looked at her father, lying wounded and unconscious on the roadside, and felt an anger rising inside her which made her do something she would never otherwise have done. She looked up at The Prison Guard's face and yelled: 'You will never touch me or my family again!' The Prison Guard, laughing, shot a bolt of electricity at her and for a moment, Claire was powerless. Then, all of a sudden, she felt stronger than ever before and she hit her enemy with a much stronger bolt. The crowd that had gathered was slightly singed, but The Prison Guard, understandably impervious to electricity, was unhurt. He roared with laughter and sent another bolt Claire's way. And another, and again and again until nothing could be seen but a big ball of smoke.
The crowd, which had moved to a safer place to watch the fight, had no more hopes for the nations most beloved superhero's daughter. But inside the smoke, Claire felt something she had never felt before: with every bolt The Prison Guard sent her way, she became stronger and stronger, until finally, she knew she was stronger than both her father and his arch nemesis put together.
When the smoke had cleared, The Prison Guard's smugness disappeared with it. Before him stood not the 19-year-old student he was so eager to torture, but an amazingly beautiful yet frightening young woman. Her entire body glowed with energy, and from her eyes shone a terrifying light. The Prison Guard, realising his mistake but unwilling to admit it, tried to attack her but he was stopped by a kick in the stomach which sent him flying through the air. Claire, able to fly much faster than her enemy could fall, was waiting for him when he landed and launched into a clobbering the likes of which The Prison Guard had never been subjected to.
Completely exhausted, The Prison Guard tried a final time to gather up some energy to electrocute his adversary, but Claire simply waited for him to charge up and then threw him into the newly erected monumental fountain that was the pride of her hometown. The Prison Guard, unable to rid himself of the charge he had meant to kill Claire with, short-circuited and died.
Claire collapsed and was caught by her father, who had woken up just in time to see his arch nemesis die. As The Gentleman of Justice took his exhausted daughter in his arms and flew her to safety, the crowd let out a deafening cheer. 'Wow,' said one of the onlookers, 'the daughter of The Gentleman of Justice really is one Awesome Lady.'

Friday, September 22, 2006

The Importance Of An Alter-Ego (1)

Although they were otherwise very good parents, Mrs Sparkle and The Gentleman of Justice never taught Claire the necessity, for a superhero of her caliber, of an alter-ego. Both Mrs Sparkle, who was a minor superhero (but huge in Germany) whose powers consisted of making evil people (or bathrooms) extremely clean, and The Gentleman of Justice, who, as his name suggests, was a very just and polite superhero who only fought fair fights and never let a bad guy get away, came from normal, non-super families and had never expected to have a superhero daughter. The Gentleman of Justice, who was an enormous star and away from home more times than not, left it to his wife to raise their daughter.
There are a lot of good things to be said about Mrs Sparkle: she loved her child dearly, instilled in her a sense of immaculate cleanliness, and made sure she went to school and bed on time. Claire went to the best schools possible (which were very good schools indeed as her father was basically superhero royalty), but when she discovered her superpowers, of which there were many, no one guided her through the usually long and difficult path to superhero-dom.
And this was how, when she was 19 and ready to go to university, Claire stumbled into her superhero life without knowing the first thing about protecting herself.
While walking to a lecture on a sunny Wednesday morning, Claire noticed a smell. The smell was neither pleasant nor foul, but to Claire it signified something very important. It was the same smell she had smelled every time her father went away for business, and every time her mother decided it was time for a spring cleaning (which was about once a month). It was her superhero danger radar, which at that point was so connected with her family Claire expected her mother to jump out of the bushes with a vacuum cleaner. This didn't happen, but when she went around a corner she saw what had triggered her radar: in the middle of the road stood The Prison Guard, one of the strongest and most evil nemeses of Claire's hometown and The Gentleman of Justice. Stuck in an eternal battle, neither one had ever been able to completely defeat the other, but right now, The Prison Guard had Claire's father in a death grip.
Before Claire knew what she was doing, she screamed out for her father and flew to face the metal-clad master of electrocution. 'Hmmm,' he said, 'So this is the daughter my enemy has been so careful to protect... Let's see how she measures up to her father.' The Gentleman of Justice, before he could even warn Claire or fly her to a safe space, was flung to one side and became unconscious as his head hit a tree.
What followed was a battle of the extremes: Claire, being unused to her powers and used to the fair fights she had seen her father have on the 8 o'clock news, had to use all her resources and strength to stay alive, let alone fight back. Her father, when he regained consciousness, tried to help her, but he soon recognised the immense strength his daughter had and realised his interference would make the fight extremely unbalanced, preventing him from being able to help. So he stood watching, hoping for his daughter to realise her strength in time for her to walk away unscathed.
But something he had never expected happened next...
(To Be Continued)

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Technology, Strangely, Does Not Suck

As I am copying some of my father's CDs onto my laptop and seriously thinking about whether I can afford an mp3 player, I realise that, although it always takes me about 5 years longer to adapt than the average human being, I do eventually adapt to modern (in my eyes) technology.
Just wanted to share my amazement with you.
Oh, and I saw the transvestite builder again Monday night. He was eating an icecream.
And I am moving back to England next week Thursday.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Ah, Look At All The Crazy People...

The good thing of being in a new city (or country) is that as well as the annoying things such as not knowing where anything is, not knowing which tram to take where to and not being used to the currency, you also get some really good views.
And I don't mean you get to see new things such as mountains or amazingly beautiful lakes or buildings (ugly or not), which you do, but I mean people. If you travel to work or school in the same place for a while, you get to know some of the people quite well. There's the guy on the tram who hasn't quite woken up yet, the grumpy old man with a newspaper, the girl applying the finishing touches of her make-up, and the little child traveling to school with his/her nanny/mother/father (the latter seems to happen quite often here).
I have now been traveling to and back from work in the same tram for three weeks and as yet I have not been able to identify the same people twice. I sit in roughly the same spot every day and, especially in the mornings, travel at the same time, but there are always different people traveling with me. Some people stand out though, and even if I will never see them again, they are very hard to forget.
The only person I have seen more than once (twice, in fact) while going to or from work is the man who practices in his car. One of my offices (I have two, because I work for two companies) is in the same street as an opera house, and the man who practices in his car sits there with his window open, sheet music in the seat next to him (he sits with his back to the window), CD on very loud, and then he practices. He is a percussion man because he has those drumsticks with soft ends, and he just sits there practicing his music. When I told my family my father thought he was just trying to look interesting, but he really cheered me up when I saw him being so dedicated.
One person who did not cheer me up but rather made me feel really sad and slightly disgusted was the man who was in the tram with me yesterday morning. He was an old man (in his 70s or late 60s I think) and he was balding. Instead of just letting himself be bald and grey, this man had painted, with some sort of black face paint, sideburns, eyebrows and even a moustache on his head. He had also extended his hairline with the paint, and he looked, well, sad. I couldn't imagine him looking in the mirror in the morning and thinking: 'I look amazing.' Or even: 'Hm, this looks slightly better than if I'd just let people see what my head really looks like.' I felt so sorry for him, but I was also slightly disgusted, because the paint was really thick and somehow made me want to scrub the man's head really hard.
But the highlight of my tramming experience was the man wearing jeans shorts, a red t-shirt, pink nailpolish and make-up with his hair in a shoulderlength middle-aged-woman style. It was one of those moments where you have to do a double-take to be sure because the clothes he wore and his general build were very old-builder type, but the rest of him was so attempt-at-lady-like. It was a very strange combo and I don't think he was a serious transsexual trying to get used to walking around like a woman, but just a crazy person expressing himself.
All in all, the views of Zurich are very entertaining.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

It Is A Very Good Day But I Am Very Tired

I have a room at Reading!!
And I am going for drinks with some people my own age on Saturday!

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Don't Expect Me To Make Sense

I don't really know what to talk about today but I kind of feel like I should post so ehm, well, everything is okay.
I actually have some really good jobs to do at work because I've been working with my boss (she has her own PR company and works with the Bank I work for through her company 3 days a week) for two days and she's given me some awesome tasks. There's the two speeches I have to prepare and draft for her, the mission statement I have to develop for a client, the information pack I have made for her about a prospective client, and something else fun I cannot remember right now. In any case, I have lots to do and am really happy about the next two weeks. The only thing I think is a pity is that the Press Conference I am helping prepare doesn't take place until after I leave for Reading.
About Reading: I have to phone the main woman at the accommodation office tomorrow, and it sounds like my new course convener is quite influential, although the accommodation lady did not sound happy about receiving her email.
No other news as yet, except for the fact that a friend of mine might be applying for a job at the Coventry Superstore of Primark. I will probably have to marry him if he does get a job there, just imagine all the lovely cheapness... drool.

Friday, September 08, 2006

My New Course Convenor Is Awesome

So, about the whole room fiasco at Reading: I sent my new course convenor and some other people an email about my situation and this is what I got back from the wonderful Dr. Long German Sounding Name:

Dear Merel,

Thank you for your e-mail. I am very sorry to hear this. It must be distressing for you. This is not acceptable, and I will be e-mailing the accomodation office to ask that they either arrange housing for you or help you in the best possible way to find housing quickly.

I hope they get back to you directly, but otherwise let me know how things go next week and I will follow this up.

We will sort this out one way or another!

Very best wishes, and I look forward to seeing you on the MA soon, Dr. Long German Sounding Name's First Name.

My new course convenor is awesome

Thursday, September 07, 2006

A Good Start...

Today I phoned Reading University Accomodations Office to check when I could move into my on-campus accomodation.
I was told by the lady on the phone that, actually, I couldn't!
Turns out that even though I sent in my application sometime back in June, because my dad's bank had screwed something up with the financial guarantee so we had to wait for about a month for the correct paperwork, my application had not been dealt with until the 10th of August. But another lady at the Admissions Office had told me not to worry, as long as they knew it was coming it would be okay.
So now I have nowhere to stay, and the woman on the phone did not sound hopeful at me ever finding anything on campus. And in any case, it was my own fault for not sending in all my guarantees earlier.
It's nice to know that even though I left one completely inept and unsympathetic University, I will be joining another one soon enough.

(It's funny how wishes come true in really bad ways. All week I've been wanting something to happen to put on my blog, and here it is!)

Friday, September 01, 2006

The Delights of Zurich

As I walked to the tram stop today, I couldn't help noticing how nice everything was. The sun was shining, people were smiling, and the lake and mountains looked beautiful. And I mean, BEAUTIFUL. I wish I could have taken a picture for you guys to get jealous about, because the lake in Zurich really is astonishingly beautiful. The water is extremely clean (almost like drinking water), and the lake is so big you can see all the little boats on it, and all the little (heh, make that really big, expensive) houses along the side of it. Then, when you move your gaze upwards on a clear day (like today), you see the mountains behind the city. This view is one of the best views a person could have, and it made me so happy! Really, even the people who usually read a book in the tram and don't look at their surroundings were walking along the lake with their heads turned sideways, that's how amazing today was.
This had already made me very happy, but when I bought a bretzel from the little shop at the other tram stop because I was starving, I was yet again pleasantly surprised. When I saw the bretzel I was in shock because the shop had cut it in half and put butter on it, and everbody knows bretzels should be enjoyed either with nothing but the salt that is on it, or lots of cheese melted on top of it. But then I took a bite, and realised the bretzel was gorgeous. But it did have a lot of butter on it, so I will have to control my urge to buy one every day...