the four right chords can make me cry

im back home and it feels weird.

posted by beckyboo @ 2:25 AM 2 comments

Ok, first thing to be said about Newcastle is that the guy at the reception is very cute.

That having been said and gotten out of the way, the hostel I'm staying at is really nice! It's bright and cheery, even though it's housed in an old Victorian building. The rooms are nice and airy, beds are warm, showers are good and clean. And the whole atmosphere is very friendly! I find myself smiling at everyone around me. It starts with the staff, who are friendly and helpful without being intrusive. When I checked in, the guy at the counter got up, shook my hand and introduced himself, very different from the last reception I recieved which has a little cold. And did I mention he's very cute?

So I'm using the internet for free now because he gave me half an hour free! He asked me if I had eaten, and I told him I wasn't eating because I was saving money. So he asked me if I could make some toast for him (freeflow toast here) cos he couldn't leave the counter, and that I should help myself to as much jam as I liked. When I came back with the toast and asked for half an hour of internet, he gave me the coupon for free! Yay =)

Newcastle is a very nice city. The weather's been kinda sucky, cold and rainy, but it's a small place and I imagine, very nice to walk around in better weather. Some of the streets are lined with really gorgeous buildings, and the park Will recommended had the most fun playground in the world! Pictures when I get back to Birmingham ok. But the best thing in this city would be the Baltic Flour Mill, which is actually an art gallery. Really cutting edge stuff! I was thinking that Hozea would love it so much.

Was thinking of another fellow Zhonghuarian today, Timo. I went to the Newcastle United Football Club stadium at St James park to take photos for the aforementioned former schoolmate.

Bought gifts for my grandma and mum today, as well as a really cool goldfish pendant for myself! It was spotted among a messy display of other things, and I could tell that the shop lady wanted it for herself! She confessed as much later on. Muahaha. I saw it first =P

Very very broke now but still spending money because Daddy said he would send me some =P But there's still York and London to go so I really need to watch it.

ok, time is running out now!!!

oh yeah
my flight has finally been confirmed

27JUN WED EMIRATES SINGAPORE
2055 EK 352 B CHANGI TERMINAL 1

posted by beckyboo @ 4:08 AM 1 comments

Ok 3 minutes of credit left!!!

At the hostel, paying £1 for 15 minutes of internet usage.

Other than that exhorbitant price, I love Liverpool!

posted by beckyboo @ 4:45 PM 0 comments

I'm going traveling alone from tomorrow onwards, so here are the details, just in case.

10-13th Liverpool
Hostel: YHA Liverpool
25 Tabley Street, off Wapping
Merseyside

13-15th Newcastle
Hostel: Albatross Backpackers Inn
51 Grainger street
Newcastle

15-17th Northumbria
Homestay

17-19th York
Hostel: York Youth Hotel
11/13 Bishophill Senior
York

posted by beckyboo @ 5:45 AM 0 comments

Little old ladies
With their sensible shoes
Little old men
With their sensible views
The old people parade
Goes marching on by

I go for a walk
Trying desperately to remember the place
That will soon remember my place no more

Empty, my room
As though I were never here
Empty, my heart
As though I never met you

We turn our backs
And walk in opposite directions
It's called "forward"

It won't matter
It won't mean a thing, child
There will be many other things
That you would wish you could forget
And forget you will
As time marches on
And you join the old people parade

posted by beckyboo @ 6:43 AM 0 comments

Personality of the Week
Brought to you by the unprepared traveler and Wikipedia

Rachel Carson

I first read Carson's landmark book, Silent Spring, in JC when I was doing a review of it for Bio S class. To use the terminology of Richard Dawkins, whom I'm reading now, this book was absolutely crucial to environmental "conscious-raising" in the 1960's. Faced with immense negative pressure from both publisher and pesticide companies, Carson spoke out against the excessive use of DDTs, highlighting their detrimental impact on health and the environment. Though she did not live to see DDT banned, she devoted the rest of her life to her cause, and can be considered one of the originators of the environmental movement.

I really admire her, for her commitment to her cause and dogged perseverance through financial difficulty, sexual discrimination and family tragedy. And it resonates with me that her training was in Science, but she continued to love writing, and she managed to successfully lead a life that involved both.

Personality of the Week (PoW) will be taking a break for 1 or 2 weeks while I'm off on my travels. Till then, stay curious about the world around you and don't lose your sense of wonder!

Labels: Personality of the Week

posted by beckyboo @ 5:29 PM 0 comments

I do believe it's true
That there are roads left in both of our shoes

posted by beckyboo @ 3:42 AM 0 comments

On Art: food for thought: excerpts from a book I read once

Thus, elaborating, I seem to perceive that a stark-naked soul has nothing but its naked likes and dislikes – nothing much better than artlessness – and bare naïveté is no more trustworthy in a gallery of paintings than in a chemist’s laboratory. In either the gallery or the laboratory, ignorance can blow itself up; and a complacent slight knowledge, too, can be disastrous. Sorcerers’ Apprentices uncork horrible turbulences.

This doesn’t mean that only a rarefied culture should dare to look at pictures or take pleasure in them. Nothing more sinister is intended than the inference that our opinions upon works of art, as upon anything else, need all the foundations we can put under them, or they are likely not to be worth expressing or even possessing. Moreover, when we rise above our likes and dislikes to form what we believe to be dispassionate judgments, these can be tricky. Sometimes we’re confident that they’re solidities, sound for the ages – and presently they prove as sly as quicksilver. Most often they are not ours at all, never were; we’ve only caught them like colds. Again, with a little time or a change of place, we see them as shameful ghosts we’re mortified to have consorted with.

We know that no man can escape from his period – willy-nilly he must be of it, chained down to it – but he has at least the power to free himself from the pressure of his haberdasher. He can even go further and keep clear vision when this decade’s styles in painting and sculpture are shown at fashionable exhibitions of art. He can’t fly out of his period, but he can avoid being harnessed in blinders by any of the series of fashions that succeed one another before his eyes.

When the fashionable way of looking at things has full hold upon us we’re victims of the flitting hour. The next hour most certainly arrives and forerunners deride what they thought valuable an hour ago. Life is as befuddled as this for minds fluffy enough to float on the fashions; but no person capable of meditative thought upon his own education needs to be that fluffy.

The meditative thought would not be enough without the education, and the education might be easily frazzled without the meditation. Current styles in seeing and thinking – even current styles in emotion – are insidiously contagious, especially so, of course, for the enthusiastic natures. Current styles may be ‘good’ styles and yet be as blinding as ‘bad’ ones. The merely stylish person, his vision slave to his modishness, utters the loud and vacant laugh of contemptuous sophistication when his led eyes behold the styles that yesterday enthralled him or his father. For the stylish of today, only today’s style, and styles somewhat like it in the past, are ‘good’ ones.

Thus stylishness is a kind of provincialism or localization in time, and the more ‘correct’ the up-to-dateness of the victim, the more surely is he to be a joke on the morrow. The paintings that Father bought go up to the garret as Grandfather’s come down. Some day Father’s will come down too. Then perhaps both will go up again, or to the auction block, making room for brighter canvases of the hurriedly passing present – these to be banished laughingly with the coming of a newer hour of illusion.

How may we live free of the continuously changing series of small illusions? How may we learn at least to see with the eyes of our whole period, and not the glaucoma gaze directed, as through gun-barrels, at tiny areas bright one moment, dark the next, and forever sliding out of sight? For the development of those necessities, education and mediation, we need all the educative and meditative aid that’s offered. Out of the history of man some truths about him have emerged into the light, and out of the history of art more than mere changing appearances may be discerned in that same illumination.

Will reference properly when i retrieve this book out of the box I sent back to Singapore, which hopefully gets there in about 2 months from now.

Packing up and winding down.

I sat at the bench, reading, today. It was past 9pm, but it was still light out. Birmingham was experiencing extremely warm weather, and I was out in my shorts and slippers. I looked out at the sky and the lawn, listened to the birds screaming at each other in the trees, made small talk with friends who walked by, and tried my best not to ruin the moment with my usual sentimental circularity.

Crossing the road earlier in the day, I waded through dandelion fluffs suspended in the sky, migrating together toward unknown destinations; anywhere but here, that's the idea. They looked like snowflakes, but less fatalistic.

Walking through the park, packed with families. Ice cream cones in every hand, worn proudly, the multi-flavoured badges of summer indolence. I hope to return home highly decorated.

My thoughts spiral wildly inward, sucking me in; I'm involuted.

Who will follow me into the dark?

posted by beckyboo @ 6:03 AM 0 comments

Personality of the Week
Brought to you by slacking biology student and Wikipedia

Lady Godiva

Hails from Birmingham's neighbour, Coventry, which boasts the finest airport I have ever slept in. *cough*

aka Patron Saint of Engineers or Goddess of Engineering, 4 of whom I have spent most of my time in Birmingham with.

Mentioned in an Aerosmith song. Aerosmith, whom I will be watching live in less than a month!

Last, but not least, she has lent her name to Godiva chocolates. Nuff said.

Labels: Personality of the Week

posted by beckyboo @ 3:29 AM 0 comments