A day in market bay

I was in downtown earlier this afternoon scouting for a rice cooker that I should have brought with me but because I already had a hand-carry, I didn't buy any. Surprisingly, I saw a few students on the same flight as mine carrying 3 hand-carries! Anyway, I ended up in Chinatown and saw that they're selling rice cooker -- for 88$pounds!! ($ = british pounds; there's no pounds symbol on the laptop's keyboard)

Looking at the price in disbelief, I shook my head and walked away. After 2 hours, I managed to find a store (Argos; www.argos.co.uk) that sells the almost similar rice cooker I had in S'toon for 22$.

The weather here is amazingly insane as it would rain and then sunshine with strong winds then back to light rain for several times within 2-4 hours; now that I have been here for 7 days, I can see that it happens almost every day. Where is the snows?!!

Perhaps there will never be any snows, at least not as much.

There are a lot of Europeans over here and most of them have come to do their business degree and hospitality studies here. I have met quite a number of them and got along with some and hung out a bit.

It's hard to understand the British's accent and I find that a little difficult to manage at time. A lot of people are of Yorkshire's background and I think they do speak Yorkshire (an English dialect). They're intonations and stresses on words are totally different that what I've been hearing for the past 20 over years now. I know it takes time to get used to it. But you know what? In my opinion, I think it's so much easier to pick up the English accent than to North American accent; not that I want to but believe me, it's as infectious as rabbies compared to N.American's.

I have done half of my groceries already but the other half , I think I will have to wait. Clothes, heater (the one in my unit is not working), lamps, clothing racks, laundry stuffs, etc. are among some of the smaller & useful things. hopefully i have dad's consent to use the card for these items. the remaining cash balances I will keep for "just in case" there's no money coming in for the next 2 weeks.

When courses begins, things will be pretty quiet. i'll just live on steam rice and be vegetarian for 4 months to save a bit. vegetables over here are cheaper than that in Canada... so, why not?

Cheers people!
-dant-

More interesting experiences on the way... so, stick around!