by Halley

Sleepless in London

It’s another night when Halley inconveniently wakes up past midnight and is unable to fall asleep again until sunrise. Being sick doesn’t help, because now I have more reasons to wake up (i.e. can’t breathe, etc…). Except sleep deprivation is probably not going to help me recover. So…vicious cycle. Hopefully it will end this weekend, because then I will have really stuff to do – as in, classes are finally starting! Yay! (I know I won’t feel this way in a week…but just allow me to fantasize for a moment, k?)

Now onto more exciting things than my unfortunate sleeping patterns and sickness…LONDON and LSE. Well London is pretty much what they tell you…and more. It’s a gigantic city, HUGE. I will be going on a few tours of the city and doing some sightseeing this weekend, and will prob. make serious efforts to see at least one new site every weekend. At that rate, I just might cover the entire city before next summer. Maybe.

And what about LSE? Well, like I’ve told some of you, it’s kinda like Duke + city.

Similarities/Equivalents

  • obsession w/ finance. So Duke minus the premeds and the engineers. 
  • Inferiority complex that comes from being rejected by more prestigious and older schools (Oxbridge vs. hyps)
  • career fair = career fair. both dukies and lse-ers take this beyond seriously. it’s like their fifth class, or more.
  • “work hard, play hard” if I hear that phrase one more time, I might just scream.
Dissimilarities
  • I have to pay for everything here: buses, gym, clubs (yes, I paid 10 pounds to join the badminton club.), printing&copying, etc…
  • 50% international undergrads, 70% overall, 50% asians (most of them singaporeans and malaysians). 
  • dorm is 30min walking distance away from school.
  • there’s no campus…it’s a claustrophobic cluster of buildings and too many people and not enough space. But at least the buildings are close together, which minimizes walking XD.
There’s more that I’ll prob. mention in future posts, but those are the main points for now. So I’m settling alright, minus the problems that I mentioned at the beginning. My heater has finally been fixed, so I’m not freezing in my room anymore. But I think I lost my resident-card…which might be a problem, cuz I’ll need it for breakfast tom. 
Current class selection (it might change in the next month or so…but I’m 90% set on these)
  1. Advanced Economic Analysis
  2. History of Economics: How theories change
  3. Philosophy of Social Sciences
  4. Problems in Analytical philosophy
by Halley

Arriving in London

a quick note before I crash for the night…

The plane ride was shorter than expected, thanks to a helpful tailwind. Got to Heathrow at around 6:20am, local time, and took a train to central london. Made the mistake of paying 10 extra pounds for a non-stop train when there was a slower, but much cheaper one. Oh well. I had a fun time (by fun, i actually mean quite painful, literally) getting all my luggage around the train station. Had the misfortune of getting a grumpy, ill-humoured old man as my taxi driver. The ride from the station to my dorm took another 10 pounds. 

Commonwealth Hall, where I’m staying, is a decent looking dorm. Better than most of the old west campus dorms, but certainly not as nice as Keohane. My room is…the size of your typical claustrophic single rooms in jarvis, or at Few. But it’s a single, so that’s good. So far the worst thing I’ve encountered here, aside from the not so appetizing English food, is the utterly inexplicable shower system. So basically it’s a little nob that you have to press every minute to keep the water flowing, I’m not exagerrating. Either I’m really stupid and haven’t figured out a better way to work this thing, or whoever designed this piece of shit should have been hit over the head. 

In any case, I’m half unpacked because I’m in desperate need of hangers. So shopping tomorrow morning, and then I’m heading to LSE in the afternoon for our exciting induction. Not really. The important part is I’ll finally see the school. The rest of my week consists of more meetings, inductions, parties, basically a repeat of freshman orientation. Woohoo.

Oh, I also met some craaaazy people here. Just imagine…a dorm with a larger percentage of asians than Duke. Scary, I know.

by Halley

Leaving, again.

So once again, I gotta pack up and hop on another plane for a couple of hours. Leaving home once again (though that concept has become increasingly blurred lately) and back to exploring the new. People always seem disappointed when they don’t hear as much enthusiasm in my voice when I talk about leaving as I should have, but I can’t help always feeling a tinge of sadness and apprehension. More often than not, I actually get a lot more excited once I’m there and settled in. I just suck at saying goodbyes, even though I’ve done it so many times.

By this Sunday morning (greenwich time), I’ll be back at the Heathrow airport and hopefully finding my way to my dorm without getting too lost. Tomorrow will be spent packing, going to the bank, buying a new suitcase, and studying the london tube map and such. Or maybe I’ll just put all that stuff in my carry-on bag and look over them on the plane. That’s prob. a good idea, since I won’t have much else to do for…8 hours. Good god, I hope there will be some good movies. At least I’m not flying to China. There are still a few matters of logistics waiting to be sorted out, but LSE people are being annoying and unresponsive. I guess at the worst, I’ll be bothering them in person next week. 

On a side note, the dollar needs to stop tanking, because when you need to tens of thousands of pounds in tuition and room&board, it gets personal.

by Halley

Yay for daily quotes

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity”. Gilda Radner, 1946-1989

Delicious…maybe it’s an acquired taste, but I’d like to have it nevertheless.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
– George Bernard Shaw

Word. Sounds a bit like my life right now.

by Halley

Anticipation

Never thought I’d say this, but I wish were in school right now, Duke or LSE. Not that I don’t enjoy staying home and relaxing, but seriously, five months of summer? That’s just a bit too long. Compared to this, I think I will actually welcome the two months next summer. Summers are meant to be spent exploring new places, hanging out with old friends, and engaging in fun and exciting things. But I have done all these in the first three months of summer and I’m ready to move on and return to the world of academia. As shocking as it might sound, I miss the intellectual challenges and, dare I say, the pressure? There is something called “too relaxing” afterall. Maybe it’s just me, but I need deadlines, I need assignments. LSAT practices don’t count. I need something more immediate than a standardized test that won’t come for another year (perhaps a good thing?). 

Meanwhile, I hang on to every email coming from LSE, every little piece of news indicating what is waiting for me across the Atlantic. I have just looked through the finalized editions of the course choices and thoroughly stalked each professor. I’m excited 🙂 They all seem very intelligent, of course. There are the usual impressive CV’s loaded with names like Harvard and UPenn, and there’s also a Chinese professor from Sichuan. Looking through my economic courses and these professors’ (or rather, lecturers) research papers, I’m reminded once again of why I was interested in the field in the first place. Not that I don’t appreciate what I have learned (and partially forgotten) in 55 – 110, but the fundamentals were never meant to be exciting. No one would argue their importance, but the whole point of going through all the torture is so that one day I can apply them to far more interesting problems and discovering new concepts. The goal is to find something that I will have enough interests in to write a senior thesis on. We’ll see how that goes.

On another note, I have fallen in love with Gone With The Wind all over again. I still remember watching the movie for the very first time almost ten years ago and how dazzled I was by the sheer beauty of it. But after a decade, I have suddenly discovered how much the story mirrors my life, and how the characters compare to people I know. Of course, there’s no war, no poverty, and no death, and hopefully…not the realizations that come all too late.