A Healthy Start

A couple of days ago, I had an illness, which I believe caused by something I ate. I had fever week for 2 days and couldn’t really leave the bed. That caused me to miss 6 classes in a row. That is why I decided to take some measures for any further problems. Nowadays I am working on a healthier lifestyle. As a student I don’t have much leisure time but I will cope with it somehow.

I started to cook for myself more often and eating at least 1 portion of vegetables and salad every day. The results are not really bright, but I am really keen on cooking and I am sure, I will improve it. I changed my cooking habits as well. I shifted from sunflower oil and butter to olive oil and walnut oil; also I started to eat less fast food, making sandwiches for my lunch at school which is healthier and saves money.

Recently I learnt how to cook menemen (a kind of Turkish omelette with cheese, tomato and green pepper) and pasta with tomato. It is not a big accomplishment but still edible and surprisingly they taste good.

In addition to change my diet, next week I will start gym because I don’t do enough exercise. Therefore last week I visited City University London’s gym centre, Saddlers Sport Centre.  Place is quite satisfactory. All kind of gym equipments are available. You have to bring a sweat towel with you for your and the other members’ convenience. There is an indoor basketball court available, however you have to reserve the place and pay a small fee.  For City University London students membership fees are rather cheap, but also the centre accepts members from outside. You can apply for different classes as well. There are calm classes such as Ashtanga Yoga, Hatha Yoga, Iyengar Yoga and Pilates, and martial arts classes such as Aikido, Kung Fu, Nudda, Capoeira, Ju-jitsu, Goju Karate and Shorinji Kempo. A sauna is available as well and free for members. After I finish my Accounting assignment, I will start to go this centre with 2 of my friends from INTO.

As a last measure, I planned my sleeping hours. I put them in an order. I started to go bed around 23:30 every day and wake up at 07:30. I believe 8 hours of sleep is necessary to keep up with my daily schedule.

With that programme, I plan to lose some weight, since I am a little bit overweight at the moment. However losing weight is not the sole reason. Having a regular time table will affect my performance at school as well.

Night Out on Saturday

As you all know, London is capital of England with Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and many other world famous land marks. It is also considered as one of the financial capital of the world. However I can say it has another characteristic. It is where night life never stops. Pubs and night clubs are always there, ready for people who want to forget about daily problems and relax with a nice conversation or dance with the different types of electronic music.

Last week a friend of mine came up with a proposal that I couldn’t have refused. He invited me a party at a night club. Actually it was a house music concert and Bob Sinclar was going to play. After assignments and exams, I thought that it would have been a good chance to forget about studies and get rid of the stress. We bought the tickets online. Venue was Ministry of Sound, one of the well known night clubs in London. I was really excited, because I had never been there before and I heard about its fame.

Finally on Saturday around 21:00, we met at a friend’s flat. We had a couple of drinks there since clubs in London are quite expensive and before dance floor it helps you to get in mood. The opening hour was 11:00, so we left the flat at 12:00. We walked to Liverpool Street Station and went to Elephant & Castle. After 3 minute walk, we saw a really long queue and started ask whose idea to leave home that late. Whilst we arrived there a member of staff asked us if we had tickets online and he said we didn’t need to wait that queue. We were relieved and walked other side but there was another queue there. However it was moving relatively faster.

In 20 minutes we were inside. It was really crowded. Bob Sinclar wasn’t on stage, there was another DJ playing. Everybody was dancing and atmosphere was good. Approximately half an hour later Bob Sinclar appeared on the DJ box. People lost sanity so to speak. Everybody was shouting, whistling, and clapping hands. With the first song club, I noticed that there was no room to move then I noticed that people spent some time outside until Bob Sinclar’s performance. To be honest I could go to bar only once to get a drink. We danced almost 4 hours. Unfortunately I left before the end of programme, because I was really tired.

I think it was my best night out in London ever. I had great fun with my friends. I am looking forward to next time.

Valentine's Day in London

Last Monday I woke up around 08:00 am. When I checked the time from my phone, I panicked because it ran out of battery so alarm clock wouldn’t work. I jumped out of the bad and noticed that I was running late. I went to bathroom to take a shower. I switched on hot water, disappointment. It was ice cold. I went down stairs and saw a note on the boiler saying out of service. ‘What a good start for a day’ I thought. I boiled some water in the cattle and put that in a bucket and then added some cold water. At least I washed my hair. I dressed up and went down for breakfast. I was out of cereals.

I picked up my bag and rushed out of house. I was at Docklands Light Rail station at Elverson Road and saw that trains wouldn’t go to Bank station because of signal failure. I went to Canary Wharf and took Jubilee Line to Stratford then from Stratford I get on train to Liverpool Street. When I finally arrived at Liverpool Street Station, I had already missed the first class. As I walked to INTO Centre, I saw flower sections and people with bouquets in their hands. I thought today must be a special day. I went to INTO’s cafeteria first floor and noticed what was special about it, 14^th of February Valentine’s Day. There was a minor decoration consisted of heart shaped shiny cards.

To be honest, I don’t have a girl friend now since I don’t really have time for that. You know it takes time to have a relationship and effort. Nowadays I have to focus on my studies.

Some people were really happy talking about Valentine’s Day, boy and girl friends, flowers, chocolates and Valentine’s Day cards. Some people said it’s just commercial nonsense. Why do we need one day or a special day to express our feelings to our lover?

In my case, even it’s a commercial nonsense or a really important day to celebrate with the beloved ones, for one day I forgot about the beginning of the day and got rid of my stress, found myself thinking about love. I don’t really know why, but I think I had a sparkle of envy for those who would celebrate their Valentine’s Day with their ‘sweetheart’.

At the end, when I finished school, I went home and called my mother and sister to celebrate their Valentine’s Day and sent a couple of e-mails to couple of important people in my life.

Also Valentine’s Day is a good excuse to buy and eat 3 big packs of chocolate. Nobody noticed that they were my gift to myself.

Chinese New Year Celebration

After a long time, finally I have some free time to update my blog. My studies are rather intense these days. I recently finished Business assignment and I was given another one a few days ago, Accounting. But today I want to talk about something new for me, Chinese New Year. 

Before I came to the UK, I didn’t know that much about Chinese New Year. I had just seen celebrations on TV a couple of times, but two weeks ago we celebrated Chinese New Year at INTO. We had a lot of drinks and dumplings. It was fun and I had chance to taste dumplings for the first time. They were extremely delicious.

After that I decided to make a research about this celebration. I found out that it is the most important traditional Chinese holiday. It is also widely known as Lunar New Year or Spring Festival. It is the first day of Chinese lunisolar calendar. In the Gregorian calendar, which is internationally accepted civil calendar, Chinese New Year falls on different dates, a date between January 21 and February 20. In this calendar there are 12 animal zodiacs. This is the year of rabbit. Also there are various traditions about Chinese New Year. On the days before New Year celebration, people clean their houses from top to bottom. It is believed that cleaning sweeps away the bad luck of preceding year and makes their homes ready for good luck. Another important tradition is red envelops. These envelops generally contain money and are given from elderly people or married couples to young people or children.

When I found myself doing a research about Chinese New Year, I noticed that studying at INTO didn’t only make contribution to my knowledge about my subjects; also studying at this kind of environment where there are students all around the world, helps me to learn about different cultures and life styles. This awareness also helped me to develop a further complaisance.

Normally I don’t like travelling to long distances, however now I am really curious about different cultures and I want to visit different countries to have a better understanding about their cultures. In that case I am really lucky, because most of my friends from INTO invited me to their home countries for summer holiday. I think it is still too early to make a summer holiday plan since we have assignments and exams before us but I prepared a list of countries that I want to visit, a good first step.

Busy Time

Lately I have been really busy because of assignments and exams. I handed in my Business assignment couple of days ago. However I still have doubts about it. My assignment was preparing a business plan for a company. This company had to be unique to some extent. First we prepared a brief business plan as a group project and we made a presentation. This part of the assignment is 5% of our final mark. The individual work was preparing a full business plan according to our presentations and the brief plan.

We decided to open a pancake take away for group work. It wasn’t that bad, because the information about the sector was accessible. We mostly used internet sources. City University’s online resources were great help. We had full access to all business journals and that saved a lot of time.

I think as a group we spent most of our free time at INTO London’s resource centre since the environment was suitable and we found really beneficial books there.

However my individual work had to be more detailed since it is 15% of my final mark. After conducting a detailed research about restaurant business, I decided to focus on marketing side of the plan since I found many useful materials that I could use.  Especially National Statistics Office’s website was great source, since I found reports about population, spending habits, food consumption and recession to support my work.

Basically my plan consisted of executive summary in which I defined the business and product, pestle analyses, SWOT analyses in which I explained strengths and weaknesses of the business, competition, advertising and future plans.

At the beginning, preparing a project with a group was extremely difficult for me since in my country we weren’t encouraged to do work as a group. I was the group leader and struggled to organise time and people. However I talked to my lecturers about it and I noticed necessity of working as a team. In business life individual performance is really important, yet team work comes first because success is not achievable alone. Team members propose different ideas and workload is shared between them. In addition to that, it is a good preparation for university, because as far as I know we will be given many projects as a group work.

The social aspect is really important as well. Normally I am not really good at making new friends but when I started doing this work, I had chance to meet new people and made many new friends.

An Unfortunate Turn Of Events

It started as an ordinary day. Weather was a little bit gloomy but it wasn’t cold or rainy. I woke up at 07:30 and started to get ready for school. I took a shower, brushed my teeth and had my breakfast. After I finished my breakfast, I went out and walked to Elverson DLR station, got on the first train and went to Bank Station. I decided walk from Bank to Liverpool Street, because it was still early for school. 10 minutes walking and I was at INTO London Centre. I attended Accounting and English classes. After the classes, I felt that I was starving so went out to have a late lunch. I checked my phone to see how much time I had for the next class and noticed a text message from my best friend in the UK. He told me that he needed to talk to me. I immediately called him. Conversation started with everyday matters, but as soon as I heard him, I noticed there was something wrong and he got to the point directly. His visa application due to the course change was rejected because of not having sufficient funds in his account for 28 days but 20 days.

I was thinking about how we had celebrated his acceptance to masters programme. He had studied linguistic in Ukraine so when he first applied for masters in marketing, he had been suggested to study diploma in marketing first and then the institution had guaranteed a place in marketing masters course. However after his first term exam results, his high performance in class and his good assignments, he had been offered a place for masters in marketing.

I felt really lonely at that very moment because another good friend of mine had gone to China due to family matters. It had been a second blow to me. After my Economics class, I went to his house to help him. First we went out and bought plastic boxes to store his belongings such as kitchen ware, towels and beddings. We booked storage from a company and they promised us for free delivery from his flat to actual storage since he had furniture to be delivered. We went back home and started packing everything. It took a while, since there were a lot of things to be packed in 10 tiny boxes. Somehow we managed to fit everything in boxes. The day after that 2 employee of the storage company came with a big lorry. They carried everything to lorry and gave some papers to my friend which so he could take his furniture and other belongings whenever he wanted.

It was his last day in the UK, so we decided to have a dinner after my school. That day I couldn’t really concentrate. I was full of thoughts and a little bit depressed. However at the dinner I concealed my feelings and we had a really nice chat. He told me about his plans for coming back on April and starting the masters. I was relieved because this was only temporary and realised that the visa application process was extremely important and even the smallest detail can’t be overlooked. Everything must have done in advance of application and precisely.

Now he is back in Ukraine and we are in touch. In 3 months time, he will be back and he will continue his studies but I am sure when he is back, he will be more cautious about these kind of matters.

New term starts!

New term at INTO has started. When I went to INTO Centre London, I noticed that we had a lot of new students from all around the world who were starting on January.  INTO City Progression Administrator, Voke was really busy at resource centre by registering new students.

I was really happy to be back. When I saw my friends, we had really nice chat about the holiday. Everybody had good time. Some of them stayed in London and some of them went back to their home countries.

There was something that I had been looking forward to, exam results. Lecturers announced our results one by one over the week. I had 80% from Business, 84% from Economics, 94% from Accounting and 81% from English. Results were really good but reminded me something that I need to keep studying since there are lots of other units waiting us from all subjects as well as written assignments, presentations and final exams.  All of these tasks are important components of our final mark so I can’t afford to overlook any of them.

Last two days of the week I was really busy because I changed my accommodation. I was staying with a host family before I went to holiday. They were really kind and helpful but I decided to change it because I needed more personal space. I moved to a house in Greenwich. Greenwich is a really cosy and nice neighbourhood by the Thames. There is a really big park called Greenwich Park quite close to my house. There is a supermarket and train station nearby so that makes shopping and travelling really easy. It takes 30 minutes from my house to INTO Study Centre and there are some alternative routes.

My room is not really big but I have enough space for everything. I have to share bathroom and kitchen with 3 other people. My first impression about my house mates is really good. They were really helpful when I was moving in. I don’t see them that much since we all have different time tables and they have part time jobs. I need one as well. I am doing my best to find a part time job but no luck so far.

Tomorrow is going to be a long day. I will clean my room and unpack my luggage. The tenant before me didn’t clean the room when he was leaving. So I couldn’t unpack most of my clothes and books. I need to do shopping as well since I need a duvet, a pillow, and covers for them. Hopefully tomorrow after dinner I will be drinking my tear in my cosy and clean room.