Reflections on Life So Far

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The school finally handed out our loan laptops. After sitting through a full week of power point presentations I was wondering if maybe the Scottish had a little “thing” with PowerPoint. As it turns out, Profs and teachers here do like to put everything onto those slides and for my courses they will have all of them downloaded onto First Class. They are pushing ICT (information and communication technology) here like drugs. Although I am grateful for the free loan laptops, it has put the burden of printing and summarising onto us, the student. They encourage us to bring our laptops everywhere, especially to class. That, to me, is a bad idea. It’s like inviting everyone to text message from their phone. It’s worse of course- imagine the sound of 500 people on msn messenger! I have to take notes to keep from falling asleep. I think I may have to say NO to ICT. I know there’s good and bad to everything. I’ll let you know what I think of the ICT addiction when I finish this course.

I was living at home before I came here so I’m feeling homesick now. I’ve always had a special appreciation for food. I love all types and am willing to try anything once. The only drawback of Glasgow for me so far is the limit in variety of foods. Their grocery stores have the tiniest amount of fresh food for sale. The rest are premade meals and frozen foods. To put it into perspective, the only fresh vegetables they sell are carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes, onions, mushrooms, lettuce, and zucchini. I could only think of a couple more things to add to that list and the rest are prechopped packages of different combinations of those vegetables. Their alcohol section is bigger! They’ve even made their fridges to match their food selection here. The cool section of the fridge is not much bigger than the top freezer part of most North American fridges and their freezer part is bigger than their cool section. It’s like a reverse fridge. The whole fridge is almost half the size of the North American one. So it seems they either eat prepackaged meals or go out to eat. I think the obesity epidemic they’ve been talking about on the news everyday on BBC Scotland can be traced to this food selection problem.

I miss my mom’s cooking for sure. Kristina and Karen, you guys can vouch for the quality of food I’m accustomed to. Lemongrass chicken, salad rolls, sushi, hot pot, mmmmhhhh….. Maybe that will be the thing that will prevent me from staying here after my school term is up. We have so few pleasures in our lives. I can’t give up on this so very important one.

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Photos

A random street in the city centre
On my way to my first grocery shopping trip in the city.

My Kitchen
It's actually quite spacious.

Livingroom and Diningroom
Again quite spacious

View from the street outside my apartment
Notice the old looking spires and things in the background. My building is on top of a hill. It makes life hard trying to haul groceries up but I have a good view.

Ross Priory
This is where dream weddings are made.

Comments

[Sam]

Food
Hey chick - you'll enjoy my mum's cooking I'm sure... you can have a traditional English Christmas dinner for you!!