Category Archives: Recreation

Book Sale at the SUB

Posted on 22 October 2008 | Comments Off on Book Sale at the SUB

I bought books!

Specifically, these books:

This one has absolutely breathtaking artwork.

And this is a different cover to the one I’ve got, but is my favourite of the two. It has a beautiful message. Read it when you’re passing by the SUB.

You’ll have to forgive the links; I was experimenting with code and making money. Unless you wish to fund my future living expenses, it’s actually a much better deal to go to the SUB and buy the books there — I got the first for under $4 and the other for under $11.

Comments Off on Book Sale at the SUB

Posted in Recreation

On-Campus Food Deals

Posted on 17 October 2008 | 5 comments

You know what we should do? We should all offer suggestions to one another about where is the best so-and-so to get.

For example, if you want butter chicken, you should go to the Village basement. If you go into the food fair and turn left, and go right to the very end, you’ll find an Indian place that sells what I in my inexperience think is really good butter chicken (and what others with their more experienced palates agree is quite good butter chicken) for the price of approximately $5.50. This means a large plate of rice with butter chicken all on top and a large piece of naan bread to go with it.

I tried the butter chicken from the Delly in the SUB basement yesterday and was rather disappointed — for $8.50, I got half of EVERYTHING the Village offers: only rice or one piece of naan that is also half the size of the Village naan, with about the same amount of butter chicken, but I prefer the taste of the other one. The short walk from the SUB to the Village is well worth saving those extra $3 and for a much better offer.

As for cookies, I have stopped purchasing from (the SUB’s) Pacific Spirit Place completely and solely patronize Blue Chip Cookies instead. I have been racking my brains for how to bake their delectable Marbellous cookies at home… I keep buying Marbellouses to study the ingredients, but I just can’t seem to work it out — which means, of course, that I buy more.

And I haven’t yet found a better place for wraps than Vanier’s, which I do still sometimes frequent when I’m longing for some egg salad in a wrap.

So what food suggestions do you have?

5 Comments

Posted in Recreation

Exam Excitement

Posted on 8 October 2008 | 4 comments

I just found out that exam timetables are up — I don’t know when they came out — and my schedule resembles something like this:

Monday: Term paper due
Tuesday: Take-home essay/paper due
Wednesday: EOSC exam
Thursday: Chinese exam
Friday: Old English exam

and I will probably have a Chinese oral exam to do online due around then.

The crunch is really not the exciting part (in fact, I think I will get butterflies in late November).

The exciting part is that I’m done by December 5th. I’m walking about a little dazed and stunned by the possibilities this opens up to me — I can go home earlier, maybe even much earlier. (My ticket’s currently booked for the 21st.) My two weeks’ rushed holiday is a month. I can get my wisdom teeth pulled out before they close for the winter holidays (I insist on going to my lifelong HK dentist; I fear Canadian dentists). I may be able to make it back in time for my mother’s birthday. I can visit my secondary school and see some of my old teachers.

But while a part of me is tempted to jump onto the next available midnight flight between the 5th and the 6th, I suppose I should check with all my various commitments and find out when they can spare me, and I was going to take some time after exams to get my L driver’s license (that’s right, I have not yet done the written test and am not qualified to drive, mostly because legal driving age in HK is 18 and there wasn’t enough time between my birthday and leaving for uni to learn), and I was looking forward to hanging out with friends here for a couple of days after exams (because face it, there’s hardly any time to really relax together during school)…

Oh forget it, I want to go home.

4 Comments

Posted in Academic, Off-Campus Life, Recreation

State of the Gateman Address

Posted on 23 September 2008 | 4 comments

I went along to the Gateman Goes Global lecture yesterday evening, in part because I wanted to see the famed Gateman (half of which the UBC student population seems to have had for an Econ prof), and the other part because I was interested to hear about what kind of work he does in Kenya.

I’m not sure if it’s the flu/overexhaustion/whatever illness I’m currently suffering that is speaking, but I was a bit disappointed.

Let’s split it into a one-part good and two-parts not-so-good evening.

Message-wise, I thought that what Professor Gateman was trying to say — to do business with compassion — was important. The concept of a social business is one I ran into when I started reading Muhammad Yunus’s book A World Without Poverty (and which I have to finish) so it wasn’t all over my head. But I don’t know… I found myself disagreeing with a lot of what was being said, the whole thing was clearly addressed to just business students (with some economics ones thrown in) so there was nothing about what anyone who’s not a businessperson can do, and I wish he’d spoken more about what he’d actually been doing personally, but I suppose the message is a start.

Organisation-wise, well, clearly the marketing was excellent given the number of people who turned up (well into the hundreds). Starting the actual event was quite another issue: a girl told me the doors would be opened at 6:15 (since the event was starting at 6:30), but we didn’t get to go inside until 6:50, which was somewhat ridiculous. If the event had started on time, I suppose I wouldn’t have been so cross about the 20 further minutes of promotion that the International Business Club and Economics Students Association were obliged to give.

But oh, the crossest part of the night was probably with my fellow students. When Professor Gateman paused his lecture and handed the mic over to a UBC alumni to talk about her experiences in Africa and with social businesses, a fair number of students started to get up and leave, and they kept leaving all the while she was talking. I absolutely could not believe how rude people can be. If you must leave because of an emergency or other plans or whatever, leave during an interval, not in the middle of someone’s speech. I can’t imagine how discouraging it must be to see so many people walk out while you’re trying your best to say something you feel is really important.

All in all, I am rather disgruntled with my fellow UBC students. And my sore throat is clamouring for my attention now.

4 Comments

Posted in Academic, Recreation

AMS Clubs & Speakeasy

Posted on 18 September 2008 | 2 comments

Last year, I spent a lot of money joining 9 clubs and then dropping all of them by the end of the first term for one reason or another.

This year, to better save my money, I’ve been signing up for mailing lists with the intention of paying only for those clubs I end up going to regularly. (Though I’ve found out that Youth Outreach doesn’t require membership fees at all, which I think is cool.)

Such as the Thai club. While I have not yet paid my membership fee for that, I trust my Thai friend will chase me up on it.

Hearing that I joined the Thai club, I also got recruited by a Taiwanese club and the Vietnamese club, neither of which I have any heritage with whatsoever or have paid my fees for either. But the promise of food is very enticing.

(The Thai club is offering a one-off 10% per table discount at an authentic Thai restaurant, so take advantage of it!)

So far I have successfully managed to avoid joining any Chinese clubs, though I foresee myself giving in to peer pressure and joining for the sake of an umbrella, two folders and a possible discount on a ski trip. While there seem to be many times more exec positions than regular membership positions, I’m not interested in going after one, even if it would be good on my resumé. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll regret this attitude.

I’ll tell you what I have done, though.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been thinking and working on my application for AMS Speakeasy, the peer counselling service. I had my interview yesterday and got the position today. Training is this weekend all weekend, and while I’m as tired as ever, I’m really happy and relieved to join the team. I’ve been wanting to get involved with this for a long while now.

I did a lot of soul-searching last term and discovered a number of things that have me targeting a lot more specifically now. Namely, I don’t know enough about anything to know what I want to be doing with my life; my experiences thus far are mostly confined to entertaining young children. My aim this year is to get a variety of new and different experiences — not just any random experience, but in things I care about.

What do I care about?

I care about English lit. I care about creative writing. I care about being able to help another person face-to-face.

So I’m working with that for now. The academics side takes care of itself, thanks to school. I mean to see what can be done about the writing/editing/publishing side of things with the English Students’ Society, which is the only one I know thus far that has any kind of English literary publication. And now I’m volunteering with Speakeasy.

I also joined a dance class at the REC, I’m applying for co-op, and a few other things I’m sure to talk about as well as time goes on. But the point is, I hope I’m doing okay even if I am not a club exec of any sort.

I’m open to trying completely new things in the hopes of stumbling across something I would never imagine adoring if I hadn’t given it a go.

Guess that’s where the Thai and Taiwanese clubs come in, eh?

2 Comments

Posted in Academic, AMS, Involvement / Leadership, Recreation