My job in the library is proved to be a dragging one. However the good news is that I can get paid. Though I havn't got a penny from my boss, I decided to spend my 'U.K national minimum wage' before hand. What I have to do therefore is to do something special this weekend. Say, drink!

Long times ago, I had a meal with Hyejung and Bomi. They wondered what kind of person I am after get drunk. Well, I got the same quetion as well, since I never get drunk. Not becaue I'm good at drinking, I just seldom drink. This time why not try some spirit. Just get drunk, who care.

Hao supported this idea. So we went to Tesco. I was to buy Vodka, but it's not cheap. In the end, I bought a bottle of Dry London Gin, 37.5%. I've never tried this kind of spirit before. I cannot forsee what would happen. In the first place I said to Hao ' If I get drunk under the table this time, would you be kind enough to carry me to my dorm.' He said no problem.

How could drink without girls. Celin and Hyejung joined us. So four people, 2 boys and 2 girls, gethered in Hyejung's room. Maybe the Korean hated beating around the bush. Shortly after I closed the door, she had already opened the bottle. By the way I bought a huge bag of Chips and a nice cheese cake to go with alcohol.

Hyejung was kind enough to teach us the Korean way of drinking alcohol, which I believe is very delicate: You cannot fill your cup first. When someone fill your cup, you should life your cup with two hands. When everyone of us want to drink, the rest should lift their cups no matter he/she wants to drink or not; when drink with boss, you should turn and not facing her/him.... All things like that. Luckily after we finished two cups, she claimed 'since we are all friends let's be casual.'  I like it. Each time we lift our cups, we would drink up all the alcohol in them, which was so nice~ 

' For the relaitonship between China and Korea, Kanbei!' ,'For you, and for all of us. Kanbei!' ' For the happy moment. Kanbei!' In one word, everything was worth celebrating and for us to empty the alcohol in cup.... Very soon we finished half of the bottle. Except  Hyejung, the rest of us got red face. Korea borders north China. So maybe the Korean just like the northerner of China. They are good at drinking alcohol. I should celebrate that I only bought one bottle of Gin, or we all would down under the table by her.  

Later Hyejung suggested to play games while drinking. Why not. But who can tell me  why she never lose. It's me who always made stupid mistake and got punished. Drink, drink, drink.  Bad luck! Time went away really fast. Suddenly when I looked at my watch it's 12o'clock. And we finished the whole bottle of Gin. I'm okay and very clear. Celin and Hao asked me if I was alright. I stood up, and tried to balance myself with one leg on the floor, saying ' See I can stand up with one hand!' Oh, come on. Am I drunk? They all laughed at me.

Before we left, we listen to the music. Hotel California, my favourite one. The last line in the song is ' we can check out anytime we want, but we can never leave.'Hearing that, a strange feeling welled up from my heart of heart. A mixed one, impossible for me to describe it clearly. I tried to grip it but in vain. Maybe i'm in my Hotel California now.... I could do nothing but stood up, taking my coat from the chair.

' Really a beautiful night. See you later. Good night!'

' See you~Bye~'

Before I took few steps, I suddenly stopped and tu rned around, speaking in a triumphal voice 'Whisky! Next time'

They burst into laugh 'Ha~ Andy has become a Alcoholic.'       

Teaching Chinese~ Am I professional?

Brothers~

4 hours' manual labour made me feel tired and  want to sit down and have a cup of tea. My job in the library is mainly get those dusty journals onto the trolley, then shift them to another shelf. The partner of me is another Chinese, but he cannot speak Mandarin. He could only speak a little bit Cantonese, since he was born in Liverpool. I'm bad in Cantonese, so during the work we used English.

The work started very well. However only half an hour later, I was a little bit fed up by those books. Such big stuff, even heavier than those damn bricks, why not burn them? I swear nobody would even give a glimpse on them. OMG~ At firstly we worked as fast as we could like crazy. The situation was like I got  6 big books in a time from the shelf, and passed them to him. He uploaded them to the trolley.  We push the trolley, very heavy as well, just like those coal-worker, to the new shelf. This time it's me who downloaded them and he rearrange the journals on the shelf.

One hour later, finally it dawned on us that we shouldn't work like crazy? Keep in mind one thing! This is only a temporary job: the sooner we finish it, the less days we are supposed to work; The less days we worked, the less paid we are likely to get, right? Why work? Make some money. Money is good, isn't it? That's the brian path of us actually. It's really bad to delay the working process meaningly. So we moved on with a general pace, a pace acceptable. Usually downloading all the books from a shelf and putting them on the trolley would cost us nearly 8 minutes; uploading them will require another 10 minutes. 

That's not efficient. So we made a little bit innovation on the process in order to speed up. Firstly we push the trolley right under the shelf from which we were downloading the books. So it made the whole things faster and easier. I mean we needn't walk a long way to the trolley with books in arms. That's clever, right? By the same methode, we uploaded the books to the new shelf. After the innovation, the whole process would be finished within 12~15 minutes. That's really boss!

Though at first I never thought my work in the library would be a manual loabour one, manual labour is good for health, isn't it?  At least I needn't pay 15 pound per month for the gym. 

Finally, finally, finally, I find a job in the school library. Oh! I can start my work from next Tuesday. Though it's just a temporary job, maybe will not last for more than few weeks, that's my first job, isn't it! Keep on going~ 

I watched the film Splendid Holiday(华丽的休假) with Celin and Hye Jung. The film is a little bit long and took us nearly 2 hours to finish it.

After that, I had a mixture of feeling. On one hand I was deeply moved by people in the film, for they sacrificed their lives for democracy; On the other hand, a sort of heavy feeling ate my heart. I feel sad for Korea and also feel sad for my country.  

A question came into my mind, what will I do if I were in that situation. I don't know. But what I do know is when the 80s drawing to its end, a similar uprising happened in Beijing, China. Many students in Beijing were on their Splendid Holiday forever.... Our centre government still kept the figure of death in that civil demonstration as a secret.... 

At least 207 people had died in Gwangju Massacre in 1980. After the civilian rule took the place of military rule in South Korea, a national cemetery was established honoring the victims of the incident. But who mourn for those students died in China?

At the end of the film, the heroine shouted on a jeep, crying ' Please! the citizen in Gwangju. Let's fight for Guangju, fight for Daehan Minguk! Please! Don't forget us.'

History is for people to remember rather than to forget....

I applyed for a poistion in my university. The result is not that good. Today I got the e-mail, the whole things were:

'Dear Student,
I am writing to you regarding the research assistant vacancies in the Career Development Department for which you sent in your CV for.
I regret to inform you that you have not been successful on this occasion. We had a lot of applicants for this position, and competition for places was high.
Please do not let this dissuade you from applying for Hope Works positions in the future, and keep checking your Hope email account for details of new opportunities.
If you would like any advice or CV guidance please visit us in Career Development, 1st Floor Gateway Building, Hope Park.
Kind regards,
Gemma Churton'

• Okay, never mind. I won't give up.

Hope a better luck with me next time.

I spent nearly a whole day on reviewing those Managing People hand-outs.  A small thought came to me when I was reading session 8-Motivation. I was wondering to myself: what motivates me everyday?

There are many theories related to motivation. Personally, the Equity Theory raised by Adams impressed me most. According to his theory, maybe it was a little bit paraphrased by me, everypeople believe that the outcome is equal with the input,i.e we perceive to be a fair reture for our efforts. Yeah! I wish it were a universal law. If I spent 1 hour on English, then the following day, my English would have a progress equal to my 1 hour's effort. However is it the case? The ture situation is that outcome is always coming late, sometimes extremely late. So people will feel we are unfairly treated, feeling of inequity can arise. Such feeling could motivate people to do less work. Or on the other side of the coin, if you are luck enough to fall into the category of 'smarter', you just spend a little energy, but you get a massive return. Under this situaiton you will also feel inequitable, but this time the feeling of inequity would motivate you to do more work.

Personally, I always feel inequitable, not the second 'inequitable' but the first one. Sometimes It's very hard for me to maintian a high morale. Why does this happen? Why never satisfied? According to Equity Theory 'Normally people would compare themselves with others who are doing similar work or occupying similar postion.' That's the point! One can never be the best, right? Say you are the best in a particular field, for example swimming. Who can guarantee that you are the No. 1 in track and field? The perfection haven't been exsited and will never be. Why not accpet yourself?

A small thought.

Loneliness your silent whisper. Fills a river of tears through the night.Memory you never let me cry.And you you never said goodbye. Sometimes our tears belined the love, we lost our dreams along the way. But I never thought you'd trade your soul to the fates,never thougt you leave me alone. Time through the rain has set me free.Sands of time will keep your memory. Love everlasting fades away. alive with your beatless heart.....

Just finished my learning diary. Will move on to a piece of reflection tomorrow. The Christmas break is drawning to its end. As I think about it, the new term sounds like an exciting term ahead, with many exiting things coming up and a lot to look forward to. I hope it will bring me many experiences about how do make a living in U.K and also increase challenges that will mature me as time goes by.

Today we 10 Chinese celebrated Lilian's Birthday. We had a wonderful pizza party. I did have a good time tonight and I believe everyone of us had a night full of joys. She is 21 now. And I have been 21 three months ago. Oh, I don't know whom I should thank, for 21 years of life. 

After the celebration, we played uno cards together. Uno means 'one', maybe it's Spanish.  It's one of the world's most popular games. The rules are very easy to learn. Each player has 7 cards in the first place. Once a player has no cards left, he/she is the winner. However when you only get one card in hand, you must yell 'uno'. I'm the one who failed to do this in a round, which resulted in picking one cards from the draw pile. The second time when I only had one card left, I was so excited and blurted out 'Nano!'. Maybe I dreamt to buy an 'Ipod Nano'. The most funny yell was from Celin. She shouted 'Youtube!' Oh my god, she is soooooooooooooooooooooo addicted to Youtube:).

What a night! We played cards till 12:00. At 11:50, security men came in, because we made such a big noice. Sorry for that, but we were really happy!  All in all, I had a gerat day. Life will resume to normal the next morning and the earth will continue to spin, but these happy memories remain. 

PS. I have to pay my accommodation fee tomorrow. My Student ID has already been blocked. By the way thanks Chrysan's post-card-Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh. And her handwriting is really lovely.

Right~ Back to bed. 

[The astute reader would notice that I changed my image into map, a map of London. This is because my life would be full of wander from this year on. I have no ideal of when is the next time that I would settle down and have a cup of tea. I'm sure I will be a wanderer. Perhaps I'm slowly taking a step to the right direction. And I hope you are also on the way to the destination.]

Just finished my learning-dairy. The topic is 'language attitude'. It's about a fact that 1 out of 4 people in the globe can speak English with some level fo proficiency. What's your attitude towards it?

Someone may don't want to learn English in the first place. However he has no choice, since English is expanding in a speed beyond anyone's imagination.

 Someone may study English like crazy, because English means chances and oppertunities for him.  I should belong to the second category, even I don't speak English like crazy.

Here are the 2 things I wish I could tell you about how English can be linked with Chances and oppertunities.

I wish people around the world can understand English. In the old days if China wanted to introduced its culture to Japan. There should be a group of Japanese understanding Chinese. However nowadays, since Japanese can speak good English, China can promote its culture and language through English.

I wish by English, Chinese can understand ourselves much better. Due to decades of war, Chinese begun to understand how childish they were, and begun to open their eyes towards the West. These years maybe our government wants to add more confidence to us; maybe Chinese want to motivate ourselves away from the sad past; or maybe Chinese are satisified by our econimc achievement. Some Chinese believe that Chinese are good at Maths and Sicence; Some Chinese believe that Chinese are wiser than many nations; Some Chinese believe that we are the No. 1 in Asia. Are all these things true or just some people believe they are ture. I don't know. However with English as a medium of cross-culture communication, we will understand what is mutual understanding and respect between the peoples ofdifferent nations, races and cultures.

I will go to a Chinese pizza party tomorrow night, which should be exciting.  Ok, back to bed.

I should stop watching Youtube. I'm sure I should. I know I should. Watching you tube is bad, I mean spent so much time on it is bad. And it can lead to bad things.

On the other hand, there is a good side to watching Youtube, especially these days. It's an interesting thing. And that's it. Watching Youtube is interesting, and I don't just mean click my way to Youtube and watching it with friends.

Youtube has always been exciting, associated with Music, Movie Trailer, fun. But these days there's a new dimension. I'm talking about the way you are looking at Youtube. Sharing anything you like to share with the rest of world; searching anything you'd like to watch from the rest of the world.

There's other things that made me fall in love with it. I mean, we've downloaded many things from the website by BitTottent P2P file-sharing technology. We would fill our computer, maybe in C disk, maybe in D disk with hundreds of movies,pictures and musics, of course it should be big enough. The motivation behind it is we tend to occupy things more than we need. However you can not download things from Youtube, at least I cannot.    

However I'm not a superman. I also want to use P2P file-sharing technology. But I can't. So now you know the reason for my Youtube addiction.

See fireworks exploding upon the sky. No crystal moon, but silky rain drifted down. A little bit cold outside,there was a figure on the window, that I cannot tell. But  I know that's the figure I only want to follow. Free my soul, just like it fly. I will follow you no matter where you are going to. I know you will lead me to a life  with love and hope. Whose figure reflected on my window? No wonder, that's mine.