The day came when my parents were getting ready to send me to KLIA. It was a Saturday evening flight. Before departure, mom bought some kuihs for me and a few friends who came by to send me off. The time came when we entered the gate. There were about 30+ of us. Most of the girls teared when they departed except myself. Perhaps my parent thought how heartless was their daughter. But hey, the trip would only take us 3 months +, not 3 years!
90% of us were the first time boarding a plane. Thus, many of us were like orang kampung when our plane took off...many wows and ahs along the way...and eventually after 1/2 hour...people started snoring...sigh..and can you imagine that the plane ran out of postcards and poker cards because of us! Apart from that, my guess was that 30 blankets and small pillows missing when we arrived Manchester on an early Sunday morning...(because later I saw those blankets and pillows in every of our room - I was of one of them -guilty!) So, weren't we like orang kampung?!
The flight was about 17 hours and from Manchester to Sheffield, it need another hour or so...Though we were deprived of good sleep during the long journey, we were not tired at all..
Again many wows and ahs as we took the bus from Manchester to Sheffield. Those greens, blue sky and the mist took our breath away...Again those didn't last long and out of sudden you can hear some cantonese folk songs...gosh! we have just arrived and it seems like we have been there ages and started missing our kampungs! Jialat...My roomate and I disbelief the way others were behaving and shook our heads.When we reached our hostel, the sun was already shining brightly above our heads. We were then assigned to our room. In our hostel, there are 6 rooms with 3 floors. Each floor, it has 2 rooms. My roomie and myself occupied the top floor. Immediately once we loaded our bagagge, someone knocked on my door and told myself and my roomie to bring along our school bag to shop for rice at Chinatown. We obeyed and were thinking why do we need a school bag? Later, we found out that in UK, you need to pay extra for plastic bags. As we walked to Chinatown, every house we passed by were tightly closed as though it was unoccupied. Not even a single soul was spotted - like we do have some washing cars, some doing gardening, chit chatting, children riding their bicycle etc on a Sunday morning...but here, none at all...How sad...
It took us more than 30 minutes to reach a Chinese grocery store. We store up some rice, some kicap, some noodles etc. Yes, they did not provide any plastic/paper bags for our stuff. We carefully placed those items into our school bags. The return was taxing as we had several kgs on our shoulders and had to walk for 30mins!
Next stop was McD which was located about 10mins away from our hostel. While most gwailos took their lunch outside the premise under the bright sun, we took our value meal inside...they must be thinking how weird we were - depriving ourselves from the bright sun! Later as we stayed longer, we began to appreciate the sun more...most of the time the weather was gloomy...
Wow, after finishing the fries I could only stomach a quarter of the burger. Their portion is larger than our usual medium value meal. I packed up my burger and hope to eat it later in the noon. Once we setlled down in our room, we were terribly exhausted and slept about 3pm. We woke up about 7pm plus...the sun was still shining brightly- it was summer time in UK. We continued our sleep and about 10pm plus (it was still bright), we heard some of our housemates were chatting in the kitchen. But then, we were still too tired to bother who were our housemates and continued to sleep. When we woke up again, it was already Monday morning at 4am (and it was already bright!)..we thought it's crazy to wake up at that hour and behold, we continued. Finally at 7am +, we decided it's enough! Err, remember my burger which I had a quarter? Amazingly, it was not stale and I finished it for lunch! Geng le...
After a quick tour to our Uni, we returned to our hostel by evening and met our housemates (finally) in the kitchen. They are Pakistani English and they were very proud of their Proton Saga! They were very friendly and took us around the city by night. Very lovely of them...But soon they left the hostel for their summer break.
The uni arranged an outing for us on the 3rd day since we arrived. They took us to the country side and we get to see loads of sheep..baaa...aaa...aaa...and the community is small and very quiet. We enjoyed ourselves very much.
After that, our classes were then on a full swing. Out of a week, we only have 3 days of classes. We would walked for about 20mins to our uni rather than taking the bus which cost 50 pence and we even packed lunch from home. After our lecture, we would be back to hostel by 5pm. Thus we have time to cook our dinner. Our meals were very simple and can be the same dishes some time.
I will need to break right here. Shall continue soon....
