Believe it or not, after reading american cases (because i try to study at times), i actually miss the House of Lords, their cases, and this line below:

"My Lords, I have had the advantage of reading in draft the speech which has been prepared by my noble and learned friend, Lord Hoffmann. I agree with it, and for the reasons which he has given I, too, would allow the appeal."

Party pictures

Here are pictures of the parties that happened last weekend.


The top 2 photos show the SGA (thats the student government association; sorta like their law club) weekly pub gathering. last min cancellations meant that only Jacqueline and I showed up. And that was when i had an oatmeal stout. Its really like a full meal by itself.

The last 6 photos show the pool party that the LLM students organise. It was quite fun, though i missed almost all my shots that night.

And finally, the photo at the top right hand corner shows the famous "Citgo" sign near Fenway Park, which apparently is like a tourist landmark in itself (the sign; the park is already a tourist attraction).


Photos we took prior to the SGA rivercruise on Sat. These were taken near Cambridge. Cambridge is really pretty. I must go visit it someday.


And the river cruise pictures! It was just like a night out clubbing, except that this was on the high seas (well not really the high seas, just in Boston Harbor I think). The JD students were also quite wild. Some dudes even took off their shirts, and believe me you, its not a pretty sight.

The view from the graduate student lounge on the 15th floor

Nice isn't it? Cambridge, where Harvard is, is on the other side of the bridge.

Homecooked food

Our attempt at cooking seafood pasta. I bought prawns and scallops from the supermarket, and we mixed it in with the pasta sauce.


Our stove. See how white it is! That's one of my hobbies in Boston - polishing the stove at home. Other hobbies include boiling water, scrubbing the pans, doing laundry etc.



The spread. Veggies are important if we don't want to get fat.



And randomly, our dishwasher works! It really damn good. The dishes are clean and dry, and hot from the steam used to wash them. Its so good that Kox wanna use it to wash his clothes.

Mid-Autumn Festival!

Being Chinese, we decided we couldn't let Mid-Autumn Festival and a beautiful moon pass us by without having a celebration. We went all the way to Chinatown to buy mooncakes that frankly would be deemed too lousy back home.


Kox over here is trying to pour the wine through the sieve, after he and the guy behind (Holden) pushed the wine cock into the bottle while trying to get it out. Don't ask me how it happened. And the sieving was unsuccessful.


The gathering! We had a conversation about how we celebrate MAF. Holden, the Taiwanese told us they will gather for a BBQ in Taiwan during MAF. Stacy (the gal on the right) and Sally (the gal on the left) told us they will have a mega family gathering back in China during MAF. And I told them that Singaporeans just eat mooncakes and do nothing else =_=


Woo hoo our lousy mooncakes were compensated by really good chinese tea.


Alex and Anna, the German and Spanish couple, who were intrigued by our mooncake escapade. We ended up playing bluff the whole night. And Kox lost and had to do the dishes.

What I found in the Library

This was what i found in the BU Law Library:



This proves once again that I'm the king at finding random stuff in libraries =)

I am an Amazon shopaholic

In just 2 days, I bought:

- 1 CD
- 2 PC games
- 1 laptop case
- 1 travel guide
- 1 IP textbook

all from Amazon. It doesnt help that I have free priority shipping for 30 days.

Parties!

Its been a busy week partying.

Wed - BU School of Law weekly pub night
Thurs - LLM pool night
Fri - Dinner with someone from NUS who came down to Boston for a meeting
Sat - BU School of Law Harbor Cruise
Sun - Mooncake Festival celebrations

Haha some of the photos are up on facebook. Will upload some of them here when i find the time to do so!

And I really must start studying soon. The "shopping" period is over!

The woes of catching football in a country that labels it as soccer

So the good news is that I have cable.

But the bad news is that I realised my package does not cover it, and I have to pay another 8USD a month for football.

And the good news is then that we decided to get it.

But the bad news is that we realised that they are not showing the early match between Liverpool and Man Utd, and of the rest of the fixtures, they decided to show Newcastle v. Hull. Sigh.

Racism

If there's one factor that made me decided that i won't work in the States, its corz you have idiots coming up to you at 1am in the morning and saying this in your face: "Barcelona eh? BARCELONA SUCKS!"

And I'm sure its race-driven, because honestly, I don't think many Americans care about football at all, much less know what "FC Barcelona" means.

And Kox told me he got spit at once while he was running. The spectre of racism is always lurking underneath the surface pleasantries, and that is not a comfortable feeling at all.

a few interesting observations

1. American law students really like wearing suits to class. Someone told me its due to some module making it compulsory for them to wear suits, but that doesn't explain why 4 out of 10 students wear suits to class.

2. Michael Hwang and M. Sonarajah are really famous. My arbitration professor at BU knows them. When we say we are from Singapore, he dropped their names, as if they are tourist landmarks!

3. The weather here is schizo. It can be as hot as back in Singapore one day, and then the next day its gets all windy and raining and we have to wear our jackets.

4. You don't have to read everything on the reading list. Back in Singapore, having a reading list means you should read everything on it; or at least the professors keep telling you that. Over here, the professors (at least in a few classes) tell you that the reading list is only to give you a headstart on researching for your paper, and that you only need to read those that they specify. And then there's "read", and there's "skim read". Go figure.

5. Getting to school doesn't necessarily means getting to your classroom. The lifts are slow. and its 15 storeys to your classroom. Makes you think twice about the TTH quip that "only old people like Sonarajah take the lift".

6. There are LLM students, and there are LLM students. Some LLM students are really here just to have fun. Some of them though are here to study like their lives depend on it.

ADVERT: A tribute to an unnamed junior

This tribute is for an unnamed junior (unless she's thick-skinned enough to demand to be named here), who wanted a tribute before she will read this blog.

This junior is an early riser, and she never ceased to amaze me when she pings me at what must be an ungodly time back in Singapore. She's considered pretty (I think; probably need to take a straw poll to find out), and she's really funny. She's bimbotic at times, but that only adds to our collective amusement =)

Ok if you are reading this, I have some form of writer's block now and I cant continue =)

And its amazing how shameless I can get to attract readers to this blog.

Doing laundry

These are more pictures of our apartment building. Kox noted wryly the other day that our building is called a condominium, but it looks nothing like it.


So, to do our laundry, first we have to step out of our apartment into this gloomy and dark and musty corridor. Its really as bad as it sounds.


We then have to take the backstairs to some room at the ground floor, which is only accessible by this flight of stairs and a door leading to the outside. The stairs are made of wood, and they creak loudly when you step on them. Needless to say, this is one flight of stairs that you wouldn't want to stay on for long.


Coming out, this is the hidden room, which is enclosed and quite quiet at times. It reminds me of those quiet places where some slasher will just jump out and hack you. HAHA!


And this is our washing area. The blue basket is my laundry basket. Christine, you should see this before complaining about your laundry area =)


And finally, a random photo showing the view outside my kitchen window, just to show Christine how the view is like as compared to the view outside her kitchen window.

Shop till you drop!

And so, on a rainy Saturday, we decided to drive out of town to an outlet village, where the shopping promises to be real good.


This is the city center, near the Boston Harbour, where we picked up our car. The architecture around Boston is really amazing.


This was our car for the day, a white Chevy SUV, which had great acceleration, ample boot space (you will see why its so important later), but sadly a very bad middle seat with a suffocating seat belt (I was in that middle seat, you see).


Happy faces in anticipation of the trip! From top left, we have Jacqueline, a HKU exchange student, Kox, and Anna, who's Spanish and the girlfriend of a German lawyer who's here on the American LLM programme. The last picture shows the parking lot of the outlet village. This is just 1 column of the parking spaces available. I estimate the outlet mall to be around 2/3 the size of the Singapore Expo.


And thats us right at the end of the shopping trip! see how much stuff we bought! and thats why the boot of the Chevy came in real handy! And the last girl in the last picture is called Stacy, who's a lawyer without a license back in China (or so she claims; the real truth is that she's working at a foreign law firm in Beijing, and they are supposed to surrender their China law license when they switch to a foreign law firm in China).

Prices there are real cheap! It took a bit of self restraint not to buy up the entire ralph lauren polo store, especially since the polos were going at 40 to 50 SGD cheaper than those sold in Singapore! Jacqueline, the HKU student, was like a kid in a candy store at Coach, and I think she spent a couple of hours easily inside that store.

All in all, this was a real good trip, with great company and great bargains!

Take me out to the ball game!

They said it wasn't possible, but we managed to get tickets to the Red Sox-Yankees game at Fenway Park!

Downtown Boston part 2 and Of Weird and Wonderful Cars part 2

Here are other random pictures during my 2nd trip down to downtown Boston to see the Boston Public Library.


Top 2 photos show different churches within walking distance of one another. The layout of the public square is such that the church on the left is across the street to the left of the Boston Public Library, and the church on the right is across the street in front of the Boston Public Library.

Oh, and the church on the left holds a session called "jazz worship" every thursday evening. Sounds interesting isn't it? I shall go and take a look and see what "jazz worship" is all about. =)

And the 2 photos below shows a Mini Clubman station wagon for sale at USD$12,500. It is really old and classic! There are wood panels at the ends of the car! This car attracted so much attention as it was parallel parked along Newbury Street. That is the equivalent of having the car parallel parked along Orchard Road!

Boston Public Library

More pictures of downtown Boston!





Now ordinarily i will put these photos in a collage, since they are all pictures of a same location, but I thought this building was really very beautiful. The above pictures are of the Boston Public Library. See how grand their city library is! If you scrutinise closely, you will see inscriptions along the sides of the roof of the building. There's one inscription that had a really important message, but it was too long for me to take it down on a photo. The inscription is

"THE COMMONWEALTH REQUIRES THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE AS THE SAFEGUARD OF ORDER AND LIBERTY" (from wikipedia)

The message drove home the point (at that time) that Boston is the cradle of the Commonwealth (and later the United States of America).

Chinese Food you've never seen - General Gau's Chicken

So what is General Gau's chicken? I have no idea. It tasted mildly spicy, sweet, sour, and crunchy. Its actually quite good (or maybe the restaurant I went to was just good).


The portions are huge! and its all for usd$5!

Random pictures of law school - Moot Court

I was looking through my photos and i realised i have photos of the moot court. So here it is! I think it looks nicer than our moot court.

Of weird and wonderful cars

Nothing much here, just that we have been randomly taking pictures of cars that we thought were interesting.


First and last photo repeats. The top 2 photos is of this car that had hundreds, if not thousands, of action figures, toys etc stuck onto it. The owner of this car must really like toys. Its kinda disgusting due to the state of the car, yet oddly fascinating at the same time.

The car on the bottom left is a damn old Jaguar. See if you can spot the leaping jaguar at the bonnet! This is damn old school, and guess where i saw it? I spotted it in the carpark of this 24 hr supermarket where we always shop for groceries. I think you wouldn't see someone driving a Rolls Royce to NTUC to shop back home, would you?

Downtown Boston

Downtown Boston is not too bad a place. Its definitely not for shoppers, but you get to see a wide variety of buildings and performances. Why is it not for shoppers? Well lets compare the figures. The small sunny island of Singapore has a total of how many Zara stores? In Boston, MA, theres a total of 1 Zara store. haha enough said. There are at least 2 H & Ms though; we visited them. Oh, and at least 2 Borders.


This was the first place we went. Its called Washington Street or something. Its supposed to be a shopping district, and this was taken late afternoon on a Saturday. Look at the crowd! (or the lack of it). Nevertheless, you can find interesting stuff, like the bottom right picture, which stated that Benjamin Franklin worked as an apprentice here for his brother's printing company long long ago.


Downtown Boston is full of old and quaint buildings like the ones shown here. The bottom 2 photos are photos of a tourist trap known as Quincy Market, where tourists go to shop and to eat their Boston clam "chowdah"


This was another shopping district known as Newbury Street. The top 2 photos show a very old church, with its magnificent clock tower. I have no idea what denomination it is though. The bottom 2 photos show Newbury Street, which as you can see is not too crowded too. I haven't found their big shopping malls yet, but shops here are like stand alone stores with 3 or 4 storeys. And my favorite (spelt like an American!) activity so far is to sit at 1 corner in Borders and read their books. There's no point buying books because I cant bring them back anyway, with my luggage allowance being limited and all.

Boston University

BU is quite a nice campus. Its sorta divided into 2 by the main road that cuts through it, and its architecture style is inconsistent, to say in the least. Lets look at some photos!


Top 2 photos show Commonwealth Ave, which cuts BU up into 2. The bottom 2 photos show some random BU buildings, of which i have no idea what they are used for.


The top 2 photos show the trinity church and the school of theology that is located right next to BU School of Law. In the third photo, the grey building on the right is the infamous Law Tower. The last photo on bottom right is again some random BU building.


The first 3 photos show "The Castle", which is some old building built in the early 20th century and is currently used for gatherings. The BU student run pub is at the basement of this building. Oh and this was where they hosted a reception for the LLM student.

The last photo on the bottom right shows the lawn at the back of the Law School. We were having an American Style BBQ lunch as sorta like a welcome party for JD and LLM students. The food was great! American Style BBQ meant buns with huge beef patties and sausages, topped with chips and relish. I think it would be a cultural shock for them if Kox and I hosted a Singapore Style BBQ, complete with sambal stingray and satay!

the noise in the neighbourhood part 2

In an earlier post, i said that the party was still ongoing at 1am. And see what those drunkards did just outside our apartment.


Pretty exciting isnt it?

our apartment

These are some photos of our apartment. The top 2 photos are pictures of my room, the bottom left photo is a picture of our pathetic living room (no sofa), and the last photo is Kox's room. And i realised i should have fought him for the queen sized bed, because my bed is not long enough for me. my feet stick out of the bed. sighz.