Yeahhh, its my first time have classes cancelled cos its snowing too heavily for lecturers to come to class and cos people having the keys to LTs are not around. Awesomeness! Im crossing my fingers that tuts would be cancelled too.
I actually hope tmr would be the same, and hopefully feb intermodule (would be perfect).
Its actually really beautiful outside now, cos everywhere is white and clean and the nights have become brighter cos the snow reflects light (right?), and its too cold for punksters to create a mess and the snow are just floating about gently in the skies.
My phones buzzing nonstop about lectures being cancelled, constantly reminding me of the good news, and im in a (relatively) warm room (wish it was warmer though, but heater's already up at max).
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I know Stef's anti-blogishment, and hates it when people publish stuff about her, but I hope she wont mind it cos its meant to be a fundraising event.
They were involved in Jailbreak, which was a fundraising event in cambridge whereby participants travel as much as possible without any money, by getting donations or hitchhiking. They then get people to pledge donations depending on how far they travelled.
And here's Stef & Limin's Jailbreak story. (Copied from an email from Stef.)
Dear Friends,
It's been a long two days. Thanks to several kind souls, we have managed to escape from Cambridge:
Distance: 821 miles
Borders crossed: 5
Modes of transport: Car, Boat
Number of hitches: 6
Final Destination: Lodz (pronounced whooge), Poland
If you might be interested, here is our story.
Hitch 0 - we left Parkers Piece at 9am and camped out at Madingley road just after Northhampton with 2 signs - 'a lift please?' and 'for charity'. We attracted strange stares, smiles and pointing fingers. The best was a snazzy 2 seater silver BMW which stopped! The guy wound down his window, got our hopes up, and said 'are you going to Morocco?'. Alas, all that came next was 'good luck' and off he went.
Hitch 1 - a nice guy who heard about jailbreak on cambridge radio picked us up on madingley road and dropped us at the bus stop by the M11 junction.
Hitch 2 - kind cambridge resident saw jailbreakers on her way to M11 and thought us two girls looked 'harmless'. She dropped us at a roundabout about 10 miles away before exiting for her unique 'carpaint' manicure.
Hitch 3 - under the advice of manicure lady who used to hitchhike, we crossed the roundabout to a slip road where some trucks were parked. Trucks are really tall, and that's where signs come in handy. The driver invited us on board when we said we were heading south. Little did we know that he was actually heading to dover, which was our intended destination all along!
Our truckie worked for a delivery company and our truck was en route to Germany, carrying frozen air parts for Airbus. Truckies are friendly. We even found out the exact birth time and date of his nephew and his father. He must have told us more, but his accent was so thick that we got lost in it half the time. He was pretty decent, and even offered to bring us across the channel but trucks were not allowed to take passengers, lest they were illegal immigrants (which apparently flood the B&Bs in Dover). The only dodgy bit was the pictures of nude girls on his window. Hmmm...
Hitch 4 - Martin, our amazing benefactor. He drove us across 5 borders over 17 hours on 6 cans of red bull and about 1 hour of sleep [all this after a night shift at work!]. We met him at the port of Dover ticketing office, which was an uncanny coincidence as the place was nearly empty that Friday noon. We thought he was a frenchman going to France and he thought we were 2 'gorgeous china girls' just wanting to cross the border. Only after we got onto his car did we find out that he was a polish man working in england heading home to bring his family back here. He planned to drive there nonstop through the night, and welcomed us to tag along!
The 2 hour ferry from dover was amazing - it reminded us of the titanic. Casinos, food, an outer deck etc.
Then began our epic journey across continental europe. Martin took us across to Belgium within an hour, and to Holland in another 3 hours. We crossed into Germany shortly after, and got into Poland at about 4am. We treated Martin to supper at a 'gold medal polish food' place called port 2000 Las Vegas. He tried to get us on a truck towards Lithuania by stopping at many truck stops but there were very few trucks on weekends and the drivers were mostly sleeping. We eventually got him to drop us at Poznan as we didn't want to trouble him any further.
Martin was quite a character. His accolades included:
- 3 time EU karate champion (just when we thought we would be safe because we outnumbered him)
- being an ex-convict jailed for 4 years for fighting
- a proud father married for 3 years, with 2 children aged 6 months and 2 years
Some of Martin's quotes:
- His favourite: 'for fuck's sake!' used to express any sort of emotion (his command of english was limited)
- 'I cant believe it! I have two beautiful china girls sitting in my car! I like china girls!'
- 'Do you like sex?'
- followed by 'you a virgin?!'
- 'you do harsh heroin, no?'
- 'how much do prostitutes cost in singapore?'
We tried to stay awake as much as possible, in fear that he would fall asleep on the wheel. We fed him clementines, red bull, changed cd after cd of polish disco music. Martin was very thoughtful, incredibly sweet, completely harmless, and the one driver who went all out to help us with our quest.
Hitch 4.5 - we approached more than 10 drivers with lithuania plates amongst several truck stops, but they were either sleeping, grumpy, unhelpful, didn't understand us, or thought we were illegal immigrants.
Hitch 5 - after Martin left us, we wandered around a rest stop unsuccessfully, trying to avoid the many dodgy looking truck drivers (we think it might be the eastern european look). We finally found a decent-looking guy pumping petrol who could drop us at the next service station near a big town, lodz. Due to the language barrier, it was a quiet journey as he sped down the highway at 160kph.
Hitch 6 - although we would have liked to keep going on the highway, the quiet saturday traffic and language barrier made us decide to take what was offered - a ride to Lodz city centre. We reached at about noon on Saturday.
In Lodz, we visited the largest mall in poland - Manufaktura. It had amazing architecture, as the reconstructed old town of Warsaw, the capital of Poland. With lightly falling snow amidst a beautiful backdrop of red brick buildings, it was decided to be our landmark of choice for our destination city. We didn't go further because:
- Hitching from the city was even more challenging than the highway! Most people were city residents.
- Lodz was about the same latitude as cambridge, so travelling north or south would not make as significant difference. Eastwards would bring us to Ukraine, which we were warned against...
- We didn't want to be stuck on the road or at a small town when dark well, not knowing how the place worked nor the language. Bear in mind dodgy-looking polish men.
So we spent the next 2 hours building Martin the jailbreak snowman in the middle of a park, as a tribute to our dear friend martin. [Picture attached]
During our time at Lodz, we received a telephone interview from Cambridge Radio! Exciting stuff.
Homeward bound: we took a bus to the tiny Lodz airport, only to find that we were the only ones there. Since it was a low traffic airport, the ticket counter only opened 2 hours before departure. We waited and waited.... only to find that the ticket price was about 4 times what we expected - at £215 per person. We checked all different flight paths from other places in Poland, but they were equally if not more expensive. Germany was cheaper, but it was near impossible to get there through the night, unless we hitchiked again [which we already established was highly improbable and unsafe]. We tried walking around the airport with a cup and our jailbreak documents - all the polish people [even non-scary ones like mothers and grandmothers] thought we were delinquents/beggars and shooed us away or called security. We had no choice but to grit our teeth and pay the money - this would be our gift to charity for a long long time to come. We did manage to get a free ride on the National Express from Stansted, and we reached home at about 1am, Sunday.
Jailbreak was an incredible experience. But it's great to be home. And no, we don't want to quit medicine anymore. :)
At your convenience, please pass to us the following amounts [or your maximum] and we will forward it to Cambridge RAG.
At 821 miles,
1p per mile: ￡8.21[= S$18]
√2p per mile: ￡11.61 [specially for Matt Falder]
2p per mile: ￡16.42
3p per mile: ￡24.63
Also, the results are out, and apparently, we've travelled furthest by land!
The team who travelled the furthest [by flight] travelled 3745 miles to Detroit, USA. Impressive!
So if you guys are interested in contributing to their cause as well, you could contact them directly, or tell me and I will add it on to the amt Im already pledging to them. (((:
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