Revisiting Newcastle upon Tyne

I will be visiting Newcastle again next weekend which is on the 19th of April just for the weekend. I will be taking a train to Newcastle. The journey is slightly over 3 hours and cost me lightly over £50 for the return tickets (cheapest I can get for weekends).

I guess it has been quite awhile since I last visited Newcastle. You might ask why Newcastle... again? Well, there are lots of memories in Newcastle itself from happy moments to unforgettable ones.

I shall start from the reason why I was in Newcastle. I was there for my honours degree in Computing Science. That was like a couple of years back. Makes me feel older now :( Perhaps wiser too :D

So, here I am with Stuart and Susan (a shot taken inside the compound of University of newcastle upon Tyne which now known as University of Newcastle).
Stuart is my dad's lecturer in University of Coventry many many years back and Susan is his beloved wife. Could you imagine my dad was still in touch with his lecturer and now its my turn! What about my kids? :P



Here are some of me and my friends, mostly of us are from the software field, twinning from Taylors College, Malaysia. Whereas, Saik Yuan (the girl holding few bouquet of flowers, in fact hugging) is the only Chemical Engineering grad in our group.



After you have graduated, obviously you will hope that you could reach higher... one day..some day...or maybe never?
So, we decided to give it a try by jumping higher (some say that might bright us luck in our job hunting LOL)... and unfortunately Patrick came in and interrupt us.
*So far none of us are unemployed* haha



So after paying so much for my degree in the UK and did some jumps on the land of British, all I got was a piece of paper. Wow... this piece of thin paper cost me so much I guess I have to frame it up like Mona Lisa's painting.

Here is my degree certificate (year 2006).
*hey no forging please, get your own! LOL*


I guess that's enough about my graduation story for now. I'll blog more about that in the future post.

So, what's in Newcastle? There are nice sceneries, great night life, the locals in Newcastle use Geordie accent(wanna learn more about Geordie? Try the English to Geordie translator). Its basically a mixture of Scottish and English accent.



This is the Millennium Bridge of Newcastle. One of the main attractions too.
Maybe you can try to search for some youtube videos to see how this bridge tilts!
Its quite cool.



So what happens when it comes to our festive seasons?
Well, being abroad its quite hard to have the holidays and festivals that you used to have in your own country. For example, Chinese New Year, Mid Autumn Festival, Hari Raya, etc.
So what can you do?

Gather with a few friends and have a potluck dinner, pub crawl, get yourself drunk, basically anything you can think of.

So here we go... Chinese New Year 2007, the year of pig (notice the couple pigs on the wall?)
Everyone is supposed to bring or cook something.



I cooked braised pork belly with yam ("wu tao kao yuk" in Cantonese). The outcome was quite alright I think =P That was my first time cooking that dish after my mom taught me :)



That's it for now, ain't those wonderful memories? So I'll be going back there again to maybe meet up some friends and of course shoot more photos. Enjoy!