Back to Work

Just a quick post to keep track of things. The past 2 weeks have been nothing short of hectic. After coming back from the eastern europe trip (which i haven't even finished blogging about) and returning to the home we had in copenhagen, it was a mad 5 days of trying to sightsee around the beautiful city i was gonna leave. saying goodbye was hard, and it warrants another post altogether - a reflection of the last 5 months. streets and places were just becoming all too familiar, and new friendships were just being cemented, but time whisks us all away. the sense of reluctance was eased by the rush of packing up and trying to squeeze my danish life into 40kg, and then move to the uk and turn into a londoner for the next 2.5 months. packing was a nightmare, and getting them to the cph airport, past the baggage check-in, out of gawick airport, onto the super-backward-tube-with-neverending-flights-of-stairs-with-no-escalators-or-lifts was nothing short of a miracle, which i will probably never find the time to record down in writing.

jetted off to italy for a week and a day with mummy, sharon and david, and then came another round of goodbyes and another luggage-packing and airport-going fiasco. had a day and a half to settle into my new place, and before i knew it, i was thrown into the cycle of waking up early in the morning and getting to work.

today was my 4th day of work. today i managed to get to work in 20 minutes, but i wasn't so fortunate on the 1st day. i woke up extra early to get ready and aimed to be at canary wharf early. it was good thing, because i got so lost in the sea of tall buildings (relative to copenhagen, every building is tall). the map i had consulted before i left the house clearly marked out the building very close to the DLR (Docklands Light Railway - think LRT). Instead, i walked halfway across canary wharf (think raffles place) and landed up at the doorstep of morgan stanley. oops, wrong bank, and the security guy pointed me in the wrong direction too... grrr. it was a bad start, but things picked up after that after i made it there on time, went through the registration process feeling so foreign and attended the induction, which made me feel a lot more comfortable because everything seemed vaguely familiar.

met my bosses, who both seemed very nice, but it was another familiar person that made me feel the most welcome. one of the directors who was at the assessment centre in february, who also happened to be the same one who had called me up, recognised me instantly, and was so unbelievably friendly and helpful. He even emailed me to check if i was ok, and if i needed help, and if i knew anyone else in London. All those emails really made the 1st day a lot less scary. He also brought me around to meet some people and allowed me to sit in for a briefing he was giving another junior guy about an overview of the whole department. It also helped that the people sitting around me are really friendly as well. E, an Australian chinese showed me the staff restaurant and even offered to let me use her card to buy food since I didn't have one yet. Also met my buddy, Amee, a Kenyan Indian, for lunch, and she was really nice too. Thank God for such a great start in terms of fitting in.

Work-wise, well, i've not been using my brain much the last semester, in the financial sense, and so i'm pretty rusty about all these company analysis things. Been trying to catch up but reading up but i've a long long way to go in terms of things to do. started a bit on real work, so i'm glad for that. but you know what's the most awesome thing? i got to leave at like 5 plus for most of the days except today. they are really flexible with time i think, my boss comes in at 740 and leaves at 5pm. her boss keeps coming round and telling Amee and me to go home early since we just started. yay, i hope that if i'm efficient enough i won't have to stay at office till too late everyday...!

time flies, as usual. tomorrow's friday! besides having to meet my boss at 8.30am tomm, i've a whole week of training next week to look forward to, and meeting other people my age. there are like 200 interns, it's madness. and i really hope i don't come across as too stupid or something, if not i'm gonna leave people thinking that singaporeans are really silly. heh... or at least the only one from a singapore university. it's quite paiseh when i look at the directory of names in the intern handbook... amidst all the branded UK and european schools, there's a single 'Sin.ga.pore Mg.mt Uni.ver.si.ty'. maybe they'll despise me. we'll see... for now, i just have to worry about what i'm gonna do over the weekend. David's camping somewhere up north in the country - lake district. he's still on holiday and travelling, i'm jealous already! i really dunno how the past 5 months just evaporated... i need to do a channelnewsasia-style 'reporting' of my activities, just to make sure that at the end of it i know where all the time went.

ambitions, ambitions.

this is carol, news on the move, london.