Went to a pub last night - probably only the second time since I came back to York for my PhD (yea, I know its a bit pathetic in a city which boasts of having 365 pubs - one for each day of the year!) - but I had good reasons, before July last year, being a non-smoker, I hated going to pubs because of the smoke. I couldn’t risk going to pub for a drink and puking all over the smokers in there! And then the disgusting smoky smell you get on your clothes when you come back from the smoke-filled-pub afterwards would make me puke again!! Yuck!
Then for the second half of last year after the smoking ban in England (in public spaces!) I was in Ghana, again most of the time trying to dodge smokes coming my way - everybody seemed to smoke there!! Having been to a smoke-free pub now, I quite liked it! So may be I should get a bit adventurous and census the York pubs - one a day!! Seriously? NO. Especially when I have already noticed quite a few pubs shut down - may be due to smoking ban!?! - I would imagine this 365 pubs thing to be just a myth now.
Continue reading ‘Non-smokers delight…’
Well, its an update-post for the sake of it. I am now back in York after seven months in West Africa - from +30 degrees to -3 degrees pretty much sums up my experience being back. “Reverse culture shock” is another phrase that comes to mind frequently. But its great to be back in York after all these months away. The immigration officer at Heathrow was asking me how I could call myself a full time student in the UK and spend more than half a year elsewhere! My response was that I was still a full time student while away 
Anyway, as usual I found myself lucky in that I didn’t have to struggle too much to find a temporary accommodation for the next 3-4 months here in York. I have a nice little room in what seems to be a recently refurbished student house - at walking distance from the uni, city centre, and a newly opened Morrisons (which wasn’t there when I left York at the end of May!). In fact quite a few things seem to have changed in these seven months - well, thats the impression I got. Firstly, I tried to book a GNER train to York as soon as I arrived in London, only to find that GNER was no more and that the train that I would be travelling to and from London will now be the National Express East Coast. The familiar colours of the GNER trains were all replaced by dull grey of the new operator. At least they should have kept the nice colours if not the name!!! Can’t complain about the free wireless on the train though, although my laptop wasn’t working so couldn’t make use of it 
Well, other than that, lots of new developments everywhere in York, not just the Morrisons that I go to but also lots at UoY and elsewhere in the city.
Oh, here comes the sub-standard kit kat that I saw on the kitchen table in my “new” house!
And a close-up of the small prints!
These goods are sub-standard, sold for household consumption only and must not be re-sold.
Then why sell them in the first place if they can’t be “sold” again!!
So thats the story of my new abode and the sub-standard kit kats!!
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Another quick update, more on my whereabouts than anything else. This weekend I’m in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. I don’t know if I can reasonably justify travelling to Ouagadougou for the weekend while I’m supposed to be carrying out my household surveys in Ghana, but I do have a couple of good reasons, or so I believe.
First reason is that I have actually completed household surveys at one of the sites and needed to take a break. A weekend-off sounded like a good idea (what an irony here though, as weekends are supposed to be taken off anyway!) when my friends in Tamale said they were driving up to Ouaga for the weekend, and whether I would be interested in “coming along”. I did need some pursuading by my friends, but not that much to be honest. I think I really needed a “breather” from the work in Ghana, and what better option there could be for going away to take a breather than coming to the capital of a Francophone country!?! Good food, nice music, good-looking and well-dressed women, and lots to do if I was up for the night-outs, and so on. Well, I think I can justify this trip, don’t you? Continue reading ‘Taking a breather, in Ouagadougou…’
copylefT 2008
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