#also it would leave a good impression on my prof if i attend this visit

[gimmeacupcake]

Ok so apparently tomorrow morning some croatian students will come visit our institute and I'm torn on whether I should go see them. While it does actually sound fun to meet them and maybe do some interpreting exercises in the booths together I haven't been sleeping well the past few nights and I don't wanna get up any earlier than absolutely necessary lmao

[thatgirlwhoworksforwhatshew-blog]

dream 2152020

dont remember the exact pattern of the dream. but it starts with me and a stranger(girl)  waiting outside miranda hostel gate(similar looking set), early in the morning claiming to be waiting for our respective friends. after a long wait, when we were denied entry inside, (for unknown reasons), so we decide to wait for the Friends to step out , and since we dont know phones? we just decide to pass our time talking to each other. she asks me about myself, and apparently im studying law. and have high dreams, and great responsibility and family burden since they are all from the same bg. we laugh at some lame jokes we made about family to easen up the situation. and she tells me shes an arts student. clearly intriguing me, and she tells me more about art history and i spill my passion for it, but how i had to cut it down for dedication towards law. shift to intense class, where it pretty much looks like an am-phi theater looking really rich classroom, with polished wooden interiors, and nearly everyone looked and spoke brit. i answer questions in the class, and none other seems to even care what the prof is asking or saying, until this one dude, also english looking somewhat grows to become my competition in class. we later somehow meet up and talk in the library, we study together in the lawns, discuss and have heated debates, which i no longer remember the content of,and just basically spend most of the time together. there were changes in the semesters, where we took different courses, so we used to club our notes and discuss them, which is something im just not over at- its beautiful. i remember us meeting , as we walk from opposite sides of the floor, which was semi circular, in the middle, and walk down the stairs to go to the canteens. it was such a beautiful scene, i cant get over it. but something strange happens,, we suddenly stop talking, and i have made alot of visits to his place, where in he basically shuts me off saying "i let him down" and "he dosnt trust me" which made sense to dream-bindu, but irl-bindu dosnt remember the context of any of it. she makes way to his hostel everyday hoping this try would get them back together, but one day, his supposedly best friend opens the door instead of him, and tells me he is gone for good, because he could not stand being 'dead inside' and i was a constant reminder of everything bad in his life, so he basically left. gone. poof. well i did the next best thing, cry everyday in all the places we spent time in, over bet my self into studies, because i still had this haunting on me, and basically had no life except for acing the exams. i declined offers and dint attend classes, just built myself a fort of books and lived in it, give the exmas, and get done. there were few scenes of a depressed looking bindu back at her home, where again she looks dis=interested in dinner conversations with her family, which was now a large family, and was again not in my home setting. it was a posh setting, and clearly irritated irl-bindu, and dream bindu was not impressed by anything, let alone this. she had a huge room, big windows, and she played records as she sat down near the window, lost. (parellel to me sitting near my window irl) and she has no diversion unlike her time at the university. so she writes her pain away, everyday every time, shes found with this jounal type brown book, and after a point gives it up as she realises its better he be left alone, as she dosnt want to be a reminder of of anything but beautiful memories, hence decides to give him the space he deserves. although practically she did give it, it was not until now that she freed herself from the thoughts of him, laced with guilt and hope. she returns to the campus, theres this one shot with a voice over, of the new subjects i choose for this term, which i sounded excited for, and as i am climbing up the stairs of the library's last floor- (i know it because it is miranda house library) i get a glimpse of him, who looks at me at the very second and turns his head away to his side, avoiding me. and the voice over goes, "sometimes normal is troubling" and an odd bell rings, and i am now bought back to the miranda hostel gate looking scene with the girl, guessiing i narrated the entire story to her, and she just hugs me before leaving with her friend. and i sit there waiting, still.

[gyrlversion]

Queen and Kate Middleton arrive for joint engagement in London

The Queen and the Duchess of Cambridge carried out their first ever joint engagement. 

Kate, 37, and the Queen, 92, shared a blanket in the back of the car as they pulled up at King’s College London, where they reopened Grade II-listed Bush House.

The Duchess was elegant in a grey Catherine Walker coat, believed to be a new bespoke addition to her wardrobe, which she teamed with her new favourite £510 Gianvito Rossi block heels and a black Mulberry clutch. 

In a rare move for such an outing, Kate, 37, completed her outfit with a hat, which is likely to be a sign of respect to the monarch. It is the same hat she wore when out with the Queen in Leicester in 2012.

Meanwhile the Queen, 92, plumped for a rose pink cashmere coat by Stewart Parvin and matching Rachel Trevor-Morgan hat with beautiful floral detailing at the brim.

Although they have carried out a handful of public visits with other members of the Royal Family, it was the first time that they have been on one together in public, outside of Buckingham Palace.  

In 2012 the pair visited Leicester as part of the Diamond Jubilee tour but were joined by the Duke of Edinburgh. However they did make individual stops on the schedule without him, including watching a student fashion show. 

Scroll down for videos

The Queen smiled warmly at the Duchess of Cambridge following a brief ceremony to officially open Bush House on Tuesday

The Duchess of Cambridge carried a bouquet of pink, white and orange blooms, left and right, as she left Bush House

The Queen and the Duchess of Cambridge shared a blanket as they arrived at King’s College London in the back of a car

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Outside on the terrace which overlooked central London, left, Kate and the Queen both remarked on the ‘impressive’ view

The Queen unveiled a plaque marking the official opening of Bush House, King’s College London, today

The Duchess and the Queen both donned hats for the occasion, left, although Kate had to readjust on the blustery roof, right

The Duchess of Cambridge remained by the Queen’s side as she officially opened Bush House on Tuesday 

The outing took place in March, shortly before William and Kate’s first wedding anniversary. 

Later that year the Duchess of Cambridge joined the Queen at Fortnum & Mason for an event launching a military initiative, where they were joined by the Duchess of Cornwall. 

Today the Queen and the Duchess of Cambridge appeared in excellent spirits as they arrived at Bush House, which previously served as the headquarters for BBC World Service but is being leased by King’s College London. 

It marks the newest building as part of the university’s Strand Campus. 

Kate and the Queen could be seen sitting with a blue blanket over their laps as they arrived in the back of a car. 

The Queen and the Duchess of Cambridge have arrived at King’s College London for a joint engagement

The Duchess of Cambridge received a beautiful bouquet of flowers as she left King’s College London following the outing

The Duchess of Cambridge waved as she followed the Queen out of Bush House, King’s College London, today

The Queen perfectly matched her outfit with her pink sapphire and diamond surround brooch, as seen on her coat

The Queen and the Duchess of Cambridge spent roughly an hour at Bush House before leaving, pictured 

There was much fanfare, with well-wishers crowding outside the gates to the building and some even standing on bollards in the hope of getting a better glimpse of the royals. 

Following royal protocol, Kate waited for the Queen to leave the car before exiting the vehicle herself. She continued to walk behind the monarch as they made their way into the building. 

The royals were greeted by Lord Christopher Geidt, chairman of King’s and former private secretary to the Queen, her most senior advisor.

He was ousted in a palace coup two years ago but remains close to the monarch. 

They were taken up to the eighth floor where they met donors, supporters and old alumni of the university who had contributed to transform the former BBC World Service at Bush House to a new faculty. 

The Duchess of Cambridge looked elegant in a Catherine Walker coat, black hat and black heels for the outing

Following protocol, the Duchess of Cambridge walked behind the Queen as they made their way into Bush House

The Queen and the Duchess of Cambridge appeared in excellent spirits and smiled as they arrived at Bush House

The Queen brought a splash of colour to proceedings in her pink coat and waved to royal well-wishers as she arrived

The Queen smiled as she stepped out of the car, dressed in a coat by Stewart Parvin and matching Rachel Trevor-Morgan hat

The Queen and the Duchess of Cambridge were given a warm welcome as they arrived at King’s College London today

The Duchess of Cambridge and the Queen will be given a tour of some of the facilities of Bush House during the engagement

The Duchess of Cambridge smiled as she stepped out of the car, while the Queen turned her attention to the well-wishers 

A crowd gathered to watch the royals drive through the gates into the campus of Bush House, pictured 

Outside on the terrace which overlooked central London, Kate and the Queen both remarked on the ‘impressive’ view. 

Meeting a group of builders, Kate said: ‘Do you all still get on? What a mammoth project this was.’ 

But it was meeting staff and students from the university’s robotic section that really captivated the royals. Matthew Howard, head of King’s robot learning lab, said: ‘It’s a sawyer robot and it’s designed to learn skills by copying the behaviour of people.

‘The sensors can be built into clothing and can pick up muscle activity as they can be made with metallic thread. It picks up the EMG muscle activity and transmits it to the robot and tries to copy what the person is doing. 

‘Sam was moving his hands so the robot moved its hand. The Duchess grabbed the hand and then Sam tensed his hand so it felt like a handshake.’

As she shook the robotic hand, Kate giggled and said: ‘Very nice to meet you!’. When it gripped her hand back, she laughed and said: ‘So strange’. 

The Duchess of Cambridge followed royal protocol by waiting for the Queen to leave the car before exiting herself 

The Duchess of Cambridge stepped out in one of her favourite shapes of coat as she joined the Queen in London today

The Duchess of Cambridge wore her new favourite Gianvito Rossi block heels and carried a Mulberry clutch 

The Queen’s Rachel Trevor-Morgan features beautiful floral detailing, left and right, which was on display as she arrived 

The Queen and the Duchess of Cambridge were greeted outside Bush House, the latest edition to the Strand Campus

The Duchess of Cambridge brought a more formal take to her outfit with a hat, which she wouldn’t typically wear on such an outing

The Duchess of Cambridge wore her long brunette locks in soft waves for the outing with the Queen in London today

The Queen looked slightly alarmed when the hand came near her and decided not to grace it with a regal shake. 

The royals then went downstairs to meet students in the university’s special trading floor and entrepreneurship section. Kate met entrepreneur Aysha Ingar who has set up an app for Muslim women and Tobi Oredein who has set up a media platform for black women in the UK. 

Kate told Aysha and Tobi: ‘I come from an entrepreneurial background and my parents started their own business so I’m all for it. Congratulations and keep going.’ 

Kate also met medical student Qasim Munye, 22, who has set up an app called Shortly for people who want to read short stories on the go, allowing people to choose a story that suits how much time they have to read. 

Kate said: ‘Oh that would be fantastic for the kiddies when it’s bedtime. Particularly for tired parents who want the children to go to sleep.’  

The Queen and the Duchess of Cambridge arrived at Bushy House, King’s College London, on Tuesday morning

The Queen climbed out of the car ahead of the Duchess of Cambridge, who followed respectfully behind

The royals were greeted by a crowd of well-wishers who had waited outside the building, hoping to catch a glimpse

The Duchess of Cambridge has rarely attended an engagement with the Queen without her husband the Duke of Cambridge

The Queen, patron of King’s College London, and the Duchess of Cambridge were greeted as they arrived at Bush House

Qassim, from London, said: ‘She mentioned that she thinks it would be good for her children before they go to sleep, to enable to set the time of the book.’

Mr Munye said he is now going to think about adding stories for children to the app. 

They ended their visit in the development’s new auditorium, where the Queen, who is patron of the university, unveiled a plaque, formally opening Bush House, before signing the visitor’s book alongside Kate.

Lord Geidt, who also went to King’s as a student, made a short speech and gave the Queen a gift of book of royal photographs. 

King’s Principal Prof Edward Byrne said: ‘It’s a huge honour to have Her Majesty and Her Royal Highness here. The University was founded by King George IV in 1829 and has always been associated with the Royal Family since as the monarch has always been our patron. 

‘It’s a day that staff and students will remember for the rest of their lives. Both HM and HRH really enjoyed meeting students from all over the world, those who have established their own businesses through the entrepreneurship institute and those in the robotics section. 

‘The duchess has a special interest in young people and has supported some of our mental health projects at King’s.’ 

Later, Kate visited the Foundling Museum to understand how it uses art to make a positive contribution to society by engaging with vulnerable and marginalised young people.

The museum tells the history of the Foundling Hospital, the UK’s first children’s charity and public art gallery.

Kate, who visited the museum in 2017, is expected to view Bedrooms of London, a photography exhibition that documents the living conditions of London’s most disadvantaged children.

The Duchess of Cambridge joined the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on an outing to Leicester in March 2012, pictured

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[aradeacalling-blog]

Today, I accompanied my professor to Saturday English courses for university students in Sebis, a town about 50 miles northeast of Arad. Our day began at 8am with a pleasant drive through village after village in the wine region of Arad County - villages with names like Sâmbateni, Ghioroc, Cuvin, Covăsânț, Siria, Pâncota, and on towards Ineu. The vibrant summer landscapes of golden wheat and sunflower fields were replaced by a layer of snow, and a fresher layer began to lightly cover the old as we drove.

We had low expectations of student attendance - perhaps 3 or 4 students at most. We were pleasantly surprised to have 15 1st and 2nd year students of Business and Economics show up. Over the course of the hour, we discussed and dissected concepts found the TEDx video on "3 Ways to (usefully) lose control of your brand" by Tim Leberecht. Most of the students were at least 30 years of age and held a variety of professional positions in the region, both in the private and public sector. They had no shortage of insight to offer, which testified to their veritable acquired professional experience in Romania. It was markedly different compared to our weekly experiences with mostly 18-year old students, whose relatively meager experiences had given them little substantive opinions to proffer. As we spent the hours discussing the applicability of the concepts shared in the video in Romania, it was certainly a lesson where I felt like I learned more than the students.

Here were the business people, managers, and entrepreneurs of the region providing a looking-glass into Romanian workplace culture. I learned and reaffirmed several truths about the business environment here, most especially, that in Romania, small business is all about close personal relationships. Indeed, because it's all more personal, it requires a high degree of honesty and transparency, because one’s name is on the line. This works well for small businesses; however, large organizations by nature tend to be impersonal and give workers a certain degree of anonymity and license to hide or excuse their personal (morally deficient) behavior behind the mask of an impersonal institution. Personal relationships are important for larger business as well, particularly among the well-networked elites. One of the students shared their own experience of owning a car wash business. In their town, their neighbors and friends - their customers - knew them by name not by brand. When their neighbors would go to get their cars washed, they would say "Merg la Nicu si la Dinu, nu la Spalatoria ABC Srl.” - I’m going to Dinu and Nicu, not Carwash ABC Co. If they did a lousy job, their professional, and more importantly, their personal reputations were at stake.

Some of the vocalized sentiments reflected the more jaded cynicism shared by many Romanians: “Daca esti bun esti luat de prost.” Translated, that is to say that “if you are good you are taken as a simpleton.” This feeling resonates among many Romanians, who feel that hard work and being good at something simply isn’t enough to succeed. Moreover, you might end up being used and abused by your colleagues for your industriousness, and you can be seen as overzealous, officious, or even impertinent in some cases. The Romanian system of PCR still thrives (the former initials of the Communist Party, now derisively referred to as Pile, Cunostinte, si Relatii - acquaintances, relations, and intercessions), in which one can succeed in life through the people they know: to bypass bureaucratic procedures; to gain entrance to schools, workplaces, and high-level positions; etc. It ultimately affirms the power of networking for survival here. It’s not what you know, but rather who you know that will ultimately allow one to succeed. Nepotism, plagiarism, corruption all run rampant in the private and public spheres. I use the term survival specifically, because it’s the survivalist mentality that has caused Romania to remain so morally depraved from a professional perspective. 

As one student said, “The level of poverty must drop so that the level of morality can rise.” 

In a country where the minimum salary is expected to rise from 1,250 to 1,450 lei per month (from $300 to $350 dollars roughly), it’s not difficult to see why one might feel compelled to seek devious means to augment their income or simply get a leg up in life. With a survivalist mentality comes a certain degree of unprediactability: rules and laws are numerous and tedious to follow, while ethical norms are absent in organizational culture. To quote another student, “[giving people less control] might be applicable in other countries, but not in Romania. It could be so in Germany, because people are more or less standardized there,” in reference to their well-planned, structured, and orderly professional attributes. Meanwhile, Romanians tend to see less control as an invitation to shirk their work. “The Romanian mentality is the problem,” he stated.

While the students were concerned that they left me a negative impression, they assured me that they would rather have me “see things for how they are,” rather than give off a false impression. I was grateful for their open honesty, for I have witnessed enough of these truths for myself during my 5 months here so far.

Afterwards, we were endlessly entreated by Radu, a doctoral student aged around 50-some years old to come over to his place. Once we arrived, he took us straight upstairs to his office, where he had prepared a small table upon which he brought endless rounds of meats. The room was decorated with Moroccan rugs, tapestries from the Sahara hung on a wall, and books upon books sat aligned in a bookcase along the other wall, which also contained memorabilia from throughout Europe. Radu was himself was quite the character. His classic look seemed to have remained unchanged throughout the years, his angular face framed by a thick set of square glasses and a Magnum PI mustache. His words came faster than I could comprehend. He was undoubtedly brilliant: having finished over 5 university degrees from civil engineering, medical school, international relations, and now history, he jumped from story to story in his life. One moment he spoke of how in 1975, he visited Napoleon’s tomb at the Dôme des Invalides, while the next, he spoke of his palinca-making escapades as a boy living in Morocco. (Note: palinca is a home-made fruit brandy typical in the Ardeal region of Romania.) Amongst other things, he hadn't eaten a piece of cake in over 20 years and runs at least 17 kilometers a day, sometimes at odd hours of the night. A few years ago, he also participated in a marathon. He noted that two things disappointed him most: firstly, that he only signed up for the 2km race rather than the 6km race, and secondly, that no one was waiting in support for him at the finish line. Radu seemed to have a lot in life, and he was eager to share to it with others. Moreover, he was especially eager to share his food with us, as he kept imploring us to eat more. When we announced that we had better get on, he jumped to ensure that we take food with us, as we had eaten a disappointingly small portion of the feast he had spread before us. Even on our way out, his 82 year old aunt chimed "nu-ii lasa sa plece" (don’t let them leave) as she packed boxes of meats and cake to take with us. Such is the old-style generous Romanian hospitality, that urges you to imbibe with food and drink until you can’t move and then sends you off with more for the road.

We started on the road toward Moneasa, a mountain resort 19km away, but the snowfall became more and more dense. Rather than risk being snowed in on the mountain, we decided to turn back towards home. On the way, we stopped at Moara cu Noroc, a large and well-known traditional restaurant in the area with an amusingly written menu in the local country slang. After another (relatively light) 3-course meal, we waddled back to the car for the journey back toward Arad. By this time, the snowfall had abated and the sun had broken through the grey, making for a most wondrous golden pink sunset, which we just had to stop and capture on the way.

There truly is no “ordinary” day here. All that to say, it was a most unexpected and wonderful day. Thank you to Profs. Cristi and Laura for making it all happen.