Going to update the the details of the past 3 days later, but just wanted to talk a bit about my experience today and my reflections on it. First, I realized that sleeping late is something that I just don’t want to do — not based on something that someone told me, or that I should be doing but I don’t want to do. It’s just something that I don’t want to do, from the bottom of my heart. Especially given my recent trend of being on time for things, and leaving enough time for random shit to happen (which always happens to me), sleep is a hugely important part of that. Definitely will sleep early from now on. The second part of what happened is I got up, and checked the LNER app and website to see if my train had been canceled because of Storm Dennis. It was so fucking unintuitive, I was looking for my route on the website and I didn’t even exist really, and it gave absolutely no indication of what I should actually do to check out my route. What’s more, on the app, it didn’t indicate clearly (at all) that there were two trains that I was supposed to take, and there was no directly line going from Edinburgh to Liverpool. I also don’t think it would have been too hard to code up whether your journey has been cancelled directly in the app — granted, perhaps they are already doing this, and since my train wasn’t actually canceled (and the time it was, @mulan booked the tickets) I didn’t notice anything wrong. However, something still remains to be said about the lack of clarity and unintuitiveness of the entire railway system. In fact, pretty much the good thing about the trains from what I’ve observed are the trains themselves (granted, it’s a pretty big benefit to have). Because I was checking and looking up all these things, I wasn’t able to shower, and I got delayed from when I was supposed to leave. Then the third complication happened — the stop I was supposed to get off on was closed, and the driver didn’t make it clear or obvious (or published anywhere at all). I thus got off on this stop on the Leith St thing, and had to run back to Prince’s street to the Waverley Station entrance. Then finally, the fourth complication — I had to look for the ticket machines which were somewhat difficult to find, and I found out my train was on platform 8, which was the only platform in the whole station which was on a completely different leve/side than the rest of them, requiring a special lift which I had to run around and go scrambling to find. Finally, I was able to find my train, and after bolting in on the first-class side, went from car to car to car until I finally found the car that my seat was in, and sat down. I’m writing this part of the journal from there right now. Pretty wild journey.
After I got to Liverpool, hung out with Nivedit! Walked around with him, got food at this pub (pretty good food), and just talked with him. He’s also studying computer science at Liverpool, doing SQL stuff in his job where he’s working the whole year (taking a gap year from school). It was interesting to see how damn callous he was with money, spending money on so much random shit including cigarettes, lighters, chips, so many uber rides that we didn’t really need to take, pool, train tickets, whatever. It was insaneee. It was cool hanging out with him though, and his friends, tal, dawood and the rest. We played Jackbox a lot and they really liked it, we also played this racing game on the playstation, and they also played this wrestling game. It’s interesting to to think how much of their lives are potato mode, so much more than me and I thought I was being potato, but literally all they do is eat junk, smoke, say they’re working but not really work. I don’t know how accurate a description that was of their lives, and maybe they do work when they need to, but from the impression I got, none of them really work too legit. I wonder if that is brown boy lifestyle in the UK. They were very nice and friendly though, and they seemed pretty happy with sleeping at 6am or whatever and just hanging out in the house and smoking and chilling. I guess the complete lack of ambition might be because of that to some extent. Me and nivedit went to eat at Zizzi’s and it was pretty good food, and then we went bowling but it was so expensive so we just played pool. Got back, played the games I mentioned, and then went to sleep, pretty late.
uid: 202002150000 tags: #journal #edinburgh