Nottingham Games

This happened last weekend on Saturday where it is an annual event in which Malaysian students from all over UK descend upon Nottingham University for a day of sport competition with each other. Within one morning, Nottingham is transformed into a mini Malaysian village with Malaysians walking everywhere and it suddenly feels like home out of a sudden. For our contingent in Leeds, we were supposed to meet up at Parkinson's steps at 4.30am in the morning for the bus since we need to reach there by 8am. The buses are double deckers and the seats are not easy to sleep on for those of us that are trying to catch up on lost sleep. All was well until when we are about 5 minutes away from the Nottingham University campus when the bus suddenly had a water leak and this caused the engine to overheat. Apparently, something like this happened last year too and it looks set to repeat itself this time. So, we ended up waiting at the bus until the 2nd bus following behind drops off its passengers and return back for us.

Well, I'm representing Leeds for Scrabble(if that even counts as a sport..lol) and with all the delays and "Malaysian time", we only get started at about an hour later from the scheduled time. The first round was actually a qualifying one and we had 4 players competing for two spots. We had one Cambridge student at our table but I managed to make it to the next round. The next round proved to be super fatal as I was matched up against quite a pro player from UCL. By the 4th round, he chalked up 53 points with just 2 tiles. It still looks possible for a comeback until sometime later when he dealt a death blow by putting a Bingo (all 7 tiles) with the word "antired" and "amen" at the triple word stretch - 86 points at one go. GG. At that point, it's just sooo miserable to continue because he's like literally torturing me with the gap and to make matters worse, I kept getting vowels for all my tiles. Anyways, I found out later that even the Cambridge student got defeated by the UCL guy. That's how pro that fella is.

With my exit at second round, I have all the free time that I want to explore around and watch the other games in progress. There was also a food fair for all the Malaysian food that we crave for like Nasi Lemak and Rendang. It's quite overpriced though if compared to Malaysia and I assume the sellers earn tremendous profits from these. After getting bored looking at the gamess, I went to the city center with a couple of my coursemates to see what they have down there. Apparently the taxis in Nottingham look different from those in Leeds and they have electric trams passing through the city just like San Francisco! We had dinner at Yates before heading back to the university campus to wait for a bus to return us back to Leeds. Overall, it's a long day but I got to meet up with some of the other Inti people that are distributed in the other parts of the UK.