Hello, welcome back to the podcast. How is everyone doing? I hope everyone is doing well. This episode is a bit of a spontaneous one, because I really should not be recording and editing a podcast episode right now, because can you believe it? It's revision season again.

Today, as I'm recording this, it's the end of April 16th and my first exam is in four days. That is, that is mad. Yeah, so my first exam is next Monday, and then my second and third exams are on Wednesday and Thursday.

And after that, I'll be done for our course, at least for our I'm not speaking of Oxford in general. We have exams at the start of the next term. So we have Trinity term, which is the last term of the year coming.

And we're being tested for the content that we learned in the previous term, which is Hillary term. Anyway, so this episode is to tell you what I've been up to, where I am now. I want to briefly divide it into two parts.

A few weeks ago, I went to America, East Coast, with my choir on a choir tour for 11 days. And it's a very fun trip. I really miss it.

So I think I'm just gonna tell you about that on the first part. And then it's kind of my reflections, my thoughts, my revision status, where I am now on the second part. So here we go.

First of all, I have a very love and hate relationship with the choir. I think I will definitely make a whole episode about this after my exams of this year's my experience being in a very traditional Anglican chapel choir in Oxford. Just some background knowledge.

When we go on choir tour, it is all paid for. We don't need to pay for accommodations and flights, which I'm very grateful for. Thank you, college.

Thank you all the donors. But even so, America is still extremely expensive. It's just costing you a lot of money just by existing, just by breathing in there.

I was spending around $100 every day. I didn't even go to very fancy places. A normal milk cost around $20 to $30.

A latte is like easily $7 or $8. So yeah, it's a very expensive trip. We were there for a week and a half, and then we had three stops.

Our first stop is Washington DC. I've never been to DC before. I've been to America around three years ago now, and I've only been to NYC.

So DC is completely new for me. I actually really, really like DC. I think it's definitely the safest and most walkable cities out of the three stops that we had.

I was hitting museums every single day. In case you don't know, in DC they had this Smithsonian Museum, which is completely free. I really like the Space Museum because I think I've had that phase of wanting to be an astronaut.

I had this phase of reading books about space when I was in primary school. Being able to see the Wright Brothers aircraft is super cool. Also they have all this Apollos something-somethings, like all the things that you used to learn on history.

Yeah, it's just a very cool place. I recommend it. I also briefly popped in the Crafts Museum and the Native American Museum, which I wish I had more time because when we were in DC we were mostly free in the mornings, but then for afternoons usually we have rehearsals, we had concerts in the evenings, or we had services to sing.

Yeah, we pretty much only had mornings free, but I was very proud of what we did in DC. Also walked around the capital area, the National Mall. It is very concentrated in one place, so the Congress is there, the White House is there, Lincoln's Memorial, and the famous Washington DC Monument.

So cool. I feel like I'm lacking words to describe it. It's a very cool place.

It kind of reminds me of Beijing for a bit, because of how wide the roads are, how spacious and grandiose everything feels. Also very historical, it's very nicely laid out, convenient to get around. I think, yeah, it's definitely giving me the big country capital vibes, and also being very cultural.

Yeah, that's probably the most cultural days throughout the entire tour, just because I was going to so many museums, and I feel like I'm taking on knowledge every day. I was also really intrigued by the American History Museum. Fun facts about me is that I'm actually really into war history, so I really liked the history of World Wars I and II, Cold War as well.