Another lovely but FREEZING day in a lovely city of London here!

Today’s my brother’s last day of his first ever semester at Royal College of Art where he’s studying Design Engineering Innovation, and he and his peers presented their projects (a chair) today. He kindly invited me to sit in and I had an amazing opportunity to do so.

I actually kind of woke up late so I had to wait until the next tea break as not to disturb the crit and I thought I’d make a nice lunch for him and a few of his close friends who all have been working non-stop. I decided to make Italian meatball hero sandwiches and went to Tesco to get the ingredients. However, I had such a hard time finding Sweet Italian sausages, actually any sausages that aren’t English. I had to settle with Pork with sweet chili sausages, which sort of went with my plan to make the meatballs kind of spicy. The sandwiches had pretty positive responses in general, (who doesn’t like mozzarella melted on top of meatballs?) but it was a bit too sweet for my taste—when Tesco says sweet chili, it apparently means sweet chili, not sweet chili. I do commend English supermarkets for stocking a decent selection of mozzarella and bufala though! Also, English apple juices are the BEST. I am talking about the cloudy, murky and residues at the bottom of the bottle kind of apple juice. Mmm.

A few notes on the crit: It was pretty looooong, I’ve only attended it from 2pm to 6:30pm with 2 short breaks in between. I thought everyone did such a great job overall. What was particularly interesting was how much the class seemed to value and encourage experiments and innovations. It is particularly interesting knowing everyone has a certain area of expertise coming into the program. Some are more like a mechanical engineer, some are more an industrial designer, some like a carpenter and some like a sculptor. Seemed like the students were given a chance to really try something they had never tried before, like mechanical engineers dipping their hands in upholstery and so on. I was reminded to push myself out of my comfort zone—which was seriously a priceless lesson for a young designer—and also how great being in school can be.

Now my brother, his flatmates are frying up some Sam-gyeop-sal to celebrate their successful first term and really, surviving and thriving in a big city that can be quite intimidating. My hat’s off to them, and I’m joining them, because I am hungry.