TIFF has a magical way of waking up the city and keeping it alive with buzz for 10 days straight. There are screenings happening everywhere across the city followed by celeb-filled parties until 4am in the morning. They make a really good use of different theatres at unique venues; some of my favourites include Ryerson Theatre and Elgin Theatre. I’ve been really lucky this season to score tickets to a few screenings. So far, I’ve been able to watch Your Sister’s Sister (thank you @womenspost) and with much thanks to @Torontoist, I’ve seen Life Without Principle, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, have tickets to the upcoming Violet & Daisy, and ending the week off with Tyrannosaur. I have to say a big thank you to Torontoist for sending extra tickets over along with priority passes to their VISA lounge after dealing with a less than pleasant situation when trying to pick up my tickets the first time around. Needless to say, they’ve got themselves a happy camper

I’ve also got to count and thank my lucky stars this week (and perhaps pick up a lotto ticket or two), as I found out I won the Drake Hotel – Chinatown photography contest! Since coming back from China, I submitted a photo from my vacation and luckily my shot was chosen out of the pile of submissions! I decided to take my friend out on a VIP experience tonight to celebrate her upcoming birthday, and also because she’s never been to TIFF before. We started the night with a fancy schmancy dinner to experience Drake’s Chinatown. While the prices are a bit more on the upper scale, the experience and the food is so worth it! You can see pictures below of some of the dishes we ordered. This Chinatown menu will only be available until November 18th so hopefully you’ll get the chance to go out there and try it! Menu can be found online here.

As soon as we finished our delicious dinner, we headed on over to Elgin Theatre to catch the world premiere of Jeff, Who Lives at Home. For TIFF, it’s typical that you wait in line for at least 1 hr to 1.5 hrs before the showtime. It was awesome because we got there 15 minutes before the showtime, and were instantly granted line by pass with our priority access cards and got amazing seats in the reserved section. Not too shabby for a Wednesday night! …. alright, who am I kidding – it was an AMAZING night out. Thank you Torontoist and Drake for making this night possible!

]]> http://www.christinelu.ca/2011/09/842/feed/ 0 http://www.christinelu.ca/2011/08/thirsty-thursdays/ http://www.christinelu.ca/2011/08/thirsty-thursdays/#comments Fri, 12 Aug 2011 05:34:52 +0000 Christine http://www.christinelu.ca/?p=746

Enjoyed a really relaxing night out starting with a massage followed by dinner planned last-minute with most of my girls. Was really nice to be able to see everyone before I head off to the motherland. Gotta love summer nights on the patio, catching up on what’s happening in everyone’s lives. Definitely a night that was much needed in the midst of a busy week. So many big milestones are coming up! With friends and family members moving away to places like New York, Hong Kong and Nova Scotia for more schooling, makes me wonder what my next big step is going to be.

With Trip to China wrapping up in September – October, I have every intention to take a break from my extracurriculars and just focus on work and life….. who am I kidding?! Anyone who knows me will know that’s going to be a pretty impossible feat. And of course, there are already a few opportunities that have come out of nowhere, including a few speaking gigs in the industry, as well a chance to dip my feet into the world of fashion and helping out a good friend by volunteering to organize an upcoming event. It never ends .. and that’s the way I like it, uh huh uh huh

“Life is only worth a damn because it’s short. It’s designed to be consumed, used, spent, lived, felt. We’re supposed to fill it with every mistake and miracle we can manage, and then we’re supposed to let go.”

- Pierce’s mother on Community, “The Psychology of Letting Go”.

Absolutely love this quote. Puts life in an interesting perspective when you think of it as filling it with mistakes and miracles. So often you stop yourself from saying what you truly feel, doing what you would absolutely love to do – and for what? You put yourself in this box and hold yourself back because you tell yourself that’s something you should do. There is no right or wrong in life. You can go through your whole life with walls put up all around you, to protect yourself from falling or failing, afraid to venture away from what you are comfortable with. But with those walls, you also block out the exceptional that can happen to you. There’s something quite beautiful in the saying that “You gotta give a little, to get a little”. It’s only when you let go of the boundaries you’ve set up for yourself, that you open yourself up for the next great thing.

Enjoying a quiet night in, I was watching one of my favourite guilty pleasures when they said a quote that really stood out to me:

“You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.” – Joseph Campbell

I’m definitely someone who takes pride in planning everything to a tee, and it’s naturally what I do in my everyday job and volunteer work on the side. In order to do something well or pull off a great event, there’s months of planning every single detail that goes into the back end. Even when it comes to friends’ birthdays or weekend activities, I jump on every single chance to bring people together and bask in the happiness of making other people happy. Even though sometimes the stress of it all can get the better of me, I still keep coming back for more. I no longer fight it; it’s just what I do.

But hearing that quote, really made me pause and think for a second. After some googling, I came across a really well-written blog post that just drove the message home. The author of the blog supported this quote with 3 reasons why you shouldn’t let plans take over your life. Simply put, they were:

1. Plans replace meaning. - Focusing too much on the detail takes you away from seeing the bigger picture.

2. Life doesn’t go to plan. - You can have all of the life plans and goals as you want to drive you forward in your life and career, but you need to be flexible to change up the game plan if you need to.

3.  You grow by letting things go. – This was the point that resonated with me the most, and for that, I am sharing with you exactly what they’ve written as it would not do it any justice if I tried to paraphrase into my own words.

“What you want now might not be what you want next year.  And I very much doubt it’ll be exactly what you want ten years from now, or even five years from now.

Hearing what’s next in your life can be impossible when all you can hear is the hum from the plans you’ve made.

It’s easy to miss an intriguing, hidden path when your eyes are fixed on the map you drew before you left home.

Sometimes you gotta add things to your life to move it forwards, but other times it’s what you remove that allows your life to take shape.  Letting go not only frees you up from your out-dated assumptions and rules, but it gives you strong, undeniable evidence of your ability to learn and grow.

It’s by letting go that you get the best shot at the life you really want.“

This speaks volumes to me and reminds me that letting go or changing paths once in a while is okay. Sometimes life moves so fast and quickly around us that we don’t have a second to step back to just spend some time on our own, to be alone with our thoughts. There’s always going to be something that needs to get done, something that needs your attention, but more and more I’m beginning to realize that I need to pay attention to myself too. Been having a bit of an off-day and couldn’t really put my finger onto why that was. I still don’t really know, but know that it’s just one of those nights I need to chill and be on my own.

Thanks for reading.

Was totally taken back with the amazing sunshine and weather we’ve been having these past two days. Getting off shortly after 5pm felt like I was leaving the office at around noon. Can’t wait to start switching up the seasons in my closet and packing away the winter jackets! Even muimui (pictured above) was enjoying herself, frolicking in our park downstairs. Let’s hope the sunshine is here to stay for awhile