We set our alarms to go off at 9:30 and I remember I kept making mine be quiet cause it was super loud. A little later I realized we were still in bed and I had to potty really bad...it was the 2nd time I had had a dream about it that night. It was only 10 so I went to the bathroom and laid back in bed and waited for Morgan to wake up. She had reset her alarm for 10:30. We got up then and she took a shower and we headed out on our day of errands.
We got cash out of the ATM and walked to the metro station. We renewed our bus passes for October and then practiced using the metro since that is the only thing that runs early enough for us to get the the train station Friday morning for Disneyland!! Since we were already at the train station we got some of our tickets for the rest of October. We were very shocked that it was so freaking expensive and worried our passes were going to end up not being worth the money we spent on them. We decided we'd check the totals out when we got home. We took the bus back to the main spot of downtown and went to the bank. We have been getting all kinds of mail from them so we assumed our ATM cards would be ready for our new accounts...they give you 28 Euros in your account so we need the cards so we can use that money. The lady put in Morgan info and then told us they were behind on putting all the stuff in and that our cards wouldn't be ready for mayb 10 days. She didn't really seem like she knew what she was talking about but I guess we'll try back again later. We walked back to the bus and headed home. The lady who speaks good English was working the front desk so we bought more laundry coins so we could finish up washing our clothes before we started our crazy month of travel.
Morgan checked our tickets when we got home and the lady had gotten us 1st class tickets for on of our overnight trains...our passes aren't even valid for 1st class...and they were 94 Euros a piece. Making that trip 100 Euros and our other trip only cost us 18. We are going back down there again tomorrow after class to exchange those tickets...she said we could up until the day we depart...for either 2nd class or a different location if that train is full. We made quesadillas out of the last 2 tortillas from our taco night. We thought about some ideas for our advertising project and I ended up falling asleep on the couch with my computer on my lap for over 2 hours. When I woke up we decided we needed to start laundry. Sadly there was a lady already doing laundry when we got down there so we had to wait an hour. We came back up and messed around a little bit. Then we decided we wanted to eat the popcorn we had bought at the store so we put on the movie Stick It and ate our popcorn on the pull out couch. We stopped it half way through to go put our laundry in. After it was over we went back down and moved one of our loads into the dryer and start our jeans in the wash. We got everything put away in that load and had to head back down to switch everything over again. I chatted on facebook for a while and folded all my socks and then we finally got to go down and get our jeans out of the dryer. Everything is put away and we have clean clothes again!!!
I hoped in the shower once everything was complete for the day. Morgan was talking to Trevor on skype. After the shower I decided to make us both a mini egg sandwhich since we had forgotten we even had eggs. We topped them with a little cheese from out tacos and they were delicious. We were about to get in bed and I remembered I had written yet today so here I am. Mom I super have to tell you a couple things but I'll try to email you tomorrow when you are at work or if you can get on skype before work that would be awesome. We have a full day of last minute things tomorrow but I'll make sure to write because I do'nt know that I'll have internet of the time over the weekend at Disneyland!!!!!!
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Why do Tuesdays Last Soo Long?
Today started out very early!! I got up at 6:45 and took a shower, then got ready and ate some Cookie Crisp to make it a little better that I was up that early. We went to class and it was somewhat entertaining. In the second half...which is our smaller tutorial classes...we had a quiz that was really easy. It took everyone else forever...mostly because they didn't understand the English. The rest of class we discussed emotions and how they effect your actions in an organization. It was a really interesting dicussion. We turned in our homework for this week...which was copying the stuff we had done for last class onto a different piece of paper and our homework for next week is just to write a brief discription of what we are going to write our term paper about that is due at the end of November. After class we ate lunch and picked out a couch in the student lounge for our break between classes. I got a Pepsi out of the vending machine so I could try to stay awake during our next class. We also had a discussion about the fact that if we were in Rolla we would have to be going to the career fair today and actually looking for Real Big Girl jobs cause we'd be graduating...thats kinda scary...glad we are here not there!!
We headed up to Financial Analysis and he was over 5 minutes late...its so annoying. He started class by going over the rest of the homework he didn't finish from last time. That took over half an hour. Then he started the powerpoint he was supposed to cover last week but didn't. It was sooo boring. I made a list of the stuff I needed to pack for Disneyland and what all we had to get done tomorrow before I ended up starting to fall asleep before it was finally time for our break. I went to the bathroom and then we ate the Snickers we brought with us to try to pep us up. I got out my computer to try to entertain myself during the second half of class. I talked to mom for a little bit and then he finally started class again...30 minutes after our break started. I looked at a bunch of fun recipes on the internet and played on facebook...talking to some people as they started to get up in Rolla. Morgan just wrote down the funny stuff he said during the class...her paper was full!! He ended class 10 minutes early...which is perfectly fine with us. We packed up and headed to the grocery store. I got soda, OJ, an apple, a few bannans and we got a baguette. I had to end up getting a different apple cause the guy dropped the one I had picked out when he was checking me out.
We got home in time to watch Wizards on tv and then relaxed some. I watched Friends and they are at a really good place in the series. They are all on vacation for Ross's big speech when he is in love with the black girl Joey is dating and Rachel likes Joey. Monica's hair is crazy and Phoebe gets proposed to by Mike. This was the episode that Joey and Rachel kiss. We had chicken nuggets for dinner and experimented with the sauce we had left from out spaghetti. We cut pieces of baguette and sliced them. We heated up the sauce and put some on the bread with some shreeded cheese. It was super good...kinda tasted like an itailan version of sloopy joes. I talked to some people who were getting ready for the career fair and Morgan was watching a tv show on her computer after dinnr. I was bored and my internet was being annoying so I took a shower and washed up all the dishes we had dirty. Now we are both just trying to find something to do to entertain ourselves before bed. We are gettng up at 9:30 to try to get all of our errands accomplished on our last easy day till Noveber. I'll let ya know how that goes tomorrow!
We headed up to Financial Analysis and he was over 5 minutes late...its so annoying. He started class by going over the rest of the homework he didn't finish from last time. That took over half an hour. Then he started the powerpoint he was supposed to cover last week but didn't. It was sooo boring. I made a list of the stuff I needed to pack for Disneyland and what all we had to get done tomorrow before I ended up starting to fall asleep before it was finally time for our break. I went to the bathroom and then we ate the Snickers we brought with us to try to pep us up. I got out my computer to try to entertain myself during the second half of class. I talked to mom for a little bit and then he finally started class again...30 minutes after our break started. I looked at a bunch of fun recipes on the internet and played on facebook...talking to some people as they started to get up in Rolla. Morgan just wrote down the funny stuff he said during the class...her paper was full!! He ended class 10 minutes early...which is perfectly fine with us. We packed up and headed to the grocery store. I got soda, OJ, an apple, a few bannans and we got a baguette. I had to end up getting a different apple cause the guy dropped the one I had picked out when he was checking me out.
We got home in time to watch Wizards on tv and then relaxed some. I watched Friends and they are at a really good place in the series. They are all on vacation for Ross's big speech when he is in love with the black girl Joey is dating and Rachel likes Joey. Monica's hair is crazy and Phoebe gets proposed to by Mike. This was the episode that Joey and Rachel kiss. We had chicken nuggets for dinner and experimented with the sauce we had left from out spaghetti. We cut pieces of baguette and sliced them. We heated up the sauce and put some on the bread with some shreeded cheese. It was super good...kinda tasted like an itailan version of sloopy joes. I talked to some people who were getting ready for the career fair and Morgan was watching a tv show on her computer after dinnr. I was bored and my internet was being annoying so I took a shower and washed up all the dishes we had dirty. Now we are both just trying to find something to do to entertain ourselves before bed. We are gettng up at 9:30 to try to get all of our errands accomplished on our last easy day till Noveber. I'll let ya know how that goes tomorrow!
Monday, September 28, 2009
Poor Kid Mac & Cheese
Well I had this all typed and then it decided to delete itself...so here goes again
I laid in bed last night because I was tired of being on the internet and had nothing else to do. Morgan was sitting in her bed on the computer with the lights and the tv on. She asked if i wanted her to turn off the lights and they really weren't bothering me. I knew if my body wanted to go to sleep I would. I woke up in the middle of the night becuase I was cold...so i put on my covers and went right back to sleep. I fell asleep a little after 10 and had my alarm set for 10:15 this moring and was still tired when it went off. I got up though and got ready. I headed out to school all by myself. Morgan was going to come meet me for lunch but she doesn't have class till after that. I saw one of the Iowa girls at the bus stop and talked to her on the way to school.
My teacher was a little late again but that was ok with me cause it meant class would be shorter. She started out in French again and was talking so fast. I had no idea what was going on. I was almost in tears I was so frustrated! Finally I think she realized we weren't all understanding and she started saying a few things in English. Near the end of class she passed out a paper and had us listen to a CD which had a conversation on it. It was also on the paper so we could read along. She then had us practice the conversation with a friend. She came over to me and the other 2 Americans I was working with and helped us. She said she knew it was harder for us becuase they don't pronounce every sound like we do. That made me feel better about that class.
I met Morgan for lunch and then we hung out in the student lounge till her class. I stayed in there for what seemed like ever for my class just messing around on facebook and listening to my music. I also watched the Cram Session for season 3 of GREEK...which was pretty much a recap of all of season 2...and I am even more excited for season 3 now. I went to culture class and was bored out of my mind. That little crazy man teaches us absolutely nothing. He pretty much told us he can't teach us about culture becuase it's an individual experience and has to be learned through that. Whatever crazy man...He also talks non stop for the hour and a half we are with him.
We came home after class and Morgan washed up the dishes so we would have room to make dinner tonight. Using 3 pans for our spaghetti takes up a lot of room in our little kitchen. I did my homework for class tomorrow morning and talked to a few people on facebook. Then I decided to start dinner. We were going to try to make macaroni tonight. I boiled the noodles and then started the milk with a little butter in it. I waited till it started simmering a little. We had bought the only normal type of cheese we saw and that was cheddar...but it was in slices like for sandwhiches. I cut them into fourths and added them slowly making sure they all melted. I drained the noodles and we were ready to go. We didn't add the sauce to the noodles untill we had them in our bowls cause I wasn't sure if we had enough for the whole pan. We ate as much as we could since it wasn't something we could save and we were both stuffed. We had to rinse out the cheese sauce pan with cold water since Morgan used all the hot to wash the dishes earlier. Sadly we still dont have any hot water and I wanted to take a shower. Guess I'll be getting up even earlier in the morning before class to shower. Speaking of that...I better study a little for my quiz in the morning and then head to bed.
I laid in bed last night because I was tired of being on the internet and had nothing else to do. Morgan was sitting in her bed on the computer with the lights and the tv on. She asked if i wanted her to turn off the lights and they really weren't bothering me. I knew if my body wanted to go to sleep I would. I woke up in the middle of the night becuase I was cold...so i put on my covers and went right back to sleep. I fell asleep a little after 10 and had my alarm set for 10:15 this moring and was still tired when it went off. I got up though and got ready. I headed out to school all by myself. Morgan was going to come meet me for lunch but she doesn't have class till after that. I saw one of the Iowa girls at the bus stop and talked to her on the way to school.
My teacher was a little late again but that was ok with me cause it meant class would be shorter. She started out in French again and was talking so fast. I had no idea what was going on. I was almost in tears I was so frustrated! Finally I think she realized we weren't all understanding and she started saying a few things in English. Near the end of class she passed out a paper and had us listen to a CD which had a conversation on it. It was also on the paper so we could read along. She then had us practice the conversation with a friend. She came over to me and the other 2 Americans I was working with and helped us. She said she knew it was harder for us becuase they don't pronounce every sound like we do. That made me feel better about that class.
I met Morgan for lunch and then we hung out in the student lounge till her class. I stayed in there for what seemed like ever for my class just messing around on facebook and listening to my music. I also watched the Cram Session for season 3 of GREEK...which was pretty much a recap of all of season 2...and I am even more excited for season 3 now. I went to culture class and was bored out of my mind. That little crazy man teaches us absolutely nothing. He pretty much told us he can't teach us about culture becuase it's an individual experience and has to be learned through that. Whatever crazy man...He also talks non stop for the hour and a half we are with him.
We came home after class and Morgan washed up the dishes so we would have room to make dinner tonight. Using 3 pans for our spaghetti takes up a lot of room in our little kitchen. I did my homework for class tomorrow morning and talked to a few people on facebook. Then I decided to start dinner. We were going to try to make macaroni tonight. I boiled the noodles and then started the milk with a little butter in it. I waited till it started simmering a little. We had bought the only normal type of cheese we saw and that was cheddar...but it was in slices like for sandwhiches. I cut them into fourths and added them slowly making sure they all melted. I drained the noodles and we were ready to go. We didn't add the sauce to the noodles untill we had them in our bowls cause I wasn't sure if we had enough for the whole pan. We ate as much as we could since it wasn't something we could save and we were both stuffed. We had to rinse out the cheese sauce pan with cold water since Morgan used all the hot to wash the dishes earlier. Sadly we still dont have any hot water and I wanted to take a shower. Guess I'll be getting up even earlier in the morning before class to shower. Speaking of that...I better study a little for my quiz in the morning and then head to bed.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Relaxing Day at the Park
We set our alarms so that we wouldn't sleep away the day today. We had checked the weather and decided we wanted to go to a park today. Our alarms went off at 10 and Morgan asked for 30 more minutes cause she hadnt' fallen asleep for a long time after we got in bed last night. When the alarm went off again...I said that that 30 minutes had just made me more tired...and we woke up at noon. We are awesome at that!! We got up and each had a bowl of our amazing Cookie Crisp before getting ready and heading out to the park. I made sure to wear my Ankiel Jersey shirt...they first t-shirt I have worn since we got there I might add...since the Cardinals Clinched the NL Central last night!!!
We took the bus out to park and weren't quite sure what to expect. We had looked at it on the internet but you never know. We walked around on the trals they had laid out. We saw a pond with a ton of ducks in it...a man was riding his bike with his dog, no one keeps there dog on a leash here, and it jumped into the pond and splashed around then got back out and caught up with him. There were several diferent obstacle type things along the trail that had signs next to them about how to do the task. We decided it was kind of like a circut to perform while running or walking the trail. We played on a few of them cause they were kinda fun. Through out the park there were big grassy fields were people were playing ball, picnicing, or just enjoying the sun. When we got back to where we had started on the trail we went into the grassy area that was right there and sat down on a bench in the shade and watched some little boys playing soccer. It was hilarious. We were getting a little hungry so we headed back out and caught the bus home. We finished up our chocolate ice cream cause it was starting to get a little frost bitten and then continued to relax. Morgan was watching some show on her computer so I watched the second Dirty Dancing on mine. It's not quite as good as the first one but I like it.
Morgan jumped in the shower once our movies were over and then we started dinner. We were going to make spaghetti. I browned up the rest of our groundbeef from our tacos and added it to the sauce we had bought. I boiled some of the noodles we bought and topped it all with a little bit of the shredded cheese be had for the tacos. It made some delicious pasta. We cleaned up some of the dishes and then I took a shower. We're just kind of hanging out right now getting ready for our last regular week with no travel. I'll make sure to get the pics of our decorations and the park up tomorrow when I'm at school.
We took the bus out to park and weren't quite sure what to expect. We had looked at it on the internet but you never know. We walked around on the trals they had laid out. We saw a pond with a ton of ducks in it...a man was riding his bike with his dog, no one keeps there dog on a leash here, and it jumped into the pond and splashed around then got back out and caught up with him. There were several diferent obstacle type things along the trail that had signs next to them about how to do the task. We decided it was kind of like a circut to perform while running or walking the trail. We played on a few of them cause they were kinda fun. Through out the park there were big grassy fields were people were playing ball, picnicing, or just enjoying the sun. When we got back to where we had started on the trail we went into the grassy area that was right there and sat down on a bench in the shade and watched some little boys playing soccer. It was hilarious. We were getting a little hungry so we headed back out and caught the bus home. We finished up our chocolate ice cream cause it was starting to get a little frost bitten and then continued to relax. Morgan was watching some show on her computer so I watched the second Dirty Dancing on mine. It's not quite as good as the first one but I like it.
Morgan jumped in the shower once our movies were over and then we started dinner. We were going to make spaghetti. I browned up the rest of our groundbeef from our tacos and added it to the sauce we had bought. I boiled some of the noodles we bought and topped it all with a little bit of the shredded cheese be had for the tacos. It made some delicious pasta. We cleaned up some of the dishes and then I took a shower. We're just kind of hanging out right now getting ready for our last regular week with no travel. I'll make sure to get the pics of our decorations and the park up tomorrow when I'm at school.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
A Day of Planning
We woke up at noon today and got started on the day. I talked to mom and dad on skype for a bit before dad headed off to breakfast with grandpa and work and mom was going to Blitz day with Ms. Pam. After we ate our chocolate crosiants from the grocery store we started researching and planning for our Disneyland Trip and the rest of October. Morgan focused on Disneyland cause it's her specialty and I looked through the packets that came with our train passes as well as the internet trying to find the best deals for us. We pretty much decided we are going to go practice taking the metro to the train station...this is what we have to do to get there Friday morning so early...on Wednesday and ask about prices for the rest of the month. We have all the dates picked out for when and where we want to go we just need to finalize everything. Once it's set I'll put up a schedule so yall can know where we will be.
I went downstairs around 4 to check on my card and package mom sent me...my card was finally here but the front desk apparently closes at 1 on Saturdays and wont be open tomorrow. Guess i'll wait till Monday for my package. Maybe my other card from mom and my letter from Amy will get here then too. Morgan is also waiting for a package so hopefully we'll some presents this week. We used some of our extra tortillas and cheese to make quesidillas for dinner tonight. We also enjoyed a twix we bought at store to reward ourselves for dealing with the internet al day. Thats about all I for today...I'll write more tomorrow!!!
I went downstairs around 4 to check on my card and package mom sent me...my card was finally here but the front desk apparently closes at 1 on Saturdays and wont be open tomorrow. Guess i'll wait till Monday for my package. Maybe my other card from mom and my letter from Amy will get here then too. Morgan is also waiting for a package so hopefully we'll some presents this week. We used some of our extra tortillas and cheese to make quesidillas for dinner tonight. We also enjoyed a twix we bought at store to reward ourselves for dealing with the internet al day. Thats about all I for today...I'll write more tomorrow!!!
Friday, September 25, 2009
2 Grocery Stores and 2 Bad Buses
I could not fall asleep for anything last night. I was awake till almost 5 this morning. I couldn't fall get to sleep so I got up and grabbed my computer and watched the last 3 episodes I had downloaded from the last season of GREEK. They were amazing...I cannot wait to get to school Monday so I can download the new episodes from this season so far. Once those were done I still wasn't tired so at 3 am I grabbed my ipod touch and played games for a while cause my computer battery was dead. I finally just listened to my music and was able to fall alseep after a long while. I didn't wake up till 1 today and Morgan was laying in bed still. We got up and got a little stuff done around the apartment before we headed out to get some groceries. We went to MonoPrix because we needed a lot of stuff. We went up and down every aisle to get what we needed. We got stuff to make tacos and noodles to make Mac & cheese and spaghetti. We found really cheap chocolate granola bars that we are going to take with us on our travels for filling cheap food. We had decided to get another type of cereal since they had so many more coices and they had Cookie Crisp!!! We didn't see the milk we usually get and the baguettes didn't look very good so we decided to go to our normal grocery store after we dropped this stuff off at home.
The first bus we took from MonoPrix back to the main stop was super full and we couldn't sit much less move much at all. It was really hot and making us both claustrophobic, I also was carrying all our groceries in a bag and it was super heavy and there was no where to put it down. When we got off that bus there was a 4 bus which takes us home but we had to walk to it and we knew we wouldn't make it so we didn't rush or anything knowing another one would be there soon. For some reason though the bus didn't come for a long time. I ended up having to sit the bag down on the sidewalk while we waited. The bus did come and we were able to sit down this time. An extremely fat man got on the bus after us and ended up sitting in the seats...yes he took up more than one seat...behind us. He smelled absolutely awful!!! I had to act like I was wipping my nose on my jacket to be able to take a breath and then I heald it as long as I could. The lady he sat down by got up and moved and sat down very pissed off like in front of us. We both giggled to ourselves. Luckily he got off a few stops before us so we could all breath again.
We dropped our stuff off at home and put the cheese and ground beef in the fridge and headed back to the other grocery store. We bought milk and baguette and headed back home. We got back just in time to watch Wizards again! When we were going in and out so much though there were a ton of women in the lobby. They were all larger black women and had flower wreaths on their heads. We hung out at home after the stores and I read some more of my book. They are so interesting and I can't stop reading them. I have Morgan kind of interested as well cause I've been talking about them. About 7 I started dinner. I left a little of the ground beef for our spaghetti but browned the rest of it with the seasoning that came in the pack we bought. Morgan warmed up the shells and we set down with out little family dinner. We had salsa from our kit as well for our tacos and some shredded cheese. I must say our tacos were delicious!! We washed up the dishes after dinner and are both just sitting on our computers now waiting till it's late enough to go to bed. Hopefully tonight I can actually get to sleep. We don't really have anything to do this weekend but we are going to work on planning out Disneyland so we don't waste anytime!!
The first bus we took from MonoPrix back to the main stop was super full and we couldn't sit much less move much at all. It was really hot and making us both claustrophobic, I also was carrying all our groceries in a bag and it was super heavy and there was no where to put it down. When we got off that bus there was a 4 bus which takes us home but we had to walk to it and we knew we wouldn't make it so we didn't rush or anything knowing another one would be there soon. For some reason though the bus didn't come for a long time. I ended up having to sit the bag down on the sidewalk while we waited. The bus did come and we were able to sit down this time. An extremely fat man got on the bus after us and ended up sitting in the seats...yes he took up more than one seat...behind us. He smelled absolutely awful!!! I had to act like I was wipping my nose on my jacket to be able to take a breath and then I heald it as long as I could. The lady he sat down by got up and moved and sat down very pissed off like in front of us. We both giggled to ourselves. Luckily he got off a few stops before us so we could all breath again.
We dropped our stuff off at home and put the cheese and ground beef in the fridge and headed back to the other grocery store. We bought milk and baguette and headed back home. We got back just in time to watch Wizards again! When we were going in and out so much though there were a ton of women in the lobby. They were all larger black women and had flower wreaths on their heads. We hung out at home after the stores and I read some more of my book. They are so interesting and I can't stop reading them. I have Morgan kind of interested as well cause I've been talking about them. About 7 I started dinner. I left a little of the ground beef for our spaghetti but browned the rest of it with the seasoning that came in the pack we bought. Morgan warmed up the shells and we set down with out little family dinner. We had salsa from our kit as well for our tacos and some shredded cheese. I must say our tacos were delicious!! We washed up the dishes after dinner and are both just sitting on our computers now waiting till it's late enough to go to bed. Hopefully tonight I can actually get to sleep. We don't really have anything to do this weekend but we are going to work on planning out Disneyland so we don't waste anytime!!
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Super Cup!!
I woke up at 8:15 this morning to take a shower beore class since time got away from us last night. I got ready and ready while Morgan showered and got ready. We headed out to the bus stop...early enough so we wouldn't have to rush this week...and it was colder than we expected. Luckily the bus came real quick and we actually beat our teacher to class. We were the only ones there when he came and unlocked the door so he talked to us for a little bit. He is really nice. When classes started we discussed the article we had read about the Dueling Computers...it was discribing the Mac & PC commercials with the 2 guys. Some people hadn't seen it so he pulled it up on youtube and we watched a few of them. Then we discussed what impact the commercials had and it was pretty much him asking the American kids...there are like 4 in my class...about it cause we were the only ones who knew. When he started his powerpoint I had a really hard time staying awake but we finally got to our break and that helped a lot. After the break he asked what time the schedule said we got out and everyone in unison said 1 so he said that was fine and he would let us out at 1. The second half of class we spent in our groups...which we got a 4th group member...who won't speak...she's chinese. We had to make an advertisement in about 30 minutes for a very basic item. We chose the cup the original girl in our group had had her coffee in during the break. We took picture of it on her computer and while they were all dicussing a slogan i played with the picture in paint. I added arms, a face and a cape. He also had a recyling logo on is stomach. Our ad was about chosing our cup company for your vending machinebecuase it'e recyled plastic.Our teacher didnt' quite understand our ad but my little cup man was adorable.
After class we were trying to deicide if we wanted to eat at school or head home but we decided to check our emails first since we can't do that at home. When we got downstairs there was a ridiculus line for a table that was serving a few different things for free. We went on into the student lounge and were going to go back out when the line died back down. I looked back out later and the line had finally died down but they were also cleaning up the table. We decided to come home and have some cheese and crackers for lunch.
After lunch we messed around on the internet for a while and watched Wizards of Waverly Place on the Disney Break. At 5 when it was over we were both exhausted. I grabbed my book and wanted to read but i set my alarm for a little after 6 just in case. I ended up falling right asleep before I even opened my book. When i woke up I checked facebook then Morgan asked if I was hungry so we decided to make our chicken noodle soup. It was the tiniest noodles I have ever seen but it was good. I washed up all our dishes after dinner got back on my computer. I emailed mom a few times and we looked at halloween costumes again. We have decided we are going t have a halloween party next semester when we live in our own house...or at Beta Sig if we have to freaking move back into Chi O...so we are just trying to get some ideas while they are all over the internet. It's starting to get late though so I'm going to have a little baguette with Nutella and head to bed. We are going to the grocery store tomorrow to get stuff to make tacos and I found us a recipe for cheese sauce for Mac & Cheese so we're going to look for that stuff. We are also going to scope out what we think we can take with us to Disneyland to eat so we don't have to pay a ton of money. We get breakfast everyday but we need lunch and dinner ideas. Any suggestions are appreciated!
After class we were trying to deicide if we wanted to eat at school or head home but we decided to check our emails first since we can't do that at home. When we got downstairs there was a ridiculus line for a table that was serving a few different things for free. We went on into the student lounge and were going to go back out when the line died back down. I looked back out later and the line had finally died down but they were also cleaning up the table. We decided to come home and have some cheese and crackers for lunch.
After lunch we messed around on the internet for a while and watched Wizards of Waverly Place on the Disney Break. At 5 when it was over we were both exhausted. I grabbed my book and wanted to read but i set my alarm for a little after 6 just in case. I ended up falling right asleep before I even opened my book. When i woke up I checked facebook then Morgan asked if I was hungry so we decided to make our chicken noodle soup. It was the tiniest noodles I have ever seen but it was good. I washed up all our dishes after dinner got back on my computer. I emailed mom a few times and we looked at halloween costumes again. We have decided we are going t have a halloween party next semester when we live in our own house...or at Beta Sig if we have to freaking move back into Chi O...so we are just trying to get some ideas while they are all over the internet. It's starting to get late though so I'm going to have a little baguette with Nutella and head to bed. We are going to the grocery store tomorrow to get stuff to make tacos and I found us a recipe for cheese sauce for Mac & Cheese so we're going to look for that stuff. We are also going to scope out what we think we can take with us to Disneyland to eat so we don't have to pay a ton of money. We get breakfast everyday but we need lunch and dinner ideas. Any suggestions are appreciated!
The Day That Got Away
I realized this morning while i was brushing my teeth I had forgotten to update this yesterday. To say the least the day kinda got away from us yesterday. We had our alarm set to get up at 10 and when it went off I was still real tired and I was hoping Morgan wouldn't move around like she was waking up...she didn't...so I fell back asleep. I ended up waking up at 12:42 and she had just woken up as well. We got up, eat some food, and got ready. We headed down to the ATM to get some cash so we could buy our train tickets to Paris without having to use our cards cause the bank charges are outrageous. After visiting the ATM we were headed to the bus stop when Morgan realized her bus pass was still in her backpack. We looped back to home and got her bus pass then headed down to the train station.
We were hoping we would be able to speak with someone who spoke English and that they would be just as helpful as the people that we spoke with last time. We noticed that a few of the tellers had their signs in French as well as English which we took to mean they spoke English. When it was our turn the guy who called us's sign wasn't in English so we aksed if he spoke English. He laughed and then the guy next to him said he did and he would help us when he was finished with his customer. We only had a wait a few more minutes and he was available. He understood what we were asking for and luckily I thought about us bringing our passports because we needed them. He was able to write in the dates our month of travel began and ended as well as stamp our passes which validated them. He as also able to get us our tran tickets to Paris for next weekend. We leave at 6:10 and get to Paris at 9 and we only have to walk 30 meters to Disneyland. We also dont' have to leave Sunday untill 9:25 which means we will get 3 full days at Disneyland. Roundtrip the tickets only cost us 6 Euros (about $9) a peice. When we had looked online they were 22 Euros one way. We were really happy with the price at the tain station and plan on buying there is we need anymore tickets. With our passes we dont usually have to buy tickets. You only need tickets for high speed or night trains which we won't need unless we are on a time crunch like going to Disneyland. Although we talked about going back to the train station tomorrow and asking how much the night trains are becuase if they are only 6 Euros as well that is cheaper than hostels and might make more sense.
We stopped at the grocery store...like always...on the way home. We were looking in the window of the bakery next door at how delicious everything looked before we went inside the store. We just needed juice and baguette, but as Morgan was grabbing the baguette I saw choclate filled croiusant type things. They looked amazing. We decided instead of getting a regular baguette and a little one we would get our regular one and those.
When we got back we stopped at the front desk and asked about coins for laundry. It cost 3.5o Euros to do 1 wash and 2 Euros to dry. We decided to do our laundry together to save some money. I talked to mom for a while after we got upstairs and the we ate bread for dinner. About 7:45 we decided to start our laundry. We did colors first becuase that was what we both had the most shirts of and it would wash our underwear as well. We are going to do whites today so we dont' run out of socks. We put our clothes in to wash...they barely all fit...and came back upstairs and decided to start decorating for Halloween. Time got a way and it had been a little over an hour since we put our clothes in...it said it needed an hour...so we headed downstairs to switch them into the dryer. Someone else had put their clothes in the other washer while we were upstairs to we decided to set an alarm this time so they wouldn't move our clothes out of the dryer. We decorated more while we waited then went down and folded all our shirts and brought our underwear back up in a bag so we wouldnt drop any of it. We put it away and got back to make our room more halloweeny.
I decorated our window so everyone else could get in the spirit and Morgan made a ton of pumpkins, ghosts, and some owls to rep Chi O. I also made a scarried cat and a grave yard. I'll add some pics at the end of this so you can see our kindergaten style drawing skills. When we got done drawing we started taping everything on the walls and had a ton of scraps left over. Morgan started trimming them all down and I made them into colorful chains. We hung them from our ceiling to add a little more flair. We are going to made a few more things in this weekend to decorate the room with our beds cause it's a little bare. When we were finally finished we realized it was 1 in the morning and we had to be up for class at 8:15. I'll tell ya about the rest of today later tonight once it's all over!!!
We were hoping we would be able to speak with someone who spoke English and that they would be just as helpful as the people that we spoke with last time. We noticed that a few of the tellers had their signs in French as well as English which we took to mean they spoke English. When it was our turn the guy who called us's sign wasn't in English so we aksed if he spoke English. He laughed and then the guy next to him said he did and he would help us when he was finished with his customer. We only had a wait a few more minutes and he was available. He understood what we were asking for and luckily I thought about us bringing our passports because we needed them. He was able to write in the dates our month of travel began and ended as well as stamp our passes which validated them. He as also able to get us our tran tickets to Paris for next weekend. We leave at 6:10 and get to Paris at 9 and we only have to walk 30 meters to Disneyland. We also dont' have to leave Sunday untill 9:25 which means we will get 3 full days at Disneyland. Roundtrip the tickets only cost us 6 Euros (about $9) a peice. When we had looked online they were 22 Euros one way. We were really happy with the price at the tain station and plan on buying there is we need anymore tickets. With our passes we dont usually have to buy tickets. You only need tickets for high speed or night trains which we won't need unless we are on a time crunch like going to Disneyland. Although we talked about going back to the train station tomorrow and asking how much the night trains are becuase if they are only 6 Euros as well that is cheaper than hostels and might make more sense.
We stopped at the grocery store...like always...on the way home. We were looking in the window of the bakery next door at how delicious everything looked before we went inside the store. We just needed juice and baguette, but as Morgan was grabbing the baguette I saw choclate filled croiusant type things. They looked amazing. We decided instead of getting a regular baguette and a little one we would get our regular one and those.
When we got back we stopped at the front desk and asked about coins for laundry. It cost 3.5o Euros to do 1 wash and 2 Euros to dry. We decided to do our laundry together to save some money. I talked to mom for a while after we got upstairs and the we ate bread for dinner. About 7:45 we decided to start our laundry. We did colors first becuase that was what we both had the most shirts of and it would wash our underwear as well. We are going to do whites today so we dont' run out of socks. We put our clothes in to wash...they barely all fit...and came back upstairs and decided to start decorating for Halloween. Time got a way and it had been a little over an hour since we put our clothes in...it said it needed an hour...so we headed downstairs to switch them into the dryer. Someone else had put their clothes in the other washer while we were upstairs to we decided to set an alarm this time so they wouldn't move our clothes out of the dryer. We decorated more while we waited then went down and folded all our shirts and brought our underwear back up in a bag so we wouldnt drop any of it. We put it away and got back to make our room more halloweeny.
I decorated our window so everyone else could get in the spirit and Morgan made a ton of pumpkins, ghosts, and some owls to rep Chi O. I also made a scarried cat and a grave yard. I'll add some pics at the end of this so you can see our kindergaten style drawing skills. When we got done drawing we started taping everything on the walls and had a ton of scraps left over. Morgan started trimming them all down and I made them into colorful chains. We hung them from our ceiling to add a little more flair. We are going to made a few more things in this weekend to decorate the room with our beds cause it's a little bare. When we were finally finished we realized it was 1 in the morning and we had to be up for class at 8:15. I'll tell ya about the rest of today later tonight once it's all over!!!
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Tuesdays are the New Monday
Tuesdays are by far my least favorite day of the week here in France. We had to get up at 7:30 this morning for class. Got ready and got to the bus stop when we wanted to...except the bus that came at the time we were planning on getting on it was so full he could only let like 2 people on. The next one was supposed to come at 8:17 so we would be pushing it but luckily I guess they were running an extra bus and one got there at 8:12 and we made it in time for class. This first class is the one we really like. It's with the American professor. He lectures for an hr and a half then we switch rooms and get into a smaller group size...we still have him as our teacher...and have what they call a tutorial. We discuss our homework from the week before and cover more indepth what we talked about in lecture. I really enjoy the topics in this class.
Neither one of us was hungry after class at 11:30 so we decided to skip the crazy cafeteria and just chill in the student lounge. I got a pepsi out of the vending machine for a little pick me up and sat down with my computer. I was able to update my ipod with new software for it and finish downloading the episodes I missed at the end of last season from GREEK. Maybe once I finish these I can get caught up on the ones for this season. We both dreaded time for our next class but it came and we reluctantly headed upstairs.
This was the class we had absolutely no idea how to do the homework in. When he finally showed up...he's been late both weeks. He told us to take out our assignments. I assumed we were going to turn them in but he started going over them. He is by far the slowest person I have ever met. He asks us a question then pauses for like 3 minutes for someone to answer, no one knows the answer or understood what he said so he finally answers it himself. He then writes it on the board cause no one still understood him and then he slowy walks around the room and awkwardly stands places for like 5 minutes. There were 4 simple questions at the beginning of our assignment and it took him over 30 minutes to answer those in class today. Then we moved into the exercises. We only finished the first part of the first of 4 questions on the first of 2 exercises before it was time for a 15 minute break at 2:30. He didn't come back till almost 3 so our break was almost 30 minutes. We assumed he would move on and start going through the powerpoint he passed out at the start of class but instead he jumped right back into the homework. He finished up the rest of part 1 and the other three questions and barely got through number 1 of 4 on exercise 2 before it was time to go. If this man would just talk or not repeatatively go over easy concepts 15 times we could get done with the whole assignment before the break if not earlier than that. I also think I would learn more, or at least come away a lot less confused about what I did learn, if I could sit with head phones in and just copy what he writes on the board. At the end of class he said we would finish up the assignment next week and start the powerpoint. Not having homework is the only thing that I like about that class.
We got home just in time to see Wizards of Waverly Place on the Disney Break on tv. On the way in the guy at the reception desk gave us both a package type thing and we already knew what they were but we were real excited to get them. It was our train passes as well as the travel guide that came with them. This should help us be able to plan our October travels better. Once wizards was over we boiled eggs and had that with some baguette for dinner. I read a little and then watched 2 of the episodes of GREEK I had downloaded. My head is kinda hurting from being stopped up so I tried taking a hot shower...it didn't really help any. I'm going to eat some white chocolate covered oreos and prolly head to bed soon. We have been up forever!! Tomorrow we are going to go to the train station to get our passes validated as well as get our tickets to Parish for next weekend when we go to Disneyland Paris!!!! We are also planning on decorating our room and working on the little homework we have for Advertising on Thursday and Oganizational Behavior next Tuesday so we can relax this weekend.
Neither one of us was hungry after class at 11:30 so we decided to skip the crazy cafeteria and just chill in the student lounge. I got a pepsi out of the vending machine for a little pick me up and sat down with my computer. I was able to update my ipod with new software for it and finish downloading the episodes I missed at the end of last season from GREEK. Maybe once I finish these I can get caught up on the ones for this season. We both dreaded time for our next class but it came and we reluctantly headed upstairs.
This was the class we had absolutely no idea how to do the homework in. When he finally showed up...he's been late both weeks. He told us to take out our assignments. I assumed we were going to turn them in but he started going over them. He is by far the slowest person I have ever met. He asks us a question then pauses for like 3 minutes for someone to answer, no one knows the answer or understood what he said so he finally answers it himself. He then writes it on the board cause no one still understood him and then he slowy walks around the room and awkwardly stands places for like 5 minutes. There were 4 simple questions at the beginning of our assignment and it took him over 30 minutes to answer those in class today. Then we moved into the exercises. We only finished the first part of the first of 4 questions on the first of 2 exercises before it was time for a 15 minute break at 2:30. He didn't come back till almost 3 so our break was almost 30 minutes. We assumed he would move on and start going through the powerpoint he passed out at the start of class but instead he jumped right back into the homework. He finished up the rest of part 1 and the other three questions and barely got through number 1 of 4 on exercise 2 before it was time to go. If this man would just talk or not repeatatively go over easy concepts 15 times we could get done with the whole assignment before the break if not earlier than that. I also think I would learn more, or at least come away a lot less confused about what I did learn, if I could sit with head phones in and just copy what he writes on the board. At the end of class he said we would finish up the assignment next week and start the powerpoint. Not having homework is the only thing that I like about that class.
We got home just in time to see Wizards of Waverly Place on the Disney Break on tv. On the way in the guy at the reception desk gave us both a package type thing and we already knew what they were but we were real excited to get them. It was our train passes as well as the travel guide that came with them. This should help us be able to plan our October travels better. Once wizards was over we boiled eggs and had that with some baguette for dinner. I read a little and then watched 2 of the episodes of GREEK I had downloaded. My head is kinda hurting from being stopped up so I tried taking a hot shower...it didn't really help any. I'm going to eat some white chocolate covered oreos and prolly head to bed soon. We have been up forever!! Tomorrow we are going to go to the train station to get our passes validated as well as get our tickets to Parish for next weekend when we go to Disneyland Paris!!!! We are also planning on decorating our room and working on the little homework we have for Advertising on Thursday and Oganizational Behavior next Tuesday so we can relax this weekend.
Monday, September 21, 2009
6 hours at school?
We got up at what seemed like very early in the morning even though it was 10 for my class. We got ready and headed out to school. Morgan didn't have class till 3:30 but she went with me for my 11:30 class so she could try and work on some homework and to use the schools good internet to try and make a plan for us at Disneyland Paris. Everyone who was outside my class before the teacher got there was talking about our culture class that no one knew what time it was. One girl said that there was a sign on the internation ladies door saying what time our groups went. She said mine was 3:30 to 5 when Morgan's french class was. So much for working out today. My french class wasn't quite what I was expected it to be. The lady pretty much only spoke in French. I was able to understand most of what she said and I did learn a little bit. We just covered the alphebet and basic introduction things.
I met Morgan after my class and told her about the culture classes being posted. We ate lunch and then went upstairs to check exactly when our classes were and where. Morgan's class was at 2 which meant she only had about 30 minutes till her class. We went back down to the student lounge and hung out till her class. (There were very few people in her class since it was on no ones schedule and everyone that should of been in her class didn't know they had to be at school untill 3:30.) Once she went up to her class I turned on my music and relaxed while checking the internet and talking to mom for a few minutes. There were a ton of people in the student lounge and I felt really awkward but I wasn't too worried about it...I just kept listening to my music.
When I got upstairs for my culture class there were a ton of people outside that I knew. I sat with the girl from Colorado that I really like and the American girls from our building sat in front of me. 2 of the Florida girls were in there too, one of them was in my French class and we sat together and she was just as lost as I was so I felt better. The teacher for our cultures classes is this crazy little man with crazy hair. I'll try to get a picture of him so I post it on here cause it's super funny. He was hilarious too though, he made calss interesting in something that could be very boring. The list of topics we are going to cover seems really interesting and one week we are going to cover topics that we submited today. He had us write down what we wanted to learn while we were in France. I'm looking forward to that week.
Once we were out of class it was 5 meaning we had been at school for 6 hours!! We stopped at the grocery store on the way home to get some food so we wouldn't starve. We had some chocolate ice cream when we got home and then worked a little more on our homework that is due tomorrow. We had to pick the category our Oganizational Behavior paper is going to fit into...it is supposed to be about how we have seen the topics we discuss in class represented in an organization we have been apart of...and then describe how our personality test results fit into how we acted in the situation. I think I am going to use cheerleading and show the differences in the way the squad members behaved and treated each other with very different aged coaches (Erica being close to our age while Ms. Wamble was an adult). I'm excited to research more about this topic and to write my paper. It has to be 10-12 pages max but I dont think that will be hard. I have several real life examples and the research will help to analyze it.
We ate bread and butter for dinner and we are going to have some white chocolate covered oreos. I just talked to Amy and Caden for a while on Skype. He smiles so big when I get back on the screen after it kicks us off. I'm going to get in the shower so I can get in bed since we have to be at like 7 for school tomorrow!
I met Morgan after my class and told her about the culture classes being posted. We ate lunch and then went upstairs to check exactly when our classes were and where. Morgan's class was at 2 which meant she only had about 30 minutes till her class. We went back down to the student lounge and hung out till her class. (There were very few people in her class since it was on no ones schedule and everyone that should of been in her class didn't know they had to be at school untill 3:30.) Once she went up to her class I turned on my music and relaxed while checking the internet and talking to mom for a few minutes. There were a ton of people in the student lounge and I felt really awkward but I wasn't too worried about it...I just kept listening to my music.
When I got upstairs for my culture class there were a ton of people outside that I knew. I sat with the girl from Colorado that I really like and the American girls from our building sat in front of me. 2 of the Florida girls were in there too, one of them was in my French class and we sat together and she was just as lost as I was so I felt better. The teacher for our cultures classes is this crazy little man with crazy hair. I'll try to get a picture of him so I post it on here cause it's super funny. He was hilarious too though, he made calss interesting in something that could be very boring. The list of topics we are going to cover seems really interesting and one week we are going to cover topics that we submited today. He had us write down what we wanted to learn while we were in France. I'm looking forward to that week.
Once we were out of class it was 5 meaning we had been at school for 6 hours!! We stopped at the grocery store on the way home to get some food so we wouldn't starve. We had some chocolate ice cream when we got home and then worked a little more on our homework that is due tomorrow. We had to pick the category our Oganizational Behavior paper is going to fit into...it is supposed to be about how we have seen the topics we discuss in class represented in an organization we have been apart of...and then describe how our personality test results fit into how we acted in the situation. I think I am going to use cheerleading and show the differences in the way the squad members behaved and treated each other with very different aged coaches (Erica being close to our age while Ms. Wamble was an adult). I'm excited to research more about this topic and to write my paper. It has to be 10-12 pages max but I dont think that will be hard. I have several real life examples and the research will help to analyze it.
We ate bread and butter for dinner and we are going to have some white chocolate covered oreos. I just talked to Amy and Caden for a while on Skype. He smiles so big when I get back on the screen after it kicks us off. I'm going to get in the shower so I can get in bed since we have to be at like 7 for school tomorrow!
Sunday, September 20, 2009
How to Accomplish Absolutely Nothing!!
I woke feeling sick again this morning at about 9:45. Once I got sick I felt better though...except I couldn't go back to sleep. I grabbed my computer and listened to music while I checked everyone's facebook updates from yesterday evening. Morgan woke up and turned on the lights to start reading in bed. I got up and took my medicine and laid back down to read while still listening to my music on my computer. A little after 2 I got a yogurt out of the fridge and ate it while reading through our assignment for Financial Analysis. Morgan got hers out too and we attempted to figure out what we were supposed to do. We got the 4 critical thinking questions answered and some of exercise one done before moving on to the next exercise. We got the first question done on that before getting even more confused than we started. We looked through the course outline and there is no mention of homework in there much less does it add into the way our grade is figured. We are assuming he will just go through it in class Tuesday and maybe that will help us understand more. There are textbooks in the library we can read and Morgan is going to try to do that while I'm in my French class tomorrow. We're going to eat lunch after my class and then when she goes to class I'm going to try to go downstairs and work out in the sports rooms.
About 4, after we gave up on our homework we started watching some tv. We watched some crazy show about countries in India...we think. It showed people riding around on Elephants and Camals and how the women have to carry water buckets on thier heads. It also randomly showed a view of a street with a man walking around completely naked...not censored at all!! It was very very very disturbing to us both. After the show was over we watched a few episodes of Man vs. Wild in between me falling asleep because I was real tired for some reason. I decided to get off the couch and check my computer to try to make myself stay awake. It was about 7 and we were getting hungry so we made our chicken nuggets for dinner. We're going to have to go to the store on the way home from school tomorrow becuase we only have a few eggs left dinner food wise.
After dinner we read again. I am about 3/4 of the way done with the 2nd Left Behind book and I don't want to put it down. This evening I read 70 pages without even realizing it. I only stopped because my back was hurting from the way I was sitting. I'm going to finish the 4 books I brought with me a lot sooner than I thought if I keep reading like this. I may need someone to send me the next few in the series later on...hint hint mom. I jumped in the shower and used the rest of our hot water up, but I made it through my shower at least. I'm going to grab a shower here in a little bit and head to bed cause I'm still super tired. I dont have class till 11:30 tomorrow but I still wanna get good sleep since I won't have Morgan to entertain me if class is boring. I'll write again tomorrow and let you know how my class and working out goes!
About 4, after we gave up on our homework we started watching some tv. We watched some crazy show about countries in India...we think. It showed people riding around on Elephants and Camals and how the women have to carry water buckets on thier heads. It also randomly showed a view of a street with a man walking around completely naked...not censored at all!! It was very very very disturbing to us both. After the show was over we watched a few episodes of Man vs. Wild in between me falling asleep because I was real tired for some reason. I decided to get off the couch and check my computer to try to make myself stay awake. It was about 7 and we were getting hungry so we made our chicken nuggets for dinner. We're going to have to go to the store on the way home from school tomorrow becuase we only have a few eggs left dinner food wise.
After dinner we read again. I am about 3/4 of the way done with the 2nd Left Behind book and I don't want to put it down. This evening I read 70 pages without even realizing it. I only stopped because my back was hurting from the way I was sitting. I'm going to finish the 4 books I brought with me a lot sooner than I thought if I keep reading like this. I may need someone to send me the next few in the series later on...hint hint mom. I jumped in the shower and used the rest of our hot water up, but I made it through my shower at least. I'm going to grab a shower here in a little bit and head to bed cause I'm still super tired. I dont have class till 11:30 tomorrow but I still wanna get good sleep since I won't have Morgan to entertain me if class is boring. I'll write again tomorrow and let you know how my class and working out goes!
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Office Depot Hike & Personality Tests
We didn't wake up till about 11 today and still had trouble getting out of bed. I had 4 texts from Mom when I woke up. I was a little worried something was wrong till I realized they were all pics. She had sent me 3 pics of goats and 1 of a donkey at the fair. It kinda made my day. We ate a little breakfast before we both showered and got ready. We needed to go to Office Depot for construction paper and the grocery store for laundry detergent and a baguette. We still weren't quite sure what bus was going to take us to Office Depot but I had a general idea of where it was and thought i knew what stop we needed to get off at.
We took our normal bus to the metro stop that also has almost every bus stopping there. We went to the stop for the bus we wanted to take and it wasn't going to be there for an hour! We quickly checked the map and saw that a bus that was already there also went to the same stop. We hopped on and hoped for the best. When we got to the stop I thought we needed to get off at it looked nothing like where the office depot had been so we didn't get off. As soon as we pulled away from the stop I saw the store over trees. I quickly pushed the stop button so we could get off at the next stop. Little did we know it was going to be a mile and a half done a narrow kinda wierd road. We got off the bus anyways and saw the same # bus heading towards us going the other direction. We had no way to get across the street and have him stop though so he kept going. We walked across to the stop and checked the schedule...the bus wouldn't be back for over 30 minutes. We decided to walk back. The road didn't have sidewalks but it did have a narrow bike path on the side of the road...we both chose to walk on the edge of the grass most the time though...it wasn't a very wide road.
We finally made it back to where we could see the Office Depot but we still weren't there yet. We were on the wrong side of what seemed like a major street. We followed a lady through some side streets to get us close to the main road and then used the cross walks to get across. We were both super hot and tired after this walk. Did I mention I was wearing my Burkinstocks...not really walking shoes. We didn't find any construction paper...but we were able to find colored printer paper that will work. We also got scissors and tape so we can decorate!!! We found a bus stop right down the road from the store and it took us back to where we started out. We walked to the grocery store and got what we needed and finally got home. We both chugged water...we were so worn out.
We woked on some of our homework. We had to take a personality test of our Organizational Behavior class and it was really fun. I turned out to be an ENTJ....E is extraverted (78%) N is Intution (24%) T is thinking (1%...i was pretty nuetral the other side is feeling) J is judging (56%). The description said I sould be some sort of executive but that I have to learn to listen to people because I judge quickly. I also looked at the carrer paths my type fits...the main ones were business manager, Engineer, & high school teacher. I thought that was pretty fitting. We also did some other tests that were in our packet for that class and they were about self-esteem (mine was like 77 out off 100) and I learned i'm a very strong type A person. We are going to work on our homework for Financial Analysis tomorrow becuase it does not look fun at all, and we are going to save the little bit of reading we have for OB till Monday so we can remember to dicuss it better.
I made us fried eggs for dinner...although we didnt use butter or anything so they were really just cooked eggs. We had a glass of wine after dinner. I talked to Amy & Caden for a while on Skype and then Mom for a long time. I had to get caught back up on the Cape gossip.
We took our normal bus to the metro stop that also has almost every bus stopping there. We went to the stop for the bus we wanted to take and it wasn't going to be there for an hour! We quickly checked the map and saw that a bus that was already there also went to the same stop. We hopped on and hoped for the best. When we got to the stop I thought we needed to get off at it looked nothing like where the office depot had been so we didn't get off. As soon as we pulled away from the stop I saw the store over trees. I quickly pushed the stop button so we could get off at the next stop. Little did we know it was going to be a mile and a half done a narrow kinda wierd road. We got off the bus anyways and saw the same # bus heading towards us going the other direction. We had no way to get across the street and have him stop though so he kept going. We walked across to the stop and checked the schedule...the bus wouldn't be back for over 30 minutes. We decided to walk back. The road didn't have sidewalks but it did have a narrow bike path on the side of the road...we both chose to walk on the edge of the grass most the time though...it wasn't a very wide road.
We finally made it back to where we could see the Office Depot but we still weren't there yet. We were on the wrong side of what seemed like a major street. We followed a lady through some side streets to get us close to the main road and then used the cross walks to get across. We were both super hot and tired after this walk. Did I mention I was wearing my Burkinstocks...not really walking shoes. We didn't find any construction paper...but we were able to find colored printer paper that will work. We also got scissors and tape so we can decorate!!! We found a bus stop right down the road from the store and it took us back to where we started out. We walked to the grocery store and got what we needed and finally got home. We both chugged water...we were so worn out.
We woked on some of our homework. We had to take a personality test of our Organizational Behavior class and it was really fun. I turned out to be an ENTJ....E is extraverted (78%) N is Intution (24%) T is thinking (1%...i was pretty nuetral the other side is feeling) J is judging (56%). The description said I sould be some sort of executive but that I have to learn to listen to people because I judge quickly. I also looked at the carrer paths my type fits...the main ones were business manager, Engineer, & high school teacher. I thought that was pretty fitting. We also did some other tests that were in our packet for that class and they were about self-esteem (mine was like 77 out off 100) and I learned i'm a very strong type A person. We are going to work on our homework for Financial Analysis tomorrow becuase it does not look fun at all, and we are going to save the little bit of reading we have for OB till Monday so we can remember to dicuss it better.
I made us fried eggs for dinner...although we didnt use butter or anything so they were really just cooked eggs. We had a glass of wine after dinner. I talked to Amy & Caden for a while on Skype and then Mom for a long time. I had to get caught back up on the Cape gossip.
Skittles Thief
I forgot to mention this yesterday and it's still really bothering both of us.
I'll start my saying that all the snacks we brought from home are sitting on our table in a bowl. They are slowing starting to look empty so it's easy to see what is left. I noticed Thursday afternoon that I still had my skittles left cause it's not something I eat very often. Yesterday after we were back from school and just sitting around watching Friends I thought i might want to eat a few of them cause I wasn't super hungry but that would hold me over till dinner. I got up to the table and they weren't there!! I asked Morgan if she had eaten them cause we have been sharing everything we brought and she hadn't cause she doesn't like skittles...she's not a big fruit person. I know i hadn't eaten them cause I just saw them yesterday. We searched the room thinking I had moved them or that maybe they were in my purse or backpack...they were no where to be found.
Yesterday afternoon when we were leaving for school we got on the elevator to a lone vaccumm...it was kinda freaky...but now it's bothering us even more. Nothing else in our room is missing except my skittles. We had our computers with us and ipods. Both of our cameras were just sitting here but they are still here. We are guessing whoever came into our room was just a little hungry but we can't figure out why anyone was in our room. If it was the maids...nothing got cleaned our floor still has bread crumbs on it.
We are going to ask the good English speaking lady about it because I don't feel comfortable knowing someone can get into our room. I'll let you know if we figure anything out.
I'll start my saying that all the snacks we brought from home are sitting on our table in a bowl. They are slowing starting to look empty so it's easy to see what is left. I noticed Thursday afternoon that I still had my skittles left cause it's not something I eat very often. Yesterday after we were back from school and just sitting around watching Friends I thought i might want to eat a few of them cause I wasn't super hungry but that would hold me over till dinner. I got up to the table and they weren't there!! I asked Morgan if she had eaten them cause we have been sharing everything we brought and she hadn't cause she doesn't like skittles...she's not a big fruit person. I know i hadn't eaten them cause I just saw them yesterday. We searched the room thinking I had moved them or that maybe they were in my purse or backpack...they were no where to be found.
Yesterday afternoon when we were leaving for school we got on the elevator to a lone vaccumm...it was kinda freaky...but now it's bothering us even more. Nothing else in our room is missing except my skittles. We had our computers with us and ipods. Both of our cameras were just sitting here but they are still here. We are guessing whoever came into our room was just a little hungry but we can't figure out why anyone was in our room. If it was the maids...nothing got cleaned our floor still has bread crumbs on it.
We are going to ask the good English speaking lady about it because I don't feel comfortable knowing someone can get into our room. I'll let you know if we figure anything out.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Spending Money, Spaghetti, & Wine
Once we decided to get outta bed and get going this morning..well close to afternoon...we got ready and headed out to school to use some good internet. We needed to decide which train pass we were going to get and order it...we don't trust our internet to let us order stuff cause it kicks us off all the time. We decided the best pass for us to get was the 1 month global pass. This allows us to travel by train for one month at the price of the card. It will start when we go to Disneyland Paris and last untill we get back from our week off we will be spending in the South of France and Italy. Every Wednesday...since we dont have class...and Friday, Saturday, & Sunday of October we will be traveling with our pass to make it worth the money we spent on it. The only trip we will have to pay for it when we go to London for the Gymnastics World Championships...the train passes don't work to England for some reason (the passes if you are European do...but not the other ones). We will definetely make it worth the money we spent though...and we will get in all the traveling we want to do. One weekend we plan to travel to 2 countries...Spain, Switzerland, or Ireland...and the Wednesday before or after will get the other country. We want to take a train back to the place we spent last Sunday one Wednesday to lay on the beach and do homework and read. We also plan to go into Paris one Wednesday and try to just site see and maybe get in a little shopping with what little money we have left after buying our passes. Our plan is to sleep on the trains so that we dont have to pay for hostels or stress our parents out by staying there. We are real excited to get all of our travel done before school gets harder before finals.
We have joked this whole time about how we want to decorate our apartment for Halloween, Thanksgiving, & Christmas. We have looked for construstion paper and haven't been able to find any. We thought maybe Office Depot would have some and thought about going there after we got done at school today but we weren't quite sure which bus took us there. We decided to come home and check it out and we are going to try to go there sometime tomorrow. I also looked on their website and didn't really find any construction paper but I did find some colored paper that I think we can make work and it's not very expensive which is important.
I watched Friends in French all afternoon...I think i'm learning something becuase I could reciete every episode pretty much. We took our towels down t get fresh ones today at the front desk. We also investigated the laundry room...we don't quite get it...we are waiting till the really good English speaking lady is working so we can ask her about it. We had another microwave spaghetti for dinner with a little baguette. We can't believe how good that stuff is...much less that it feeds both of us and it's cheap which is nice. We had a glass of wine after dinner to make us feel better about how much we spent on our train passes today. The cheap wine we bought at the grocery store was good!!
We are planning to work on some homework tomorrow, to go to Office Depot, and to stop at the grocery store for a baguette becuase they are closed on Sundays. We plan on pretty much just having a lazy weekend!!
Dreary Day
I realized this morning that I forgot to write yesterday. I was exhausted after school and ended up being really sick last night. I'll fill ya in on that later though. Wednesday night after I wrote my blog I tried to take a shower so I could get in bed and not have to wake up any extra early for class on Thursday. I got in the shower and turned on the water...all the way on hot...and it was cold!! Morgan had showered early that morning and we hadn't washed dishes or anything to use hot water throughtout the day. I was a little upset. It was of course after the front desk was closed too. I decided I'd try in the morning and if we still didn't have hot water I'd go down and say something.
When I woke up though we did have hot water...enough for both of us to shower. It was pretty cold yesterday morning and looked like it was going to rain at any minute...which the weather said it was supposed to...but it never actually did. When we were both ready we headed down to the bus. We were sick of being super early everywhere we went cause people look at us funny so we tried to wait a little extra time in the arpartment before we went outside. We got to the bus stop just as the bus was pulling away and the next one wasn't going to be there till 9:48 and our class was at 10. Of course it was a minute or 2 late and we were freaking out. They are crazy about being on time at school. We practially ran off the bus and into school and got to our classroom with like a minute to spare...and we weren't the last ones to get there. We learned our lesson though and we will make sure we catch that bus we missed yesterday from now on.
This was our advertising class and it wasn't that bad. We are missing a bit of background information but he seemed to explain everything that we weren't quite sure about...well he asked someone in the class to explain it at least. We are going to have a group project in this class. It is to create an advertisment for a problem or new product for a company. (We are thinking about doing an ethanol car in America cause they are very green here) We are in a group together with a girl from Brazil (they speak porteguese there...we both thought they spoke Spanish). She is real nice and lives not very far from us so it will make getting together easier. We may have a few more people in our group but we aren't sure yet. Each week we have a little something we have to do in our groups during class that relates to the lecture. At the end of the semester we have to give a 20 minute pressentation on our advertisment we create. The class is supposed to go from 10-1 with a 15 minute break in the middle. However, this teacher (who was from England so we could understand him!!) thinks that because he gives us a break he can extend class till 1:15...kinda annoying but o well.
After class we checked our emails and schedules to see if our french classes were up yet. I have class monday from 11:30 to 1. Morgan's is from 3:30 to 5. I'm excited they aren't early on Monday so we can sleep in a little after our weekends of travel in October. After we got done checking our schedules we took the bus to the train station to see if anyone could give us more information on the train passes we need to buy. After we wondered all around the train station trying to find where we needed to be they couldnt' even help us. Since the passes we need are for non-European citizens they dont sell them there and had no information on them for us. We came home and researched it more and were able to find out a way to avoid some of the extra costs with the pass if we aren't worried about extra time on the train which we aren't really on our week off. We are going to go up to school here a little while and order our passes so we can get them in time for Disneyland in 2 weeks!!!!
By the time we got home from the train station I was burning up and had a horrible headache. I had a little bit of baguette and then decided I wanted some yogurt. I grabbed one of my strawberry ones out of the fridge and it was expired. Luckily Morgan's vanilla yogurt wasnt expired so I ate one of hers. I watched a little tv...they have a disney break on a channel everyday at 4:25 and it's wizards of waverly place which is a fun show. Once that was over though my head was still hurting and I was exhausted so I decided to lay down for 30 minutes. I set my phone alarm and I guess I turned it off in my sleep becuase I woke up after 7. I was freezing and I think that is the only reason I woke up. I grabbed a sweatshirt and my computer and moved to the couch. Morgan had just opened a bag of bbq lays (medium sized) and was looking at halloween costumes for fun. I joined in and we ended up eating the whole bag of chips. We finished looking through most of the halloween costumes and watched 3 episodes of Bones on tv.
I started feeling really sick and was afraid I had a fever since I was so cold and morgan wasn't at all. I ended up getting sick before we went to bed and my stomach felt a little better, but not amazing. we went to bed at 11 and it took me a while to fall asleep cause I still felt bad. I woke at 2 cause my watch a alarm was set for some reason and still didn't feel good but I was able to fall back asleep. I woke up for real at 9:45 this morning and didn't really feel bad so I got up and grabbed my computer trying to not wake up Morgan, but she was already up. I started to not feel very good again and ended up getting sick again but I feel fine now...although I havent' eaten anythiing and we are both still laying in our beds on our computers 2 hrs after waking up. Hopefully it was just something I ate yesterday and I'm not really sick.
We are going to get out to school sometime soon and get our train passes ordered and then spend the rest of the weekend working on our homework and relaxing. I'll make sure I post again this evening and let ya know how the train passes worked out and if I am feeling better.
When I woke up though we did have hot water...enough for both of us to shower. It was pretty cold yesterday morning and looked like it was going to rain at any minute...which the weather said it was supposed to...but it never actually did. When we were both ready we headed down to the bus. We were sick of being super early everywhere we went cause people look at us funny so we tried to wait a little extra time in the arpartment before we went outside. We got to the bus stop just as the bus was pulling away and the next one wasn't going to be there till 9:48 and our class was at 10. Of course it was a minute or 2 late and we were freaking out. They are crazy about being on time at school. We practially ran off the bus and into school and got to our classroom with like a minute to spare...and we weren't the last ones to get there. We learned our lesson though and we will make sure we catch that bus we missed yesterday from now on.
This was our advertising class and it wasn't that bad. We are missing a bit of background information but he seemed to explain everything that we weren't quite sure about...well he asked someone in the class to explain it at least. We are going to have a group project in this class. It is to create an advertisment for a problem or new product for a company. (We are thinking about doing an ethanol car in America cause they are very green here) We are in a group together with a girl from Brazil (they speak porteguese there...we both thought they spoke Spanish). She is real nice and lives not very far from us so it will make getting together easier. We may have a few more people in our group but we aren't sure yet. Each week we have a little something we have to do in our groups during class that relates to the lecture. At the end of the semester we have to give a 20 minute pressentation on our advertisment we create. The class is supposed to go from 10-1 with a 15 minute break in the middle. However, this teacher (who was from England so we could understand him!!) thinks that because he gives us a break he can extend class till 1:15...kinda annoying but o well.
After class we checked our emails and schedules to see if our french classes were up yet. I have class monday from 11:30 to 1. Morgan's is from 3:30 to 5. I'm excited they aren't early on Monday so we can sleep in a little after our weekends of travel in October. After we got done checking our schedules we took the bus to the train station to see if anyone could give us more information on the train passes we need to buy. After we wondered all around the train station trying to find where we needed to be they couldnt' even help us. Since the passes we need are for non-European citizens they dont sell them there and had no information on them for us. We came home and researched it more and were able to find out a way to avoid some of the extra costs with the pass if we aren't worried about extra time on the train which we aren't really on our week off. We are going to go up to school here a little while and order our passes so we can get them in time for Disneyland in 2 weeks!!!!
By the time we got home from the train station I was burning up and had a horrible headache. I had a little bit of baguette and then decided I wanted some yogurt. I grabbed one of my strawberry ones out of the fridge and it was expired. Luckily Morgan's vanilla yogurt wasnt expired so I ate one of hers. I watched a little tv...they have a disney break on a channel everyday at 4:25 and it's wizards of waverly place which is a fun show. Once that was over though my head was still hurting and I was exhausted so I decided to lay down for 30 minutes. I set my phone alarm and I guess I turned it off in my sleep becuase I woke up after 7. I was freezing and I think that is the only reason I woke up. I grabbed a sweatshirt and my computer and moved to the couch. Morgan had just opened a bag of bbq lays (medium sized) and was looking at halloween costumes for fun. I joined in and we ended up eating the whole bag of chips. We finished looking through most of the halloween costumes and watched 3 episodes of Bones on tv.
I started feeling really sick and was afraid I had a fever since I was so cold and morgan wasn't at all. I ended up getting sick before we went to bed and my stomach felt a little better, but not amazing. we went to bed at 11 and it took me a while to fall asleep cause I still felt bad. I woke at 2 cause my watch a alarm was set for some reason and still didn't feel good but I was able to fall back asleep. I woke up for real at 9:45 this morning and didn't really feel bad so I got up and grabbed my computer trying to not wake up Morgan, but she was already up. I started to not feel very good again and ended up getting sick again but I feel fine now...although I havent' eaten anythiing and we are both still laying in our beds on our computers 2 hrs after waking up. Hopefully it was just something I ate yesterday and I'm not really sick.
We are going to get out to school sometime soon and get our train passes ordered and then spend the rest of the weekend working on our homework and relaxing. I'll make sure I post again this evening and let ya know how the train passes worked out and if I am feeling better.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Why can't we just be European?
We don't have classes on Wednesdays so we slept in since we only had a little to accomplish today. We woke up at 11 and laid around the apartment for a while talking about the traveling we wanted to do and how we needed to figure it out so we could make sure we had enough money. We started researching different passes we could get to travel on the trains to get to different places. We found a perfect one that would let us travel for a full month as much as we wanted and it wasn't to terribly expensive. When we were about to order them we realized you had to be European citizens to be able to purchase them...if you weren't you had to get a EuroRail Pass. They are more expensive and don't include travel to London...which is super expensive by itself. After checking about everything we could think of we have pretty much decided we are going to end up buying the month EuroRail Pass and just get to London on our own. This means we will be traveling every weekend and pretty much every Wednesday (since we don't have classes) in October...including the week we have off classes...to make it worth our money. We have plenty of places we want to visit to travel that much we just will have to take night trains so we dont' have to get hostels everywhere.
We did get conformation on our Disneyland Trip and tickets for the Gymnastics worlds in London. I booked our hostel for Friday & Saturday night that weekend in London. It had a super high rating and was only like 12 Euros a night...which is about $16. If includes breakfast and wireless internet. We will be staying in an 8 person dorm but we'll really only be there to sleep so we aren't real worried about that.
Around 3 we decided we better head downtown and get to the store instead of just sitting here and getting more upset about how expensive travel is. We got ready and wakled to the bus stop. A bus was just pulling away but we knew another one would come in 8 minutes. We waited for it and stood up when it was turning the corner to our stop...but it just kept going. They stared at us as he just drove right by. We decided he hated Americans and just didn't want to pick us up. Travel seems to be easier here if you just belong. When the next bus was in view a French lady walked up and stood nextto the street. We whisperd to each other it would stop for her cause she wasn't American. She didnt' do anything different than we had and the bus stopped. This just added to our being upset about traveling. Once the bus finally picked us up we took it to the mall and i bought the wallet I had seen at Claire's the last time we were there. The id holder I brought with me is nice but it's too hard to get my cards in and out of when i have so many of them in there and I'm afraid to travel with out them. Although we found out today everywhere we have used our cards...except the ATM...has charged us a fee. We are going to try to stop using our cards. We went to MonoPrix while we were there to pick up the things our grocery store doesn't carry. We got some Nutella to eat on our baguette...it's what they put in the chocolate crepes...we also got another baguette and I got some lotion cause the soap here is super drying out my hands. We realized yesterday in our classes that our teachers handed out the powerpoints for notes so I prolly didnt' need to buy the notebooks I did...too bad I can't find the reciept or I'd return them. I found 5 folders for 2 Euros today so I got those to keep all my stuff in for my classes. We got Oust 3-in-1 to use on our apartment to kill germs since we can't seem to find lysol. We knew there was something else we needed but couldn't think of it at all. After we had been home for about an hour I remembered we had needed klennex...guess we'll be using toilet paper for a while.
I read some of my book and enjoyed the rest of our lazy day. I ate my leftover part of the pizza from last night for dinner. I'm going to shower here in a bit and get ready for class tomorrow. We have advertising from 10-1 so we dont have to be up too super early. Hopefully while we are at school tomororw we'll be able to figure out when our French classes are on Monday.
We did get conformation on our Disneyland Trip and tickets for the Gymnastics worlds in London. I booked our hostel for Friday & Saturday night that weekend in London. It had a super high rating and was only like 12 Euros a night...which is about $16. If includes breakfast and wireless internet. We will be staying in an 8 person dorm but we'll really only be there to sleep so we aren't real worried about that.
Around 3 we decided we better head downtown and get to the store instead of just sitting here and getting more upset about how expensive travel is. We got ready and wakled to the bus stop. A bus was just pulling away but we knew another one would come in 8 minutes. We waited for it and stood up when it was turning the corner to our stop...but it just kept going. They stared at us as he just drove right by. We decided he hated Americans and just didn't want to pick us up. Travel seems to be easier here if you just belong. When the next bus was in view a French lady walked up and stood nextto the street. We whisperd to each other it would stop for her cause she wasn't American. She didnt' do anything different than we had and the bus stopped. This just added to our being upset about traveling. Once the bus finally picked us up we took it to the mall and i bought the wallet I had seen at Claire's the last time we were there. The id holder I brought with me is nice but it's too hard to get my cards in and out of when i have so many of them in there and I'm afraid to travel with out them. Although we found out today everywhere we have used our cards...except the ATM...has charged us a fee. We are going to try to stop using our cards. We went to MonoPrix while we were there to pick up the things our grocery store doesn't carry. We got some Nutella to eat on our baguette...it's what they put in the chocolate crepes...we also got another baguette and I got some lotion cause the soap here is super drying out my hands. We realized yesterday in our classes that our teachers handed out the powerpoints for notes so I prolly didnt' need to buy the notebooks I did...too bad I can't find the reciept or I'd return them. I found 5 folders for 2 Euros today so I got those to keep all my stuff in for my classes. We got Oust 3-in-1 to use on our apartment to kill germs since we can't seem to find lysol. We knew there was something else we needed but couldn't think of it at all. After we had been home for about an hour I remembered we had needed klennex...guess we'll be using toilet paper for a while.
I read some of my book and enjoyed the rest of our lazy day. I ate my leftover part of the pizza from last night for dinner. I'm going to shower here in a bit and get ready for class tomorrow. We have advertising from 10-1 so we dont have to be up too super early. Hopefully while we are at school tomororw we'll be able to figure out when our French classes are on Monday.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
First real day of school
We had to get up ridiculously early to get to classes this morning. Our first class was at 8:30 but we wanted to be there a little early so I could talk to the proffessor about switching into that class. We got up at 7:15 got ready and ate breakfast on the bus...thank goodness for still having iced animal crackers from home. We got there about 8:05 and went up to our room. The proffessor was already there, I talked to him and explained what was going on and he didnt' act like it was a big deal at all and just told me to add my name to whatever group I was in for the day. After I sat back down he brought us the handouts for the day and asked us if we were from US or Canada, then where from in the US. Turns out he was born and raised in North Carolina (I won't hold that against him) and came here a while ago to work and ended up marrying a French women and has worked at the school for 10 yrs. He was so easy to understand becuase he spoke perfect english and was basing most of his class on American companies and studies. The class is called Orgainizational Behavior...its about how people act individually, in groups, and as a whole orgainization...it seems super interesting. Through out the class he kept looking back at the 2 of us to kinda get our feedback on what he was saying about America. All of our classes only meet once a week but are for 3 hrs. This class is a little different though. We have a big lecture for the first half and then break up into 3 smaller classes for tutorials or more indepth look at what we learned...luckily our group still has him as our instructor. I think I'm going to really enjoy his class.
After that class we went and asked the WellCome Team people the specifics about the trip to Amsterdam they have planned...it was during one of the weekends we were thinking about going to Disneyland so we wanted to see if it was worth it. We ate lunch while we thought about it and decided that if we could get Disney tickets for the other weekend we would go on the trip with the school. We ended up booking our tickets for Disneyland for 3 days and 2 nights at the Disneyland Santa Fe Hotel. We will go to Disneyland Friday Oct 2nd, Saturday 3rd, and Sunday 4th. We'll stay at the hotel Friday & Saturday night. We'll be traveling overnight on the train...hopefully...friday & sunday nights. We get breakfast each morning and "park hopper"...which means we can go back and forth between the parks as much as we want...for all 3 days with our package.
When we finished booking our trip it was time for the next class. This one was a straight 3 hr lecture called Financial Analysis. The teacher was late to start the class and didn't even introduce himself. He didn't go through the syllabus or anything he just starting lecturing. His form of lecturing was reading straight off his powerpoints. Not very effective in keeping me awake for 3 hrs. He had no control over the class at all. He didn't talk very loudly and there were so many people talking in the room that we could barely hear him where we were sitting...not to metion his horrible accent. He also randomly just started...we are assuming...repeating himself in French. When he would try to get the class to quiet down...which didn't work...he would tap his marker on the desk in front of him...it always made up jump...but no one quit talking. He would sometimes randomly stop talking and walk around the room for like 5 minutes...we really have no idea why. We did get a break in the middle of the class...it was suppossed to be for 15 minutes but lasted over 25. He kept having 1 on 1 converstations with people in the front of the room in French...kind of a waste of our time. At the end of class he just randomly quit lecturing in the middle of a slid and told us to complete the 3 sections of HW he had passed out...everyone only had 2 sections. Needless to say this man was completely annoying and a worthless teacher. This should be an interesting class every week...at least I have Morgan with me.
After class we had a little over an hour till my meeting about my schedule so we went back to the student lounge and decided to book our trip to London. Morgan had seen that the Gymnastic World Championships were in London in October so we are going!!! They are October 13th-18th. We are going to both the men's and women's event finals on Saturday & Sunday night. I can't believe I get to go to the World Championships for Gymnastics!!
I went upstairs for my meeting a little early and she was just getting back from another meeting so I got to go ahead and start my meeting. I explained to her about how I went to the other class this morning and he didn't seem to mind. She made sure I didn't have a conflict with any of my other classes and said it would prolly work out better for the group sizes anyway. She also let me go ahead and be in Morgan's group and everything!! I asked her about my class for Thursday (which still isn't showing on the internet) and she said to just go ahead and go to the one Morgan is in and she put a note that I want to be in that class and she was going to try to just put me in that one to start with. She also said our French classes will be posted by Thursday so we'll know when our class is on Monday. After all that she showed me that right outside her office is the Internatonal student board where things we need to know will be posted. This all took about 5 minutes and I was so happy!! Nothing is ever that quick of goes that smoothly in Rolla.
We headed home after being at school for wayyyy to long (We'd been there about 9 hrs). Once we got home we relaxed for a bit and then took the bus down to the Dominos to reward ourselves for sitting through 6 hrs of classes. They don't have tables in their pizza places to we sat at a table outside a little cafe down the street. After we'd been sitting there about 5 minutes a guy came out said hi and then just stood there staring at us. We decided to get up and were closing our box when he walked off quickly and said "no eat eat." We were creeped out and decided just to take our pizza home and eat since it was starting to sprinkle anyway. We power walked to the bus stop and then home after we got off. Our cheesy bread and pizza was delicious though. We got a pizza called the Cannibale. It had bbq sauce, chicken, meatballs, spicy sausage, & Mozzarela. It was sooo good! We have left overs to eat tomorrow too.
We are both exhausted from being up for so long and having to actually think for the first time since May all day today. We'll be going to bed here soon. We don't have classes tomorrow so we are going to the mall place downtown to go to the store we saw that is for the trains. We got a pamphlet from them at school about getting a card to get cheap train tickets and we want to check it out a little more. We are also going to get klennex at Monoprix cause our grocery store doesnt' carry them and we are out of our last box from monoprix. I'll post again tomorrow but it will prolly be boring unless we find something out about the train stuff.
After that class we went and asked the WellCome Team people the specifics about the trip to Amsterdam they have planned...it was during one of the weekends we were thinking about going to Disneyland so we wanted to see if it was worth it. We ate lunch while we thought about it and decided that if we could get Disney tickets for the other weekend we would go on the trip with the school. We ended up booking our tickets for Disneyland for 3 days and 2 nights at the Disneyland Santa Fe Hotel. We will go to Disneyland Friday Oct 2nd, Saturday 3rd, and Sunday 4th. We'll stay at the hotel Friday & Saturday night. We'll be traveling overnight on the train...hopefully...friday & sunday nights. We get breakfast each morning and "park hopper"...which means we can go back and forth between the parks as much as we want...for all 3 days with our package.
When we finished booking our trip it was time for the next class. This one was a straight 3 hr lecture called Financial Analysis. The teacher was late to start the class and didn't even introduce himself. He didn't go through the syllabus or anything he just starting lecturing. His form of lecturing was reading straight off his powerpoints. Not very effective in keeping me awake for 3 hrs. He had no control over the class at all. He didn't talk very loudly and there were so many people talking in the room that we could barely hear him where we were sitting...not to metion his horrible accent. He also randomly just started...we are assuming...repeating himself in French. When he would try to get the class to quiet down...which didn't work...he would tap his marker on the desk in front of him...it always made up jump...but no one quit talking. He would sometimes randomly stop talking and walk around the room for like 5 minutes...we really have no idea why. We did get a break in the middle of the class...it was suppossed to be for 15 minutes but lasted over 25. He kept having 1 on 1 converstations with people in the front of the room in French...kind of a waste of our time. At the end of class he just randomly quit lecturing in the middle of a slid and told us to complete the 3 sections of HW he had passed out...everyone only had 2 sections. Needless to say this man was completely annoying and a worthless teacher. This should be an interesting class every week...at least I have Morgan with me.
After class we had a little over an hour till my meeting about my schedule so we went back to the student lounge and decided to book our trip to London. Morgan had seen that the Gymnastic World Championships were in London in October so we are going!!! They are October 13th-18th. We are going to both the men's and women's event finals on Saturday & Sunday night. I can't believe I get to go to the World Championships for Gymnastics!!
I went upstairs for my meeting a little early and she was just getting back from another meeting so I got to go ahead and start my meeting. I explained to her about how I went to the other class this morning and he didn't seem to mind. She made sure I didn't have a conflict with any of my other classes and said it would prolly work out better for the group sizes anyway. She also let me go ahead and be in Morgan's group and everything!! I asked her about my class for Thursday (which still isn't showing on the internet) and she said to just go ahead and go to the one Morgan is in and she put a note that I want to be in that class and she was going to try to just put me in that one to start with. She also said our French classes will be posted by Thursday so we'll know when our class is on Monday. After all that she showed me that right outside her office is the Internatonal student board where things we need to know will be posted. This all took about 5 minutes and I was so happy!! Nothing is ever that quick of goes that smoothly in Rolla.
We headed home after being at school for wayyyy to long (We'd been there about 9 hrs). Once we got home we relaxed for a bit and then took the bus down to the Dominos to reward ourselves for sitting through 6 hrs of classes. They don't have tables in their pizza places to we sat at a table outside a little cafe down the street. After we'd been sitting there about 5 minutes a guy came out said hi and then just stood there staring at us. We decided to get up and were closing our box when he walked off quickly and said "no eat eat." We were creeped out and decided just to take our pizza home and eat since it was starting to sprinkle anyway. We power walked to the bus stop and then home after we got off. Our cheesy bread and pizza was delicious though. We got a pizza called the Cannibale. It had bbq sauce, chicken, meatballs, spicy sausage, & Mozzarela. It was sooo good! We have left overs to eat tomorrow too.
We are both exhausted from being up for so long and having to actually think for the first time since May all day today. We'll be going to bed here soon. We don't have classes tomorrow so we are going to the mall place downtown to go to the store we saw that is for the trains. We got a pamphlet from them at school about getting a card to get cheap train tickets and we want to check it out a little more. We are also going to get klennex at Monoprix cause our grocery store doesnt' carry them and we are out of our last box from monoprix. I'll post again tomorrow but it will prolly be boring unless we find something out about the train stuff.
Monday, September 14, 2009
"First" Day of Classes
It's in quotes cause we didn't actually have any classes today. We slept in till 11 cause we were both super worn out from our amazing trip yesterday. Once we woke up we just laid around the apartment and dreaded having to go to school for out meeting at 2. We ended up finally getting ready and going to the meeting which wasn't actually a meeting. The lady just asked if anyone had questions and announced that some of the classes still weren't showing online (my thursday class still isn't) and that they would for sure all be fixed by thursday. Then she had everyone walk down to the front and get there student cards (ID). We waited till everyone had gone so we wouldn't have to stand in line forever and we weren't in a hurry and we had a few questions for her.
When we finally went to get our cards we asked her about declaring a Dr. like our social security said we had to...but no one ever told us how. She told us we should have already done it...another thing the smelly lady messed up...but that we could wait till we went to see the Dr. and fill out the form at the office. She told us not to worry about it though because we were only here for a semester and prolly wouldn't get sick. We both looked at each other and just laughed and told her that wasn't possible...we WOULD get sick. She told us just to look at the list of English speaking Dr. and chose one but to wait till we did get to sick to fill out the form. I also asked her about switching classes. The class I'm wanting to switch into is tomorrow morning and my meeting isn't till tomorrow evening. She suggested I go to the class in the morning and explain to the teacher why I'm there...I'm hoping he won't have any problem with it and that will make it easier in my meeting to get my schedule changed. I'm also hoping that in my meeting she will be able to tell me when my other class actually is. Thats kind of important!!
After we finished asking our questions we went into the student lounge to use the internet to get all of our pictures on facebook, captioned, and tagged. I was hoping to get some on here too but the website wouldn't cooperate for some reason. I did get every picture on facebook though so you can check them out there until I can get them on here.
On our way home we stopped at the grocery store to get quite a bit of stuff. We made a list to make sure we didn't forget anything and hopefully we won't have to go back until Wednesday when we both don't have classes and we plan on going to Monoprix downtown to get some stuff they don't carry at our store. We picked up a lot of stuff and it wasn't very much more than we usually spend so we were proud of ourselves...we are becoming better shoppers.
We were really wanting to order Domino's for dinner becuase Morgan isn't feeling super good and it sounded good. We couldn't figure out their website for ordering online and they didn't really seem to have any "regular" pizzas. We gave up after a while and just had a little snack instead to fill us up. Around 8 I ended up making another round of egg sandwiches on baguette. They were just as delicous this time! While we were eating we saw a commercial for what seemed like a really great deal at Disneyland Paris. We started looking into it and found out that they decorate and have special things during october and november for Halloween. We decided it was an awesome deal and figured out our weekends and are going to book the trip tomorrow. We are planning on going the first weekend in October. We'll be going to the park all day Friday, staying at Disney's Santa Fe Hotel Friday night, and going to the other park all day Saturday before prolly staying in a hostel and visiting Paris on Sunday. We are so excited!!!
I talked to Amy & Caden a little while I was looking at the stuff on Disneyland and he gets so excited to see me. I love it!!!
My shin is hurting today and I keep bumping it on stuff, but I'll take this little pain over what my legs felt like today last year!! I did almost break myself today though. We were walking away from the ATM before going to the grocery store and I was putting my cash into my wallet. I forgot there were 3 steps leading away from the ATM to the street. I noticed Morgan slowed down and looked away from my wallet to see why...I was stepping off the top step and didn't even realize it. I tried to extend my step mid-air and was going to only make it halfway onto the bottom step. I had to extend my step even farther and practically landing...super hard on my left leg...in the splits. I managed not to fall and Morgan was super confused about what had just happened. I had to explain it to her and we laughed the whole way to the store.
It's shower time though because we have to leave for class at 7:45 in the morning so I have time ot talk to the proffessor before class. I'll try to get the pics up tomorrow during one of my breaks in classes and I'll post about my classes and meeting tomorrow night!!
When we finally went to get our cards we asked her about declaring a Dr. like our social security said we had to...but no one ever told us how. She told us we should have already done it...another thing the smelly lady messed up...but that we could wait till we went to see the Dr. and fill out the form at the office. She told us not to worry about it though because we were only here for a semester and prolly wouldn't get sick. We both looked at each other and just laughed and told her that wasn't possible...we WOULD get sick. She told us just to look at the list of English speaking Dr. and chose one but to wait till we did get to sick to fill out the form. I also asked her about switching classes. The class I'm wanting to switch into is tomorrow morning and my meeting isn't till tomorrow evening. She suggested I go to the class in the morning and explain to the teacher why I'm there...I'm hoping he won't have any problem with it and that will make it easier in my meeting to get my schedule changed. I'm also hoping that in my meeting she will be able to tell me when my other class actually is. Thats kind of important!!
After we finished asking our questions we went into the student lounge to use the internet to get all of our pictures on facebook, captioned, and tagged. I was hoping to get some on here too but the website wouldn't cooperate for some reason. I did get every picture on facebook though so you can check them out there until I can get them on here.
On our way home we stopped at the grocery store to get quite a bit of stuff. We made a list to make sure we didn't forget anything and hopefully we won't have to go back until Wednesday when we both don't have classes and we plan on going to Monoprix downtown to get some stuff they don't carry at our store. We picked up a lot of stuff and it wasn't very much more than we usually spend so we were proud of ourselves...we are becoming better shoppers.
We were really wanting to order Domino's for dinner becuase Morgan isn't feeling super good and it sounded good. We couldn't figure out their website for ordering online and they didn't really seem to have any "regular" pizzas. We gave up after a while and just had a little snack instead to fill us up. Around 8 I ended up making another round of egg sandwiches on baguette. They were just as delicous this time! While we were eating we saw a commercial for what seemed like a really great deal at Disneyland Paris. We started looking into it and found out that they decorate and have special things during october and november for Halloween. We decided it was an awesome deal and figured out our weekends and are going to book the trip tomorrow. We are planning on going the first weekend in October. We'll be going to the park all day Friday, staying at Disney's Santa Fe Hotel Friday night, and going to the other park all day Saturday before prolly staying in a hostel and visiting Paris on Sunday. We are so excited!!!
I talked to Amy & Caden a little while I was looking at the stuff on Disneyland and he gets so excited to see me. I love it!!!
My shin is hurting today and I keep bumping it on stuff, but I'll take this little pain over what my legs felt like today last year!! I did almost break myself today though. We were walking away from the ATM before going to the grocery store and I was putting my cash into my wallet. I forgot there were 3 steps leading away from the ATM to the street. I noticed Morgan slowed down and looked away from my wallet to see why...I was stepping off the top step and didn't even realize it. I tried to extend my step mid-air and was going to only make it halfway onto the bottom step. I had to extend my step even farther and practically landing...super hard on my left leg...in the splits. I managed not to fall and Morgan was super confused about what had just happened. I had to explain it to her and we laughed the whole way to the store.
It's shower time though because we have to leave for class at 7:45 in the morning so I have time ot talk to the proffessor before class. I'll try to get the pics up tomorrow during one of my breaks in classes and I'll post about my classes and meeting tomorrow night!!
Pictures from Dina & St Malo
Here are my pictures from my amazing trip Sunday!!!
Dinan
This is a carving inside the church
(Yes, they are camels...It was for my friend)
The front of the inside of the church
The back of the church
The vew of the river off the city walls
Haning out on the walls
The bridge to enter the city
A wooden house in the city
(I liked the colors on this one)
St. Malo
The city walls
The French Flag
The flag of Brittany
The beach from the city walls
Overlooking the beach
All the Sailboats
The water on the rocks we climbed on
The water crashing over the rocks
(This reminds me of the begining of Grease)
Me out on the rocks being gangsta
The water breaking on the shore
(Mount St. Michele in the background)
Mount St. Michele
Me way up on the rocks by MSM
The beautiful view from Mt. St. Michele
Bus ride home...exhausted & wind blown
My shin after scrapping it
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Dinan & St. Malo
We had to get up WAY to early this morning and hike all the way to school in the cold cause the buses don't start running till after 8. We were supposed to meet at 8:15 but of course had to wait till almost 8:45 cause the people at our school...who preach about being on time constantly...are amazing at being on time. Once we finally left we had about an hour drive to Dinan which was our first stop of the day. Pretty much everyone on the bus passed out. When we got to Dinan we stopped at a little cafe and most people ordered coffee or some breakfast. We choose to just sit in the sun...it was super windy and cold. Once breakfast was over we walked to the Tourism Office and met up with our guide who would be taking us on a tour of this historic city. It was a midevil city that used to have walls all the way around it to protect it. Some of the walls still stand. We looked at a bunch of houses that have been around since the 15th century as well as a a church that houses the heart of a very famous knight from Brittany. We got to see the walls and some of the towers that still stand. It was a beautiful view. We got a few minutes to look through souviner shop and then got back on the bus to go to St. Malo.
St. Malo is another medevil town except this one still has all of the walls intacked, you can walk all the way around the city on top of the walls. I fell asleep again on the way to St. Malo and Morgan woke me up just in time to see the beach as we passed it. We drove around the whole outside of the city while the welcome team tried ot figure out where we needed to go in to get to the resturant we were going to eat at. After we finally got off and went into to the city, they asked some people and the resturant was outside the city. We got back on the bus and drove to a sketchy looking place and stopped outside of a closed resturant, they hadn't made sure the place was open for lunch before we got there. We drove back to the city and went in to look for a place that could hold 40 people for lunch. They picked a really nice resturant and we had a 3 course meal with wine. The appitizer was a little scary but i had chicken and fries for main course and carmel & chocolate ice cream for dessert.
Once we were done eating we were allowed to go explore the city and the beach for about 3 hours. We checked out a souviner shop and bought a few postcards and I got a bracelet with a real four leaf clover made into it. We decided we were ready for the beach. We made our way through the city and outside the walls to the beach. It was absolutely the most beautiful thing I have ever seen!! There was white sand, amazing rocks jutting out into the water, & the bluest water I think i have ever seen. There were also sail boat in the water and a million seagulls flying around. We climbed out onto the rocks to take some pictures and as we started out we jumped up onto a concrete platform to get to the rocks and my foot sliped and I scrapped my shin all up and bruised it (Considering what happend today last year...I think that was an ok injury). We spent forever wondering all over the rocks and take hundreds of pictures. I felt like a mountain climber as much as we climbed up and down and all over the rocks that surrounded the water. I climbed down all the way to where the waves were breaking right in front of me and I was trying to get a cool picture of it when 2 guys snorkeling appearing and caught my attention...a wave a little bigger than had been coming in broke at that point and my jeans and shoes got splashed...it was kinda funny. A bunch of the seagulls floated in this one little pool by the shore and flew up everytime a wave broke while it passed them. We also climbed all the way out to where Mount St. Michel was, it cost money so we didn't actually go in, and explored around it. There was some kind of sailboat convention thing going on so we got to see a ton of boats in the water right by the shore.
Once we were worn out from rock climbing and sick of being blown away by the wind we went back into the city to explore and see all the shops. There were a ton of souviner type shops since it was a tourist town and i think we went in every single one. I think every one of them had owl stuff in it too. We aren't sure if it has some sort of meaning to them but we had never seen so much owl stuff before. We bought these really cute necklaces that have owls on them...we just couldn't pass them up. I also bought a shot glass and a ring with the symbol for Brittany on it becuase I love it. We found a store that was call cinco (which is ironic since thats Spanish) and it was like everythings a dollar...except everything was 5 Euros. They had all kinds of stuff but we both bought a watch. It was the first place we had seen digital watches and they were cheap. I didn't bring either of my watches with me since the batteries were dead and it's too scary to keep my cell phone in my pocket here...and it's bad in class here to have it out even just for time. We had visited every tourist store and it still wasn't time to meet back up to get on the bus so we went in a store we had been in downtown yesterday called Pimkie. I had seen this adorable black leather bomber jacket for only 30 Euros and a really wanted it but i talked myself out of it...that didn't work so well today. It looks really good on me though and it's real cold here.
It was finally close enough to time to head back up towards the entrance to the city where we were meeting and where we had seen the creperie we wanted to get a crepe at (there were tons in the city but this one was the most reasonably priced). I got a crepe with chocolat...which was actually nutella...and it was amazing!! So much better than the last one I had and a lot bigger for the same price. We walked outside the walls and met up with all the students and were waiting for the WellCome Team people till after it was time to meet. Someone finally went back inside the walls and found them waiting there for us. They made all of us come in to them for them to count us...then we went back out and walked all the way to where the bus was. Once we were finally on it was time to head home. It only tool us about 45 minutes to get back and luckily the buses were still running. About 20 of us hopped on the bus that came about 15 minutes after we got back and almost all of us got off at the stop by our apartment. We found out that there are actually 12 students that live here. 8 are Phillipeano...2 of them live on our floor, the rest live on the 4th floor with the 2 girls from Colorado. The girls from Iowa live pretty close to us as well as the super odd Finnish girls...who all wear black and look identical...3 are super duper tiny and one is fat...3 have the exact same color bleach blonde hair except on of the tiny ones has darker hair...they kind of annoy us.
Once we finally got home we loaded our pics on our computers and I made us scrambled eggs for dinner since eggs are the only food we have in our house. We forgot yesterday we were out and that the stores are all closed on Sundays. We were going to go tomorrow before we have to be at school to get some groceries. We have a meeting at 2 tomorrow at school to get our student cards and we are going to take our computers to check our schedules again and hope my other class is showing finally. I am also going to use the good school internet to upload some of my pics from today...I'll put just a few on here but all the good ones will be on facebook so you'll have to check them out there.
I'm exhausted, tired of typing, and my shin needs to get washed off...the scratch is a little dirty. I'll be sure to write tomorrow and tell you the meeting was and get the pictures added. It was the most gorgeous place...they pictures don't even do it justice!!
**Today was definetely a test of my patience which seems to happen a lot here...especially when it comes to the WellCome Team. I'm doing my best not to let the little things get to me and just blow things off. I understand they work on a whole different philosophy than we do about time and punctuality. Maybe this is going to be good for me in helping me deal with people I work with in the future who don't understand that to me being on time means arriving at least 15 minutes early...ALWAYS!! Anyways just wanted to fill you in on the little life thoughts I was having today**
St. Malo is another medevil town except this one still has all of the walls intacked, you can walk all the way around the city on top of the walls. I fell asleep again on the way to St. Malo and Morgan woke me up just in time to see the beach as we passed it. We drove around the whole outside of the city while the welcome team tried ot figure out where we needed to go in to get to the resturant we were going to eat at. After we finally got off and went into to the city, they asked some people and the resturant was outside the city. We got back on the bus and drove to a sketchy looking place and stopped outside of a closed resturant, they hadn't made sure the place was open for lunch before we got there. We drove back to the city and went in to look for a place that could hold 40 people for lunch. They picked a really nice resturant and we had a 3 course meal with wine. The appitizer was a little scary but i had chicken and fries for main course and carmel & chocolate ice cream for dessert.
Once we were done eating we were allowed to go explore the city and the beach for about 3 hours. We checked out a souviner shop and bought a few postcards and I got a bracelet with a real four leaf clover made into it. We decided we were ready for the beach. We made our way through the city and outside the walls to the beach. It was absolutely the most beautiful thing I have ever seen!! There was white sand, amazing rocks jutting out into the water, & the bluest water I think i have ever seen. There were also sail boat in the water and a million seagulls flying around. We climbed out onto the rocks to take some pictures and as we started out we jumped up onto a concrete platform to get to the rocks and my foot sliped and I scrapped my shin all up and bruised it (Considering what happend today last year...I think that was an ok injury). We spent forever wondering all over the rocks and take hundreds of pictures. I felt like a mountain climber as much as we climbed up and down and all over the rocks that surrounded the water. I climbed down all the way to where the waves were breaking right in front of me and I was trying to get a cool picture of it when 2 guys snorkeling appearing and caught my attention...a wave a little bigger than had been coming in broke at that point and my jeans and shoes got splashed...it was kinda funny. A bunch of the seagulls floated in this one little pool by the shore and flew up everytime a wave broke while it passed them. We also climbed all the way out to where Mount St. Michel was, it cost money so we didn't actually go in, and explored around it. There was some kind of sailboat convention thing going on so we got to see a ton of boats in the water right by the shore.
Once we were worn out from rock climbing and sick of being blown away by the wind we went back into the city to explore and see all the shops. There were a ton of souviner type shops since it was a tourist town and i think we went in every single one. I think every one of them had owl stuff in it too. We aren't sure if it has some sort of meaning to them but we had never seen so much owl stuff before. We bought these really cute necklaces that have owls on them...we just couldn't pass them up. I also bought a shot glass and a ring with the symbol for Brittany on it becuase I love it. We found a store that was call cinco (which is ironic since thats Spanish) and it was like everythings a dollar...except everything was 5 Euros. They had all kinds of stuff but we both bought a watch. It was the first place we had seen digital watches and they were cheap. I didn't bring either of my watches with me since the batteries were dead and it's too scary to keep my cell phone in my pocket here...and it's bad in class here to have it out even just for time. We had visited every tourist store and it still wasn't time to meet back up to get on the bus so we went in a store we had been in downtown yesterday called Pimkie. I had seen this adorable black leather bomber jacket for only 30 Euros and a really wanted it but i talked myself out of it...that didn't work so well today. It looks really good on me though and it's real cold here.
It was finally close enough to time to head back up towards the entrance to the city where we were meeting and where we had seen the creperie we wanted to get a crepe at (there were tons in the city but this one was the most reasonably priced). I got a crepe with chocolat...which was actually nutella...and it was amazing!! So much better than the last one I had and a lot bigger for the same price. We walked outside the walls and met up with all the students and were waiting for the WellCome Team people till after it was time to meet. Someone finally went back inside the walls and found them waiting there for us. They made all of us come in to them for them to count us...then we went back out and walked all the way to where the bus was. Once we were finally on it was time to head home. It only tool us about 45 minutes to get back and luckily the buses were still running. About 20 of us hopped on the bus that came about 15 minutes after we got back and almost all of us got off at the stop by our apartment. We found out that there are actually 12 students that live here. 8 are Phillipeano...2 of them live on our floor, the rest live on the 4th floor with the 2 girls from Colorado. The girls from Iowa live pretty close to us as well as the super odd Finnish girls...who all wear black and look identical...3 are super duper tiny and one is fat...3 have the exact same color bleach blonde hair except on of the tiny ones has darker hair...they kind of annoy us.
Once we finally got home we loaded our pics on our computers and I made us scrambled eggs for dinner since eggs are the only food we have in our house. We forgot yesterday we were out and that the stores are all closed on Sundays. We were going to go tomorrow before we have to be at school to get some groceries. We have a meeting at 2 tomorrow at school to get our student cards and we are going to take our computers to check our schedules again and hope my other class is showing finally. I am also going to use the good school internet to upload some of my pics from today...I'll put just a few on here but all the good ones will be on facebook so you'll have to check them out there.
I'm exhausted, tired of typing, and my shin needs to get washed off...the scratch is a little dirty. I'll be sure to write tomorrow and tell you the meeting was and get the pictures added. It was the most gorgeous place...they pictures don't even do it justice!!
**Today was definetely a test of my patience which seems to happen a lot here...especially when it comes to the WellCome Team. I'm doing my best not to let the little things get to me and just blow things off. I understand they work on a whole different philosophy than we do about time and punctuality. Maybe this is going to be good for me in helping me deal with people I work with in the future who don't understand that to me being on time means arriving at least 15 minutes early...ALWAYS!! Anyways just wanted to fill you in on the little life thoughts I was having today**
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Shopping & a Cold Shower
We tried to sleep in a little this morning since we didn't have to be at the scavenger hunt untill 2. We ended up waking up before our alarms with horrible sinus headaches. After taking our medicine and eating some breakfast we got to feeling a little better. We got ready and headed downtown to where we thought we were supposed to meet for the treasure hunt...but no one was there!!
We decided to take the bus back to our apartment real quick and grab our purses and shop instead. We had seen people carrying H&M bags the last time we were shopping and we wanted to find it. We started out the way we had gone last time and kept going...we kept passing people who had H&M bags so we knew we had to be heading the right direction...then we looked around a corner and there it was!!! It wasn't quite as big as the one in Chicago but it was still pretty impressive. They gave us each a coupon on the way in that if you bought at least 2 things the more expensive one was 20% off. I found this adorable jacket I had seen a girl wearing during orientation that i kept talking about. I passed it up as we were shopping but then we had to walk back by it to leave. Morgan was looking at something so i picked one up and tried it on...they have real weird sizes here so i wasn't sure if it would fit or not. It was perfect!! Morgan turned around and pretty much told me i couldn't leave without it. I told her she had to buy this dress she liked then so we could use the discount. Just while ago when i was cleaning out my purse and was about to throw away my coupon from H&M I saw that it was good till Dec. 9th...needless to say i didn't throw it away.
After H&M we walked back to the main bus station and hoped on a bus that was supposed to take us to the mall type place we found the very first day we were downtown. It dropped us off right outside. This was the place with the Monoprix that had absolutley everything. We walked around a little and found some cute stuff, then ended up back at monoprix cause we had a few things we wanted. We found white chocolate covered oreos and pre-mixed refrigerated brownie mix...you all know i can't pass up something like that. We decided we were getting hungry and tired so we wanted to head hit up a Creperie and then home. Sadly...every Creperie we saw and tried to stop at...was closed. Aparently they are only open on saturday mornings.
We ended up just breaking into our new baguette when we got home. We also split a giant microwavable spagetti for dinner with a little baguette. After dinner i finished up my book, the first left behind book, it was really good. I'm excited to start the 2nd one...I think i'm going to finish the 4 I brought with me far before it's time to head home. My head was starting to hurt again so i thought maybe a hot shower would help. We have been having a little trouble with both of us getting through our showers, if we take them back to back, with super hot water. Morgan had showered this morning so i assumed i'd be ok...I was terribly wrong. Before i even finished with my shampoo I had to turn it all the way to hot...and it was frezzing before i could get washed off and the conditioner out of my hair. It was a sad moment.
We are going to have a brownie batter party here in a few minutes and then head to bed because we have to be up early tomorrow for our trip. We are going with school to the Brittany coasts to see Mount St. Michel. We have seen pictures and this place looks gorgous so we are really excited. Hopefully this time we are really meeting where they told us we were so we don't miss it. We are leaving extra early to make sure we have time to find them. We aren't sure what time we will be back tomorrow night so incase i dont post thats why. I'll make sure and take lots of pics and hopefully the internet will cooperate and let me get them up here for you guys.
Enjoy the fair!!! I had a piece of taffy today to make me a little less sad.
We decided to take the bus back to our apartment real quick and grab our purses and shop instead. We had seen people carrying H&M bags the last time we were shopping and we wanted to find it. We started out the way we had gone last time and kept going...we kept passing people who had H&M bags so we knew we had to be heading the right direction...then we looked around a corner and there it was!!! It wasn't quite as big as the one in Chicago but it was still pretty impressive. They gave us each a coupon on the way in that if you bought at least 2 things the more expensive one was 20% off. I found this adorable jacket I had seen a girl wearing during orientation that i kept talking about. I passed it up as we were shopping but then we had to walk back by it to leave. Morgan was looking at something so i picked one up and tried it on...they have real weird sizes here so i wasn't sure if it would fit or not. It was perfect!! Morgan turned around and pretty much told me i couldn't leave without it. I told her she had to buy this dress she liked then so we could use the discount. Just while ago when i was cleaning out my purse and was about to throw away my coupon from H&M I saw that it was good till Dec. 9th...needless to say i didn't throw it away.
After H&M we walked back to the main bus station and hoped on a bus that was supposed to take us to the mall type place we found the very first day we were downtown. It dropped us off right outside. This was the place with the Monoprix that had absolutley everything. We walked around a little and found some cute stuff, then ended up back at monoprix cause we had a few things we wanted. We found white chocolate covered oreos and pre-mixed refrigerated brownie mix...you all know i can't pass up something like that. We decided we were getting hungry and tired so we wanted to head hit up a Creperie and then home. Sadly...every Creperie we saw and tried to stop at...was closed. Aparently they are only open on saturday mornings.
We ended up just breaking into our new baguette when we got home. We also split a giant microwavable spagetti for dinner with a little baguette. After dinner i finished up my book, the first left behind book, it was really good. I'm excited to start the 2nd one...I think i'm going to finish the 4 I brought with me far before it's time to head home. My head was starting to hurt again so i thought maybe a hot shower would help. We have been having a little trouble with both of us getting through our showers, if we take them back to back, with super hot water. Morgan had showered this morning so i assumed i'd be ok...I was terribly wrong. Before i even finished with my shampoo I had to turn it all the way to hot...and it was frezzing before i could get washed off and the conditioner out of my hair. It was a sad moment.
We are going to have a brownie batter party here in a few minutes and then head to bed because we have to be up early tomorrow for our trip. We are going with school to the Brittany coasts to see Mount St. Michel. We have seen pictures and this place looks gorgous so we are really excited. Hopefully this time we are really meeting where they told us we were so we don't miss it. We are leaving extra early to make sure we have time to find them. We aren't sure what time we will be back tomorrow night so incase i dont post thats why. I'll make sure and take lots of pics and hopefully the internet will cooperate and let me get them up here for you guys.
Enjoy the fair!!! I had a piece of taffy today to make me a little less sad.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Last day of Orientation!!
Last night was interesting. We about froze to death waiting for the WellCome Team to meet us all and lead us where we were going. We went to this pretty cool bar/club called Museum. We got in free but drinks were ridiculously expensive, so we only had a couple. They had all kinds of stuff...but no American beer (we have yet to find any Bud products). They did have Smirnoff Ice and they put a glow stick in it...which was kinda cool. They had a pretty big dance floor which the crazy European people packed. We enjoyed sitting along the sides laughing at the way they all dance. They pretty much rave...to Techno music. They did play a few American songs and it was funny to listen to the other kids sing them...yet they still jumped while they danced. They had trouble keeping there feet on the ground for some reason. We only stayed till about 11:30 since we had meetings again today. When we got home we stopped by McDonalds cause I was hungry. I used some of the little French I know to order my food...the chick didn't understand very simple english...not even fries instead of frites...but i got my point across. We came home and ate and washed our feet off cause we both wore flip flops and we had to walk a long way from the bus stop to the club. Then we headed to bed for some much needed sleep.
This morning we had no desire to get up at 7:30 when our alarms went off...but it was our last day of orientation and we were going to be done by lunch. We got to school and got to listen to even more pointless lectures. They first one was on how to use the library and it's website, which they had taught us in our compter training sessions...it was also all on the paper the lady handed out. They next meeting was supposed to give us info about Brittany (the area we live in) and allow us to discuss some of the things we like and don't like so far. The discussion part was kinda fun because we got in small groups of 4-5 and wrote things down. We met 2 girls from Norway and they were real nice. They said they couldn't find good bread though...we aren't real sure what they are talking about...they may be on crack...the bread here is amazing! The other part we were supposed to watch a slide show and video and then play a game to see how much we learned. They were both real boring and about stuff we already pretty much knew...and everyone was tired from the night before. Our group didn't win the prize...o well. After the meetings were finally over we got out our computers and were finally able to see most of our schedules. I have a class on Friday afternoon :(, Morgans class is on Tuesday morning so I made an appt to try to get my schedule changed. Hopefully we can figure something out. My other 2 classes one is on Tuesday afternoon and the other Thursday afternoon. Our French class will be on Monday afternoons but we are sure what time yet but they dont start to week after next so we have time still. The Welcome Drink was the last thing of the day and it was outside under the apple trees. There was a long table that had soda, water, and juice on it and some odd looking food. By the time we got out there after scheduling my meeting there were no cups and neither of us were real hungry or feeling very brave.
We decided just to start home cause we had a few errands to run first. We stopped at the bank so I could get some cash at the ATM. Their money is very wierd here. The coins are in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, & 50 cent incriments as well as 1 & 2 Euros. The dollars dont start till 5 Euros and instead of all being the same size like ours, they get taller depending on much they are worth...they are all the same length though.
After the bank we stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things we needed. We deicded to buy a bottle of cheap wine to try and we got some ketchup so we could eat the chicken nuggets we bought last week. They ended up being amazing.
The rest of the afternoon we have just been laying around the apartment reading and playing on our computers. I fell asleep for about an hour earlier and still feel exhausted. We got eggs when we were at the grocery store today and I made us fried eggs for dinner. We used our Baguette and sliced it to make egg sandwiches for dinner. They were delicious!! We'll prolly be going to bed pretty early tonight. I have some cool pictures to add so hopefully the internet will cooperate and i'll write more tomorrow. We are going on a "treasure" hunt tomorrow afternoon put on by the WellCome team so that should be fun.
Morgan & I at the club
Morgan's drink & the awesome tats they gave us
Glowing Smirnoffs
On the bus going home
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