May 2nd, 2008

It's been a while since my last update, so I gotta catch up on a bunch of stuff.

Most of last week was spent finishing my ISP which stands at about 35 pages all together. I'm really happy with it and I had to give a short presentation on it this week. My advisor fully edited it and even came to my presentation which was also really nice.

Last weekend (April 26-27) Chris, Kat, Steph, Alex, Ida, Nico, and I went to Lyon, France to see a soccer match. It was awesome. We got into Lyon around midday grabbed some lunch and walked around for a bit. Chris and I found a Olympique Lyonnaise (The soccer team) store and bought matching jerseys haha. Then we went down by the river (Lyon is surrounded by two rivers) where there were a ton of people chillin and playing and just hanging out. We got some bottles of wine and just soaked in the beautiful weather. APPARENTLY, however, you are not allowed to drink nor have glass down by the water, and we were threatened with 75 Euro fines (oops!).

After, we went to the soccer game which i cannot even describe. 40,000 fans just cheering and chanting the whole time. Lyonnaise played the entire second half down a man (because supposedly Grosso punched the ref at half time). The game ended in a 2-2 tie, with Lyonnaise hitting the crossbar in the 90th minute.

Saturday night was awesome as well. We all got back from the game, changed quickly and headed out to some bars/clubs. There are all these boats docked on the river, and they are all bars or clubs. We finally found a good one and danced and drank the night away on a boat!

We woke up Sunday and decided to go exploring. Most of the city was closed cause it was Sunday, but the city was beautiful. It is really really old, and we went up to the top of the city to see the beautiful Basilica and panoramic view. We saw town hall and a Roman ampitheater from 12 BC! At this point it was just me, Steph, Alex, and Nico and we headed to the train station to find out that the train we wanted to take doesn't run on the weekends, so we killed a few hours in a cafe trading curse words and slang back and forth in French and English. Nico now says "Badass" and "damn straight" a lot hahahahha.

That brings us to this week. There were mostly presentations this week, which were pretty boring. Yesterday was the last one, so we decided we had to celebrate. We have been wanting to go to this club in Lausanne called MAD. It's a really famous club and is supposed to be a ton of fun and we don't have class this morning so we figured it would be a good time to party all night. The club had a special rap night and so the DJs were playing all rap and old school rap. A whole bunch of the program came and so did Nico and Tiff and it was a ton of fun. There were many hours of sweaty dancing cause the place was packed. I think it was a tres bon way to end the program.

Today we have our last official SIT activity. We are taking a boat trip from Nyon to Geneva this afternoon, and then having a big group dinner tonight at the same place we had our first group dinner when we first arrived.

Tomorrow I think I'm doing something with my family, I'm not sure what yet. Sunday I'm going home.

I cannot believe how fast this semester went. It's unbelievable to think about all that I have seen and done and I can't believe I'm not going to see my friends from the program for probably quite some time. I'm also pretty sad to leave my host family, but obviously really excited to see everybody back home.

Not sure if this will be my last post or not, but what a long strange ride it's been :)