What is with these sun themed titles lately, sheesh...you think a girl could come up with some more variety.
This week was full of spur of the moment decisions despite plenty of time off to actually make good choices.
Wednesday, I worked with a Polish guy named Kris who was preforming electrophoresis on proteins from hypothalimic rat testicles. I got to work with him through the whole process that took nearly the whole day, only to have it fail. I feel pretty awful about it because I probably screwed something up along the way. Anyway, this poor guy was so nervous around me because he didn't want to speak English around a native speaker. I was impressed with his abilities, but we kept a Polish to English dictionary up on his computer just in case.
The two Polish people in the team I am working with are quite friendly, and it is funny because everyone else thinks they work way to hard, but they say that the Dutch are slackers.
Thursday, I finally met undergraduate students. Hurrah! I was begining to think they didn't really exist and that the bachelor's category online was just to screw with me. But it turns out they must just hide in their little gnome hovels somewhere and study all the time or something.
Anyway, I was able to help (watch two men kill rats and rip their intestines out) set up for an interesting lab and then observe the class. The whole class was in Dutch, but the general idea is that the intestines were turned inside out to create sacs that would absorb sugars and then keep them inside to be measured. After the intestines hung in solution for a half an hour (just long enough for all the students to down a gallon of coffee), they were removed and the glucose contents of each section were measured using color detection. The class consisted of all food tech students, so the course was very basic. I guess the difficulty level of each course differs for each major, which makes sense but seems inefficient. But I sat in the corner by myself until a brave girl asked me why I was poking my nose around in their business. Houston, we've made contact!
After the lecture, I grabbed the ear of a Dutch student named Jochem ( try coughing when you say it, it makes it sound more correct). He and I talked about the differences between the U.S. universities and here. As it turns out, they are on a 10 point system and many classes are only based on the final exam with no curves. He also made fun of our Greek system a bit because he is in a frat, but he made a point to explain that it was a very different thing here. He and I are getting (bet you can't guess) coffee sometime to continue our discussion. I am glad to finally meet someone my age though. Most of my neighbors are at least 24, and one of them is 30.
Friday, I went in for less than a half an hour to have someone explain to me that the Dutch try to avoid working on Fridays in the summer. "Don't Americans get 30 days off a year just for vacation?" I can see now why the Polish thought they were slackers. So I took another long bike ride and saw all the ubber-romantic spots to take your girlfriend....sad for me. And NO! I have not found Sven to take me there....silly family.
Later that night, Sam and I tried to go out again, this time to the pubs. Haha, that was a joke. We walked around for awhile realizing that we were the youngest people out. Also, we must have stood out because we got tons of stares and cat calls. So, we hung our heads in defeat and came home. Maybe the international club isn't so bad......
Saturday we went to The Hague enjoying a nice relaxing day on the beach. The North Sea is freezing, and I apologize to my toes for even attempting to get in. The sand was nice though and it finally warmed up. I am pretty sure we were in a bad movie about L.A. circa 1988 however. The beach was packed with leather skined men in speedos and people playing bad beach music with their boom boxes. And yes, it is common for women to be topless on the beaches in Europe and no, we didn't do that. I thought it might be a good idea for the two of us to sip on a bottle of red while listening to the waves. Makes you feel smart when you have a perfectly good bottle of wine and nothing to open it with..heh... We were also pretty lame because McDonald's somehow sounded delicious. Tastes the same here to me, but it is now Sam's goal to try new McDonald's menu items in every new country she visits. We got back really late, and now we know the buses and trains still run at midnight. Thank God!
Today, I have just been reading and relaxing in my room. Tomorrow we enter Hell. Our four week class begins and lectures last from 8 to5 every day. Ugh. Goodbye free time! I will miss thee!
No comments:
Post a Comment