Posts
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| Saturday Feb 16 - Dublin, Ireland (Part 1) |
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| Sunday Feb 17 - Dublin, Ireland |
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| Monday Feb 18 - Travel to Glasgow via Belfast, Northern Ireland |
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| Tuesday Feb 19 - Glasgow, Scotland |
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| Wednesday Feb 20 - Glasgow & Highlands |
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| Thursday Feb 21 - Glasgow & Travel to London |
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| Friday Feb 22 - London |
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| Saturday Feb 23 - London |
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| Sunday Feb 24 - Traveling Home |
That's all the albums from my trip! And a ton of pictures too!
As far as things that have been going on since I got back, I didn't have classes the first few days of that week because it was rattrapages from last semester. Basically here, if you don't get a passing final grade, you are given a second chance to make a passing grade and that's what those are. That whole week just kinda flew by then because I didn't have many classes and was still in a tourist mood - but by the weekend I was good and back in the mood for classes. So by the time monday of this week came around - it had been two weeks since most of my classes met so it was kinda odd getting back into them.
This week in my one class I had to present my first project which is worth a third of my final grade (Performance Artistic). It was a simple project - we had to create a 3 min presentation of images dealing with the word we were given in the beginning of the course. My word was bruit which is noise. So after my original idea got ruled out because I was just unable to create it visually, I came up with another idea last week and set to work on it. The concept was that the world is full of noises - cars, computers, music, crowds, ... everyday noise. All that everyday noise blends together and ends up sounding repeated - like white noise. So the first part of my clip was a bunch of video files I got offline about crowds, music, cars, traffic, etc. I sped up the clips and ran them one after the other - but I muted each clip's sound and instead played "white noise" Then I had a clip of my loud alarm clock going off with the phrase that there are better noises in the world that we forget about. Then I had a bunch of clips played in real time with the sound. These were clips of birds chirping, cats meowing, dogs barking, children playing in the park, rain, storms, and other sounds of nature that are the beautiful sounds we tend to forget about because they get lost among all the other everyday noises.
So I got up and presented my video - after Charlie presented hers. I think it went over well, the point got across. It was tough to talk about it and answer questions because in all my Art du Spectacle courses like this one I am the only international student and most of the other students don't speak English well or at all - nor do the professors! So thankfully Charlie is bilingual and was able to help out. Apparently we weren't supposed to use thigns from the internet but because I'm an international student the professor said that it was alright. Now I just have to work on my other two assignments for that class!
I've been heading to the gym rather often now - mostly with Charlie, but today I went by myself after my morning class. It wears me out but it's at least a healthy thing to be doing!
There's a huge party thing that's being hosted by the school this weekend that I'm going to go too, but aside from that my weekend is all about doing work for classes and studying because this next week I have 4 Devoirs Surveilles (DS) which are basically midterms. So I might get together with some friends and have a study group but not sure. March is a long month for me here as we don't have another break until the beginning of April and most of this time is taking DS and doing work for classes. I technically only have to pass 8 classes to transfer back for my credits back home however I've never been one to just settle for the minimum! So of my 14 classes, I still can drop a couple if I want to - or they become too much work. I just would feel bad now with being almost halfway through the semester and dropping a class so I probably won't unless it's going horrible. And even though some of the classes are tough to follow or are just plain boring - I do enjoy them or at least enjoy the people in them though that mostly applies to my 5 Arts du Spectacle courses as it's the same group of students and I'm the only international student - so in a way it's really helping me with the language and the culture.
I have some friends that share the same desire for taking the same trip over our next vacation in April which is two weeks long, so hopefully we'll be sitting down and getting that planned - hopefully it isn't too expensive for me! As the plan stands right now, we would leave here and head to Berlin, Germany for a few days. Then we would swing down through Prague in the Czech Republic for a day or so on our way to Vienna, Austria. After a day or two there we would head to Saltzburg, Austria (mainly to take the Sound of Music tour!). After that, we would head down to Venice, Italy. From there we're not sure as I ideally would want to go to Rome, Italy but one of the girls in our small group will be going to Rome the week before with her mother. So it's very rough in planning but it's most of what I was originally thinking of doing for that break so it was cool that I have friends interested in doing the same thing. Not that traveling alone is that bad - when you're alone you get to experience what you want to do without having to agree with the others in your group. But it'd be fun to travel and hang out with friends too - so hopefully we'll be figuring all that out these next few weeks.
Aside from that, there's not much else going on. As I said, this month is mostly about studying, taking tests, and doing schoolwork. But I'm sure interesting things will happen and I might take up some local sites around the Lille area on the weekends - and might plan a trip down to Paris as well with Charlie but that's all yet to be decided.
I was excited the other morning because I saw frost on cars! I'm still really missing the snow but the weather here has been rather nice - to the point that February didn't feel like February but more like April!
Well, I should go do some work and get some sleep, so till next time! Laterz!
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