It's definitely exam season at Trinity - the libraries are completely full all day long (no one buys text books so come study time everyone is at the library), very few people are outside, and everyone is focused on studying. It's pretty crazy, but that's how it is here. There is very little assessment during the semester, so people don't bother learning things as they go. Then comes exams, when everyone realizes just how little they learned and so camp out in the library and feverishly go over notes for about a month. Trinity has a week long dead-day period, and then about 3 weeks of exams, so things are spread out more than UT and cramming is a bit more feasible, though I probably should have started a bit earlier.
I had my first exam on Monday and it wasn't too bad, I don't know how they grade here so I'm not sure how well I did but I am confident that I at least passed. Also, in the middle of the exams, they bring you tea and coffee :) It's very cute and quite nice! I've got another exam tomorrow, then Monday, Wednesday, a week off and my final one June 3rd. Twenty three hours after I finish that exam, I get on a plane home! It's crazy how fast things go!
Pretty much all of my free time now is studying, literally 8 or more hours a day. It's very sad, but its been raining a lot which makes spending all day inside less depressing. I made carrot cake after my last exam as a mental break, and to enjoy while studying. My room mates were very happy with that idea too :) Lots of tea and lots of studying still to do, so back to the library I go.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Little Things
I felt like blogging today, mainly to put off studying again - I haven't had any crazy adventures in the past 5 days :) This morning I did a bit of photography which was fun - a gorgeous day for it too! I read a photo blog by a guy in Austin, which was a bad idea because now I want to buy two new lenses (both cost about the same as my camera :\ ), and it made me a bit homesick as all the examples were from around Austin, even the 37th st lights :P So I went and took some pictures of my own and played with HDR, hopefully I'll get better at it with practice.
Trinity Ball was last night, I failed on the picture front as we were running late when getting ready and then I kept forgetting to take my camera out at the ball. It was a lot of fun though, they put up 5 different stages around campus, which is completely enclosed, and have bands playing from 10-5am. It's apparently the largest private party in Europe, woo! I went with my room mates but then hooked up with a couple frisbee kids (Sam, Jen, and Kevin) and we wandered around, running into Finola and Dave and then met Niall and several others for a 2am throwing session in the midst of the crowd. Good times :)
I also made pumpkin pie yesterday because several of my room mates had never had it and I felt like baking. I ended up buying a cheesecake in order to get a pie pan, and so now we have cheese cake and pumpkin pie in our fridge. Pie turned out surprisingly well considering it was baked in a deep-dish 6 or 7" pan rather than normal 9". I've decided I've definitely made too many pies in my life as I didn't even bother looking up a recipe for pie crust and could still make it. I guess there are worse things to know by heart.
Other news in my life: We found out that we have a place to live in Germany this summer, which is always good. The four of us going will be sharing a house outside of Würzburg, it'll be interesting and a bit far, but at least we don't have to pay for 6 months of housing. One of the girls is going in less than two weeks so I'll get info from her about it, as well as figure out what I'm actually going to be doing :P And I decided to go ahead and register for Windmill Windup, an ultimate tournament in Amsterdam the weekend I get back to Europe. It's kind of expensive but including airfair will end up being cheaper (and easier to get to) than Jestival (the other tournament I was thinking about, same weekend. Yes, frisbee has taken over my life) And finally, I'm actually starting to be productive - yay! Classes are done and my exams don't start until the 18th, so I have quite a while to buckle down and learn everything. Jealous of everyone who is already done!!
And with that, back to the studying! Wish me luck :)
Trinity Ball was last night, I failed on the picture front as we were running late when getting ready and then I kept forgetting to take my camera out at the ball. It was a lot of fun though, they put up 5 different stages around campus, which is completely enclosed, and have bands playing from 10-5am. It's apparently the largest private party in Europe, woo! I went with my room mates but then hooked up with a couple frisbee kids (Sam, Jen, and Kevin) and we wandered around, running into Finola and Dave and then met Niall and several others for a 2am throwing session in the midst of the crowd. Good times :)
I also made pumpkin pie yesterday because several of my room mates had never had it and I felt like baking. I ended up buying a cheesecake in order to get a pie pan, and so now we have cheese cake and pumpkin pie in our fridge. Pie turned out surprisingly well considering it was baked in a deep-dish 6 or 7" pan rather than normal 9". I've decided I've definitely made too many pies in my life as I didn't even bother looking up a recipe for pie crust and could still make it. I guess there are worse things to know by heart.
Other news in my life: We found out that we have a place to live in Germany this summer, which is always good. The four of us going will be sharing a house outside of Würzburg, it'll be interesting and a bit far, but at least we don't have to pay for 6 months of housing. One of the girls is going in less than two weeks so I'll get info from her about it, as well as figure out what I'm actually going to be doing :P And I decided to go ahead and register for Windmill Windup, an ultimate tournament in Amsterdam the weekend I get back to Europe. It's kind of expensive but including airfair will end up being cheaper (and easier to get to) than Jestival (the other tournament I was thinking about, same weekend. Yes, frisbee has taken over my life) And finally, I'm actually starting to be productive - yay! Classes are done and my exams don't start until the 18th, so I have quite a while to buckle down and learn everything. Jealous of everyone who is already done!!
And with that, back to the studying! Wish me luck :)
Monday, May 4, 2009
One month to go
Wow, time goes by fast! I have exactly a month left in Ireland and I'm not really sure what happened to the last four months. I've got 3 days of class left, a week of studying, then 5 exams spread out over 3 weeks before heading back to the States for 3 days and back to Europe (Germany this time). Crazy!
Since you last heard from me I've done a lot of studying and played a lot of frisbee (yes, it is taking over my life). The studying part is really uninteresting and involves me, the library and terms like "branching ratio of a complex logarithm" and "spin and parity of nucleons"so I'm assuming you don't want a detailed description of that. As for frisbee I played in two tournaments, mixed nationals in Dublin and Tom's Tourney in Bruges.
Mixed nationals was a club tournament for the various Irish clubs, there were 8 teams playing, mostly from Dublin. I played for Open Club Sandwich, a beginner's club mostly from DCU and DIT. We came in 8th but played a lot better than we were expected to. The team had me handling, which was new but probably good for me :P We had a lot of fun, and the weather even turned gorgeous for the second half of the day! I was voted team mvp and got chocolate :)
The next week went by really fast, as my flight to Brugge was early thursday morning (and over 100 euro cheaper than other flights, hence the skipping of class) I had to turn in assignments early so spent a lot of time in the library. My friend Jen and I did have a cooking date wednesday and made fajitas :) I decided against sleeping in the airport and just woke up really early to make my flight. There were 3 of us from the team, Deadly Buzz (Irish women), on the same flight and after having fun with ryanair's baggage restrictions made it to Charleroi and a bus and a train later to Brugge (definitely starting to get tired of ryanair and their out of the way airports). We spent that day grocery shopping, throwing, and basking in the sun - glorious! Kebabs for dinner, party on the pitches that night as the 4 Irish teams gathered (the other teams were Jabba, Broccoli, and Johnny Chimpo), and learning how to throw hammers and scoopers rounded out the night.
The next day our first game wasn't until 1, so 4 of us girls went in to town in search of waffles and chocolate (we were successful) and were back in time to watch a bit of Broccoli's game and then on to our day of ultimate. It was our first time to play together (I hadn't met about half of the girls before the tournament), so our first game was really rocky - 15 - 2 not in our favor, but as the weekend went on we got a lot better. We lost all 3 games our first day but learned a lot, and ran a lot - European teams are really fit! Our last game of the day we lost in sudden death, which was disapointing but showed how much we had learned during the day. That night there was a bbq which was really good and then a comedy show. We hung around afterwards, the Irish girls tried to have bonding time but the guys ended up joining us for a fairly epic game of never have i ever which ended with Kevin playing his guitar until we were kicked out of the tent at 3:30.
Saturday was our toughest and best day - we played 4 games and won 3 of them (technically our record for the day was 4-1, but we won the last match because a team dropped out). We started at 11:30 and played 3 games in a row with an hour in between. Our team of 17 slowly dropped in number as 4 people got injured, though thankfully not debilitatingly so we could still keep 2 lines. We played hard and won our group for the day and then decided to immediately play a challenge match to try and move up to the top 8, but lost that game and then found out we had to play a cross-over match. When we realized that we were "playing" the team that dropped out I don't think any of us have ever been so happy to not play a game. Instead we celebrated with showers, watching Jabba play, and going for dinner. After dinner we headed to the tournament party. That was great fun, lots of dancing and the vegetable game (try and say various fruit/veggies without showing your teeth or laughing). The Irish definitely won the party award - they danced all night and apparently were again the last to leave as the club was closing.
The next morning this was very apparent as all 3 teams (I don't know about Jabba) lost their early morning games. We couldn't get together the flow we had on Saturday and dissapointingly lost to a team we had beaten before so ended up playing in the semi-finals of the plate division (lower half). It was really windy and we started out quickly losing, but fought back and as time ran out scored a hard fought point to tie it, so continued play but sadly lost in the end. We did yoga with the team to try and avoid sore muscles (didn't work) and then celebrated a good tournament with champagne showers (apparently a tradition for one of the other Irish teams that we stole), watched the final, and headed to the airport.
Four of us were flying out of Charleroi, and could make the flight if we left Brugge at 4 am, and made it in 2 minutes from the train station to bus stop. We decided this wasn't worth it and so just headed there that night and slept in the airport. I was tired enough that I slept surprisingly well, then woke up dealt with the annoying baggage rules for ryanair, and made it on the plane back to Dublin. Great weekend, though I'm pretty sure I only got 18 hours of sleep the entire time and now my legs are competely exhausted. Gotta love frisbee :)
Since you last heard from me I've done a lot of studying and played a lot of frisbee (yes, it is taking over my life). The studying part is really uninteresting and involves me, the library and terms like "branching ratio of a complex logarithm" and "spin and parity of nucleons"so I'm assuming you don't want a detailed description of that. As for frisbee I played in two tournaments, mixed nationals in Dublin and Tom's Tourney in Bruges.
Mixed nationals was a club tournament for the various Irish clubs, there were 8 teams playing, mostly from Dublin. I played for Open Club Sandwich, a beginner's club mostly from DCU and DIT. We came in 8th but played a lot better than we were expected to. The team had me handling, which was new but probably good for me :P We had a lot of fun, and the weather even turned gorgeous for the second half of the day! I was voted team mvp and got chocolate :)
The next week went by really fast, as my flight to Brugge was early thursday morning (and over 100 euro cheaper than other flights, hence the skipping of class) I had to turn in assignments early so spent a lot of time in the library. My friend Jen and I did have a cooking date wednesday and made fajitas :) I decided against sleeping in the airport and just woke up really early to make my flight. There were 3 of us from the team, Deadly Buzz (Irish women), on the same flight and after having fun with ryanair's baggage restrictions made it to Charleroi and a bus and a train later to Brugge (definitely starting to get tired of ryanair and their out of the way airports). We spent that day grocery shopping, throwing, and basking in the sun - glorious! Kebabs for dinner, party on the pitches that night as the 4 Irish teams gathered (the other teams were Jabba, Broccoli, and Johnny Chimpo), and learning how to throw hammers and scoopers rounded out the night.
The next day our first game wasn't until 1, so 4 of us girls went in to town in search of waffles and chocolate (we were successful) and were back in time to watch a bit of Broccoli's game and then on to our day of ultimate. It was our first time to play together (I hadn't met about half of the girls before the tournament), so our first game was really rocky - 15 - 2 not in our favor, but as the weekend went on we got a lot better. We lost all 3 games our first day but learned a lot, and ran a lot - European teams are really fit! Our last game of the day we lost in sudden death, which was disapointing but showed how much we had learned during the day. That night there was a bbq which was really good and then a comedy show. We hung around afterwards, the Irish girls tried to have bonding time but the guys ended up joining us for a fairly epic game of never have i ever which ended with Kevin playing his guitar until we were kicked out of the tent at 3:30.
Saturday was our toughest and best day - we played 4 games and won 3 of them (technically our record for the day was 4-1, but we won the last match because a team dropped out). We started at 11:30 and played 3 games in a row with an hour in between. Our team of 17 slowly dropped in number as 4 people got injured, though thankfully not debilitatingly so we could still keep 2 lines. We played hard and won our group for the day and then decided to immediately play a challenge match to try and move up to the top 8, but lost that game and then found out we had to play a cross-over match. When we realized that we were "playing" the team that dropped out I don't think any of us have ever been so happy to not play a game. Instead we celebrated with showers, watching Jabba play, and going for dinner. After dinner we headed to the tournament party. That was great fun, lots of dancing and the vegetable game (try and say various fruit/veggies without showing your teeth or laughing). The Irish definitely won the party award - they danced all night and apparently were again the last to leave as the club was closing.
The next morning this was very apparent as all 3 teams (I don't know about Jabba) lost their early morning games. We couldn't get together the flow we had on Saturday and dissapointingly lost to a team we had beaten before so ended up playing in the semi-finals of the plate division (lower half). It was really windy and we started out quickly losing, but fought back and as time ran out scored a hard fought point to tie it, so continued play but sadly lost in the end. We did yoga with the team to try and avoid sore muscles (didn't work) and then celebrated a good tournament with champagne showers (apparently a tradition for one of the other Irish teams that we stole), watched the final, and headed to the airport.
Four of us were flying out of Charleroi, and could make the flight if we left Brugge at 4 am, and made it in 2 minutes from the train station to bus stop. We decided this wasn't worth it and so just headed there that night and slept in the airport. I was tired enough that I slept surprisingly well, then woke up dealt with the annoying baggage rules for ryanair, and made it on the plane back to Dublin. Great weekend, though I'm pretty sure I only got 18 hours of sleep the entire time and now my legs are competely exhausted. Gotta love frisbee :)
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