Y helo thar.

So. This time next week I'll have been home for almost two days. If you define home as a general "that side of the Atlantic," since my flight doesn't land til around six-ish at night. I have a lot to blog about: grades, a two-day trip to Geneva, a four-day trip to Barcelona. General end-of-the-semester reflections. Unfortunately, you're probably going to have to wait til I get home to read all that. My internets are disappearing on Saturday and I'm not getting home til Tuesday night. Sad face. Blogger hates entries that are copy/pasted from Microsoft Word, too, so I may or may not type things up over the weekend and try to post them when I get home or something. We'll see. Beyond that, nothing interesting has happened in my life. I've watched three seasons of NCIS in less than a week. Good times. I'm going to pack now. Ta.

You Know You're a Nerd When...

Monday [May 18] was my last final and a big last hurrah dinner with 23 other international students. We're a crazy bunch, let me tell ya. More on that later. We got back around 1130, I think? And then Courtney and I were up til 2-something trying to plan travels. We settled for Barcelona, whee! I didn't get to sleep til after 3 that night, which wouldn't have been too bad...

...except I had a 6:10 am train to Geneva, and had to be up at 5. Ewwww. I managed, somehow. When I got to Geneva I met up with Carolyn (the one from Italy/Turkey) and our friend Catherine, who lived on my floor my freshman year [I lived in her old room my past three semesters. Hee.], then graduated and ran off to Geneva for grad school. We spent 3-3.5 hours sitting in Starbucks talking about VCU, the Honors College, wreaking havoc on the world when we're all FSOs, and... scholarships. Yes. So to complete the post title, you know you're a nerd when you meet up with friends halfway across the world to talk about school and scholarships and other nerd things. Clearly, we're a special bunch. And I'm all the more excited now to gain a functioning knowledge of a third language.

After we left Starbucks we walked to the old city to get some lunch at Chez ma cousine. It was delicious. They had potato wedges and chicken and yum. We passed a protest of some kind on the way but we couldn't really figure out what it was for. After lunch we went to Clavin's church, which was closed. It was pretty huge though. And there's a museum underneath but it cost lots of francs to get into. Oh wells. We wandered around Geneva a bit more before heading back to Catherine's apartment. At which point we may or may not have harassed the National Scholarship Coordinator in the Honors College via Skype chat. He said something to the effect of, "I can only imagine the trouble you three have gotten yourselves into." Great to know people back home have faith in us. =D

We talked more about taking over the world. We made dinner. We watched CSI: Miami. The next day we ate the leftovers from dinner, because 2.2 pounds of pasta is a LOT. Back in town we went to a little store that had all kinds of American products that you can't get in Europe: Kraft Mac & Cheese, Betty Crocker, root beer, Mountain Dew, Reese's... it was amazing. And it made us happy. Even though it was a little expensive, but hey. You do what you have to do. We walked to the lake and got ice cream. Met up with two of Carolyn's friends from RVA. Walked around the lake to the massive water jet they have there. Sat in Starbucks with Catherine for another hour and some change after Carolyn left.

Pretty awesome two days. Solidified the fact that I am a nerd and I love it. :) And I love my friends. (Awwwww.)

Lazy lazy lazy

Wooooot. Today is made of win because I'm not doing anything. For starters, I slept until 12:30 and it was glorious. Why? Because in the span of a week I had 10 exams, plus a paper.

The paper was 10 pages long, and a comparison of Camus' L'Etranger (The Stranger) and Balzac's Le Père Goriot. Lee, Veronica, and I wrote the paper together, but it was a pain in the butt to do. Père Goriot was 270 pages of text. Period. No chapters or anything, just continuous story. Ugh. The entire thing was an ordeal, but we got a 14/20, so no one's complaining. I know it looks bad, but it's a B.

The French grade on a scale of 1-20. 10 is average/passing. 18-20 are impossible to get. So 16-17 is A, 14-15 is B, 12-13 C, 10-11 D if you equate it to the American system. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to get 16-17 too. So while the honors kid in me is frustrated over having gotten a B, the exchange student in me is glee-ing over having gotten a 14.

Oh, god. Completely unrelated, but I'm looking at Facebook where people are talking about unpacking all their dorm stuff and cleaning their rooms at home and I just realized I'm going to have to do that too. Oh, fail.

Anyway, yeah. 10 exams? Not fun. 6 between Tue-Thu of last week. Two each this past Monday and Tuesday. One I know I got a 15 on. That excites me because it was an oral exam too. Hee. Some of them I think I did well on, some I'm not so sure. I can find out my grades starting May 25, and I will defintely do so.

I have two more classes tomorrow and an exam Monday and then I am DONE. And then I will hopefully catch up on the traveling I never did this semester. D: For now, I'm settling for being lazy and cleaning my room. Kinda contradicting, I know, but my room is a mess and I didn't have time to clean it while I was having an aneurysm over all of my finals. So cleaning my room = less stress = me being more chill. Word.

BRB, MOROCCO

Holy god. I'm shaking right now. I could just die. But that would be counterproductive. Oh my god seriously though.

I'm going to Morocco next year. I'm studying at Al Akhawayn Univsersity in Ifrane.

And the US Government is paying for it.

Oh. My. GOD.

There are no words to describe how I feel right now. No. Words.

In January I applied for the NSEP/Boren undergraduate scholarship, which pays up to $20,000 for students to go somewhere and learn a language that is critical to national security. It was ridiculous and frustrating and I've been waiting since February to hear about it. I got an email at the beginning of April saying "Hey we're still considering your application!" and that they'd announce the winners in May 1st. So needless to say I didn't sleep a whole lot last night and I've been up since 9 am going absolutely nuts: refreshing my inbox, refreshing the page with last year's winners on it, refreshing my inbox again, having a heart attack when I got a new but unrelated email... it's been bad. Being 6 hours ahead is just painful.

So Mom Skyped me and we were talking about it and both just being "omg i can has email plz?" And then she was looking at my Turkey pictures and I refreshed my email and almost died. I stopped, stared at it, and went "YES!" and then froze again. And nearly bounced off my chair. It was ridiculous. I just kept laughing and almost crying. And shaking. There was lots of shaking. I can't believe it. I'm grinning like a fool but omg. There were 896 applications for this thing. I don't know how many they actually gave out but OH MY GOD.

This is absolutely ridiculous. So ridiculous. Ahhhh. I was trying so hard not to just assume that I would get it. So hard. I'd applied for two other things to do over this summer but didn't get either of them and if I didn't get this I would have died, I think. I'm still about to die, but in a good way.

This is very quickly going to dissolve into ramblings, so I'm just going to stop now. I'll post the link to the website once they update with this year's winners. MY NAME IS GOING TO BE ON IT. AHHHHH.

This post lacks a witty title.

If you're keeping up with this, you'll probably noticed I skipped a few days. I've done the shorter days in Turkey first for the sake of having something written. Be sure to check back later and scroll down, because eventually everything will be posted in chronological order. And if you scroll down a lot more, I finally posted about Avignon. There are no photos up in the posts themselves as of yet, but there are or will be links to my photobucket for each post.

I ran out of titles.

Saturday, 4.18.2009

We went out with Ahmet and his sister Nalan for some sightseeing in Ankara. First we went to Estergon Castle. It's a museum now but I think it used to be a castle?



It was kind of small for a castle though. It had all kinds of displays of cultural things. Then we played foozball. It was highly entertaining. Next we went to a restaurant right next to the castle. There was çay, of course, (I burned my tongue!) and lots of nuts. Which turned out to be rather embarrassing because I couldn't for the life of me peel the shells off the pistachios. Or any of the other nuts. So after I accidentally sent a few flying across the table, Nalan cracked a few and gave them to me. Oh yeah, I felt special. I forget what the things we ate were called, but then there was quasi-ice cream for dessert. It was like turkish delight, but cold. Very, very cold. It also melts very, very quickly.

From the castle we went across the city to Atakule Tower (I think?). It's a huge tower with an elevator that you can ride to the top for a 360-degree view of... everything. You could only take pictures from half of it (it's surrounded by glass and parts of the glass are blacked out) because parts of it look over government buildings and stuff they don't want you taking pictures of.

Carolyn, being awesome.

From the tower, we headed off to... the zoo. Yes, I went to the zoo in Turkey. Nalan was wearing a shirt with an elephant on it. Either I didn't understand what the shirt said or I didn't recognize the elephant... somehow this became "I've never seen an elephant before." So we went to the zoo in search of an elephant, only to find out later that it had died two years ago. Hah, oops. Regardless, there was zoo. It was fun. But they had dogs there, which made me sad. :( There was also a hippo chilling in his own house thing with a pool. And he farted. And everyone promptly ran away. Hi-lar-i-ous.

Way to fail at being creative, C.S. Lewis. :(

I think we spent the better part of two hours at the zoo. After that we went to a supermarket so Carolyn could buy food. =P Apparently they don't have Pringles and Lay's chips and a bunch of other things in Italy. Spent more time at Ahmet's house. Went to dinner with him and Nalan and their friend whose name I can't remember. Fail? And we had all kinds of Turkish things that I also can't remember. There was ayran, which is a drink of yogurt + salt + water. Emphasis on the salt. It counteracts the insane spices in food. The salt threw me off though. There was also köfte (meatballs); specifically, I think Içli köfte? I somehow lost the list Carolyn gave me, but wikipedia is helping me remember. We had stuffed eggplant (some kind of dolma?) as well. And lamb kebab something or other. It was all pretty good, but there were lots of crazy spices going on; it was pretty harsh compared to bland French food and all the spaghetti I've been eating.

After our ridiculous dinner, we headed straight to the bus station for a fantastic trip back to Istanbul and lame old Europe.

peeeekchurrrs

The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round

Friday, 4.17.2009

Not too much to say about this one. Got up, ate breakfast, almost missed the shuttle from the hostel thing back up to the top of the mountain. Played with a kitty who had just had kittens while we waited for the minibus back to Antalya. Got lunch at the bus station. I don't even know what I got. Doner kebab I think? Discovered that I'm not really a fan of Turkish yogurt. It's not bad, I just don't like it. (As opposed to European yogurt, which is just yucky.) Commence 8-hour bus ride from Antalya to Anakara. What movie did they play on the bus?

The Patriot.

Yeah. So we're on a bus full of Turks, watching a movie about the American Revolutionary War. Awesome. There was something wrong with it the first time, so they just gave up. They restarted it after our half hour stop and this time it worked. I think Carolyn and I were the only ones watching it. I don't even know if I count since it was dubbed in Turkish and I obviously had no clue what was going on. I'd never seen the movie before. Oh well. But yeah. Most of the bus was asleep while the movie was on. It was fun stuff.

We pulled into Ankara under the most threatening-looking clouds ever, but it didn't rain too hard at all. We stopped at a bakery to get a birthday cake for Carolyn's friend Ahmet, at whose house we were spending the night. The music in the bakery? "As Long As You Love Me." By the Backstreet Boys. I laughed. A lot. This song is 10 or 11 years old. I know this because I sang it in the talent show in 5th grade. (shudder) Moving on. Got to Ahmet's house. He spent some time studying at VCU. [I thought he and Carolyn went to the same uni in Ankara, but I was wrong. Surprise.] Everyone in his family spoke English except his dad. That made it just a little awkward for me, but hey. We ate some Turkish food with the family and it was good even though I have no idea what it was. Walked around the city for a little bit, hunting down some of Carolyn's friends. Went back to Ahmet's house and passed out. Fun stuff. For some reason, being on a bus for hours is really exhausting. =/

A few pics