Pondering Physics and Pubs-Day 15- January 23rd, 2018

After never fully recovering from the soreness of snowshoeing and skiing, I slept in until 10 am. After some social media browsing, I headed downstairs and ate breakfast. I was planning to meet Harry at the BU office around 11:30 to plan for our trip.

I grabbed all my stuff and headed out to meet Harry. We had six of us going on the trip and were mainly looking for hostels and cheaper airbnb’s. Harry has stayed in hostels a few times and was good source of information. We tried to do it systematically and found several options for each city. We found a hostel in Stockholm that was on a boat and were immediately hooked.

Here’s a picture of the Hostel

We were able to figure out most of the housing, but still need to figure out the stuff we are actually going to do in each city. If you have any suggestions for any of the cities let me know!

After a bit, Harry and I headed to campus for our three hours of physics class. I was planning to eat lunch beforehand, but the tram was late so I grabbed a muffin really quickly from the cafe in the science building. Today was our first physics tutorial, which is when you work on practice exercises rather than listening to a lecture. This made class go by a bit quicker.

We had a fifteen minutes halfway through before out second physics professor came. A few friends and I went to use a vending machine that is filled with cool French candy. Unfortunately for us, about half of the candy we got in the vending machine got stuck. A French student showed us how to properly shove the machine to make the things to fall. Despite his demonstration, it didn’t work.

After another hour and a half of physics, I took the tram to head home. While talking about microwavable meals with my classmates on the tram, I was inspired to look for hot pockets in the grocery store. I got off on a different stop near me and began my hunt. I wasn’t able to find any, but I picked out a premade salad and pasta dish to have as dinners during the week. I also purchased a huge baguette and wine corkscrew. I headed home munching on my baguette in typical French fashion.

After not eating dinner with Andre and Anne-Marie for five days, I was really looking forward to the meal tonight. As appetizers for dinner, Anne-Marie weirdly gave us pigs in a blanket. They were really good so I couldn’t complain. After some salad, Anne-Marie took my plate and gave me an ungodly serving of mashed potatoes. The mashed potatoes literally took up 2/3 of my plate. I naturally ate all of them. The French are really big on cleaning your plate, and it is common to use your bread to soak up the liquids and crumbs on your plate. She also gave me a hamburger, minus the bun. All the food was good as expected. After we had our bread and cheese, A-M gave me something that was like an apple sauce. Though rather than just apples, it was apple and rhubarb and somehow tasted even better.

After dinner, I had plans to meet Sebastian and Harry for a pub crawl that Sebastian’s program was hosting. We all got stamps that gave us half off drinks at every bar we went to. Considering I only had one class the next day, this night was looking to be a fun time. I don’t recall the name of the bar, but the first one we went to was very cool and had weird decorations all over. There was books with the pages torn out on tables, bicycles hanging from the ceiling, and random typewriters in places.

We also met some other girls who were on the crawl and were from Italy, Finland and the Czech Republic. We hung out with them for a while as we went from bar to bar. I consumed many really good beers, trying to sample all the different ones.

At one bar we went to, the bartender learned Sebastian and I were American and told us to go behind the bar and put on American rap music for the bar. We took him up on this offer and soon the whole bar was blasting rap music, something unusual in France. This was a very fun time and everyone on the crawl was loving the music. The people not on the crawl must have not liked the music because they all left the bar once we started djing.

Here’s a picture of Harry, Sebastian and I with some of our other American friends.

Here’s a funny video of Sebastian dancing to Magnolia by Playboi Carti

We went to another bar for a bit, then ended up back at the one where they let us control the music. Not only was the bartender letting me DJ again, but he was giving me free drinks now as well. I was very confused to why he was doing this, but I took full advantage of it. I also ran into a bunch of Italian people at the bar and did my best to speak Italian with them. After struggling with French lately, my Italian suddenly seemed so much better. I found out they were from Milan, but studying in France like me.

I kept asking people for music recommendations and would go behind the bar to play whatever songs they wanted. After a while, I realized all my American friends had gone home, but I was honestly okay with that. I am honestly impressed with my ability to meet so many new friends at the bars. I guess it’s easy when you are a loud American. After a little bit, I said goodnight to my Czech and Italian friends and went home for the night.

Tonight was a great night and definitely one for the books.