Accidental Dine and Dash-Day 52- March 2nd, 2018

Class at 8 AM made today an early start. I got out of bed around 6:30 and took my time getting ready. Today would be a long day, and I was in no rush to get it started. After eating breakfast and packing my lunch, I headed off to school.

The cold rain was a nice treat this morning. I was in such a good mood that I took this picture to encapsulate that feeling.

Just kidding. It was miserable.

I have been learning that I really don’t mind 8 AM circuits too much. We just do practice problems and as nerdy as it may sound, I actually find the subject matter really interesting. I take advantage of this time to ask a lot of questions and make sure I fully understand everything.

French culture class felt like an eternity today. There are three different professors that take turns teaching the class and we had the second professor for the first time today. She was very  nice, but didn’t include as much discussion and class participation as the other professor. I think the discussion and sharing of anecdotes is what make culture class really fun some times. Just listening to a lecture can drag on for three hours.

Today we learned about the French-Algerian war, which was a pretty interesting topic that I knew nothing about. Algeria was a colony of France and in the 1950s, a group called the FLN used guerilla warfare  against the French to gain its independence. Our teacher compared this war to the Vietnam War in the US.

France had a lot of success in the war, but used a ton of unethical methods that created controversy in not only metropolitan France, but around the world too. Many countries didn’t approve of France’s actions and the UN even recognized Algeria’s independence. Eventually France and the FLM met and Algeria’s independence was recognized. This was such a decisive issue in France that their 4th republic fell apart, and a whole new system of government was created to avoid a French civil war. This is the 5th republic and what France currently has today.

The biggest difference is that the 5th republic brought a much more strengthened president which was selected by the people and not by parliament as before. The constitution was completely rewritten as well. This war was so significant in France that it literally led to them changing their government system completely.

Well that’s enough history today and I hope my readers learned something. There is so much more interesting content to the Algerian War and I would definitely encourage people to look more stuff up about it.

After culture, a bunch of my BU classmates and I spent about half an hour cramming for our physics test. We all felt pretty rough, but I felt a little better after discussing some tutorial questions with them. Safe to say I learned a lot in today’s three hour lecture.

In the half hour before physics, I did some last minute cramming with my classmates for our exam. We all felt pretty rough, but discussing practice problems with my friends helped a lot.

When we got to class, we were surprised to learn two things. First, this was a full fledged exam and not the 30 minute quiz our professor described. To be fair, we somewhat assumed this would happen. The second surprise was that it was open note. This was nice to hear, but honestly didn’t make a huge difference with the material. I had memorized all the formulas anyway.

The exam format was new to me and included a lot of written description of our work. Overall the exam was tough, but not as hard as I expected. Hopefully I did okay. I discussed the exam with my French and American classmates afterwards, and everyone had similar opinions.

I still had one more differential equations class to get through today. I’m going to be honest, I completely checked out mentally for this one. I took notes, but everything went in one ear and out the other. C’est la vie.

In an effort to complete this busy and productive day, I immediately went to the gym after returning home. I was bench pressing today and some random guy asked if I was an American and offered to spot me. This was nice because I rarely run into English speakers at the gym and always appreciate a spotter on top of that. Nick ended up coming to the gym a little before I left. Today I did chest day and an ab workout.

I headed home to shower and make dinner. Dinner today was another one of my giant baguette sandwiches. Thank god I go to the gym to balance out the insane amount of bread I eat on a daily basis.

The Sandwich supplies

The complete sandwich (I only ate half)

 

 

I spent some time relaxing after dinner, until Jonathan and I spontaneously decided to go out.

It was just the two of us, so we just wanted a  chill night. We went to La Natation for their 3 euro pints of Kanterbrau and free sausage and peanuts. It was nice to chill out after a long day and enjoy a tasty beer and sausage.

We had bought the beers at the counter and brought them to our table. Apparently you’re supposed to order beers from a server when you’re at a table, and not from the bar. We realized this when a server chased us down when we left, thinking that we didn’t pay for the beers. They were actually really nice about it and we simply explained that we paid for them at the bar. Nothing like the accidental dine-and-dash!

We bought two cigars after leaving and went to the river to smoke them. Jonathan and I enjoyed a nice walk and ended up calling it a night around 11:45. This ended up being a very relaxing night despite going out.