Missed Trains and Colorful Lights-Day 77-March 27th, 2018

I stayed up a little later last night, but I didn’t even bother setting an alarm this morning. I woke up naturally around 9:30 and got up to have breakfast. Afterwards, I spent some time working on the prelab for my physics lab I had at 1:30 today. It wasn’t that difficult and took around forty minutes.

Once I finished physics, in an effort to be productive, I spent some tracking my expenses from the first half of my time abroad. I think it is valuable to look at your spending habits once in a while to have a better understanding of what you should spend more and less on in the future.

An hour before I planned to leave, I made myself lunch using the nutella, bananas and bread I had bought yesterday.

My Lunch

It was alright, but I did not put enough nutella on it and I am not a fan of this white bread. Still, it did not make for a bad lunch. After cleaning up, I headed off to school.

My commute to campus had become so routine that I could do it with my eyes closed. I should probably keep my eyes open though, because I got on the wrong today out of reflex. Typically the A and C line trains look different, and the C trains are newer ones. I saw a new-looking train pull into the station, and got on without even checking the letter. A few minutes later, I realized my stupidity and got off the next stop. I hopped on a B line train to campus and only got to lab a few minutes late.

I dida lab on atomic spectra today. We used a a device called a spectrometer to look at various light sources to see what wavelengths (in this case, colors of visible light) made up the light. The fact that we could only see certain wavelengths was proof that at the atomic scale, energy can only exist at very specific levels. This is also known a quantized states.

In other words, we looked at glowing tubes of light through a device that showed pretty colors. It’s sort of how white light is made of a rainbow.

Here’s an example of this with hydrogen atoms in a vacuum

The different lines of color correspond to specific wavelengths of light on the electromagnetic spectrum. The lens I am holding in the picture is the same lens that is in in a device hooked up to our computer. This device allowed us to see these same colorful lines displayed graphically on the computer. We could then extract data from the graph.

An example of what the graph for hydrogen would look like, each peak corresponds to one of the colorful lines in the above picture.

That’s all the quantum physics I’ll talk about for today.

The lab took the whole four hours and I was very tired of looking at light bulbs by the end of it.

I had some time before dinner when I got home, so I headed to the gym. Today I did triceps and back. This was followed by an ab workout and pushups as always. I returned home and hopped in the shower immediately.

The dinner bell rang soon after I showered and I was starving. Anne-Marie did not disappoint tonight as they was at least five courses. The first course was salad and various sliced meats. After that, we ate a variation of eggs that were pretty much omelets. Next was something that looked like a chicken cutlet, but was filled with ham and cheese. The last course was raviole, which is the French version of ravioli and a bit smaller. Google describes these as “raviole de dauphine”. They were really good.

After the raviole, we had the typical bread and cheese, then homemade pudding and cookies for dessert. I am living like a king right currently. Good thing I went to the gym today.

I hung around dinner once again to practice my French with A-M and Jessica. Once I headed back upstairs, I worked on a French group project for a while. This took more time than expected, but I was glad to get it done.

I also spent some time reviewing some Italian. I’m going to Venice this weekend and I want to make sure my Italian is on point. We have a pretty long bus ride there and I’m going to use that time to refresh on some vocab. I’ve really been hyping my Italian skills to Nick and Harry and don’t want to disappoint.

Once I realized how distracted I got by reviewing Italian, I typed up this blog post. By the time I was finished, it was time for bed.