Days 27-33

Now that the semester is under way, I'm doing much fewer interesting things and much more not interesting things (like reading for classes).

Wednesday night a few of us got together and went to Kuletos for happy hour. Its pretty safe to say that we all enjoy going there quite a bit. We've been at least once a week since we've been here. Our goal is to try all of their cocktails by the time we leave. We've already tried about half the list as a whole, not that we've each had an entire glass of those cocktails, but we all get different ones and try everyone else's. When we got back to IH, Dora was making homemade crepes because it was Claire's Name Day. Name day is this great tradition in Hungary (maybe other countriesa s well, but Dora told us about it and she's from Hungary). Each name is assigned a day of the year. When your name day comes up, you celebrate and people buy you presents. Its almost like your birthday! (PS- My name day is Nov 25th *wink*wink*)

Thursday, I finally met my "Buddy". (I joined the Buddy Club for international students. They pair you up with an aussie student who either just got back from study abroad in your home country or is going soon.) My "buddy" is really nice. I met up with her and one of her friends after class and went for coffee with them (well, I had hot chocolate, but I digress). We hung out and chatted for about an hour. She is a history/law major (you can study undergrad law here), and just got back from a year at UPenn. She's really sweet and nice. Later that evening, I went to bible study at the church I've been going to that is just down the road from campus. It was great, we had dinner and talked about hospitality (based on the sermon from last sunday). Afterwards, I started working on ym first paper of the semester and Skyped with mom for about an hour or so.

Friday was great, because I finally started my internship at the National Breast Cancer Foundation. There was another intern on her first day as well. They bought us lunch, it was great! We got a tour of the office and were given more details on our respective projects. I'm planning their Annual Research Update annual event. It's going to be a lot of work, and a bit of pressure for it to work, but I won't be here for the actual event, because it got moved back to February instead of the usual November. I looked at all the documents that were used in planning the event in years past. Then I got to go home at 3pm. I took that extra time to print out a few resumes and take them over to the mall near IH and apply for jobs. Hopefully I find one! After dinner, we watched How I Met Your Mother again :)

Saturday, I started stressing out about my paper. So I stayed back while a bunch of people went to the Aquarium (I knew that I'd be stressing out the whole time and wouldn't enjoy it anyways). I ended up going over to the Med School Library with a friend. He did med school stuff, I started typing my paper. I got a good bit of work done, so I felt a lot better about the paper. For dinner, a big group of people from IH went to a Korean BBQ restaurant downtown. It was one of the former Senior Residents (the same thing as an RA) last night in town before he headed back to India. So we went out to dinner and it was delicious! Although I'm still terrible at using chopsticks, I plan on being slightly proficient by the time I leave. Not that theres much use for chopsticks back home, but it doesn't matter. Two of the other girls and I skipped the majority of the walk home, leaving the boys behind. It was a lot of fun, but quite tiring (especially skipping up a hill).

Today, I went to the morning service at church. It was pretty good, but not quite what I was expecting. I think I'll stick with the evening service, more people my age. After that, I came home and took a nap before lunch. After lunch, I worked on my paper more. I'm currently 550 words over the limit and I haven't written my introduction or conclusion yet...uh oh. I need to cut it down a lot! I'm not sure how I plan on doing that just yet. I'll figure it out, It's not due until wednesday anyways. At dinner, I tried Vegemite on toast. Very interesting. It tasted kinda like concentrated soy sauce. It was really salty and kinda bitter. I don't think I'll eat it again, but now I can say that I have tried Vegemite in Australia! Later tonight, a group of us are meeting together to try and plan for spring break at the end of september. So exciting!

The girls at Kuletos for Claire's Name Day!