I'm off!

Yet again, I am spending my weekend out of the City of Light. Early tomorrow morning, I will board a plane to head off to the land of Shakespeare, Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter... you get the gist, even if you missed the movie reference.

In London, I will be meeting my friends Tina and Misha, who are both studying there for the semester (and both fellow residents of Walsh Hall), as well as friends Heather (Toledo, Spain), Lauren (Madrid), Antoinette (Dublin), AJ (Oxford), plus Meghan and Jim from Paris, not to mention about 150 other Notre Dame students.* What brings us all to London this weekend, you wonder? Why Halloween of course! That wonderfully American tradition that still seems to baffle the rest of the world. Europeans seem to have caught on the the costume idea quite nicely, but most unfortunately the FREE CANDY aspect still eludes them as far as I can tell.

To fill the trick-or-treating void that those of us abroad are feeling right now, the students of the ND London Program (our largest program with about 120 students) have organized a riverboat Halloween party on the Thames for Saturday night. Quite a few of us in other European cities this semester considered this the only motivation we needed to pick this weekend to see the sights of London, so we will all be converging on the city this weekend, probably running into old classmates at Big Ben (this is surprisingly not far-fetched at all - last weekend I ran into groups of Notre Dame and St. Mary's students on the Eiffel Tower purely by coincidence).

For now though, I guess I should return to my looming exposé on environmental inequalities in Gary, Indiana. Since this is an oral presentation, I'm strongly considering giving my French classmates a cultural introduction to Gary either through a rendition of the Music Man song or through a highly inappropriate, but extremely illustrative video clip called "GARY INDIANA murder capitol of the world."

*In a bizarre coincidence, one of my friends from Sciences-Po, Gosia, from Poland, will also be in London this weekend, so I may get to see her too!

It's been a long, long time

Hello faithful followers,

If you still exist, then you are indeed very faithful because I have been absent for quite some time now. My apologies. I promise I will go back and fill you in on my trips to Bavaria and Barcelona, but doing that all at once seems rather daunting. So first, I will fill you in on my most recent exploits, academic and non.

This past weekend I had a wonderful "Notre Dame family" experience. The ND Club of Paris (yes, such a thing exists) sponsored a game watch for the ND-USC game on Saturday night. The club president and his wife brought their "sling box" which allowed us to watch NBC's broadcast of the game exactly as we would have seen it in the states - commercials and all.

As a side note -I realized during the course of the game, that I'll be missing an entire year of US ad campaigns. Granted, that's not something I plan to lose any sleep over, but just something I really hadn't thought about until I noticed that I didn't want to pull my hair out during commercial breaks in the first half because the commercials were all new to me (but man, by the fifth time they showed that Gatorade commercial...).

We were a very respectable group of 14 Notre Dame fans - 4 adults, one 6 year old boy, 8 current students, and one recent grad. It was great to just hang out in a house and watch the game. If the game watch food had been chips, salsa, and coke instead of baguette, cheese, and wine, you could have convinced me we were anywhere in the United States. As for the game itself, well, it was a valiant effort - I'm glad we can say we made it a game. I also can't imagine how frustrated I would have been following that game just with a GameTracker - there were so many reviews and changed calls and whatnot.

Since the game ended at about 1:30am Parisian time, all of us young folks just stayed at this very nice couple's home with makeshift mattresses and padding. They had enough camping gear that all 9 of us had reasonably comfortable places to sleep - but I had been willing to sleep on just a hardwood floor to see that game, so anything else was a bonus. In the morning they made fabulous apple cinnamon pancakes for us and we got to spend some more time with their kids. Peter (the 6 year old) and I learned a lot about transportation that morning, let me tell you. For example, did you know that George Stephenson invented the train? Yeah, neither did I...

And now, I will soon be headed off to the WOS Bar, which I mentioned in an earlier post as the bar where we watched the ND-Michigan game (I'm trying not to pay too much attention to the fact that we've lost the only two games that I've actually been able to watch...). Anyway, I go to the WOS bar nearly every Monday for Pub Quiz night. Pierre, the bartender, asks questions in both French and English for 5 different categories: News/Current Events, Geography, Sports, Music, and General. Questions range from the absurd for all: "How many gallons of milk does the average cow produce in its lifetime" (answers within like a 1,000 gallon range were acceptable); to the absurd for Americans: half of the music questions; to the absurd for Frenchies: "What is the name of the most elite group of colleges in the United States, how many are there, and what are their names?" (we had to help Pierre out with the answer to this one - there was much confusion between Penn State and UPenn).

We have consistently placed third or second, but who knows, tonight could be our night of fame and glory as victors of the WOS Bar Pub Quiz!