Catching my breath

Finally... a quiet afternoon when I can collect my thoughts, do some house chores and all in all relax a bit. I just finished a course in Microbiology. An extremely boring one, I might add. Come to think of it, that means it did not offer me much of a challenge. We had lectures, we had labs (boring as hell, pipetting from tube A to tube B, argh!), we had presentations about what we have done. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. What was actually amusing is how me and my lab partner cooperated. Well, we did not. It was an unspoken agreement that each of us is capable enough of completing one experiment without the help of the other. So we just divided the parallel experiments between us and turned our undivided attention towards them. Sometimes, when the lab assistants came to one of us asking how a particular experiment was going, they asked the "wrong" person. Some embarrassing moments passed like this. The presentations themselves were a lot of fun as well. I never use a manuscript when I present my work, so the presentation is always free for improvisation. At the last one I actually had to improvise all over my partner's part, since he got sick and was not able to come to the lecture hall. Whatever, one-man-shows are always fun.

Parallel with completing this course, I was busy with the International Convent in Uppsala. We were planing the welcoming week for the newly arrived international students. On Friday, me and another guy took a small group of around 9 people to one of the most interesting events in the student life here: the pub crawl. After the first pub, our group doubled in size. At all the other pubs we picked one or two additional drunkards, so in the end a tired mob of about 30 people crashed down at GH nation, having a great time. Several minutes later, all the other 200 international students participating in the pub crawl came in... and in the GH pub there is only place for 74. You figure out the picture for yourselves.

One day later, it was Albena's birthday party. Huge amounts of people laughing, talking, drinking, smoking, eating, but otherwise having a wonderful time. A hardcore group of not less than seven Bulgarians built up, laughing and roaring. Yay! I went to bed at 4, with about 4-5 hours of sleep until morning, when our nation organized an International Brunch for the same newly arrived foreign students. The kitchen was supposed to have stocked food for about 100 people. "Only" 70 of them showed up, which did not cause them any trouble to pick the trays clean of food. All in all, it was amazing.


Now I am trying to collect some strength to write an article for our nation's magazine. Tomorrow I start a course in Biochemistry, while simultaneously working at a biochemistry lab. I need to meet the financial adviser for the wine-tasting (or wine-wasting, as one friend puts it) society, then attend their year meeting. Ah, whatever, all of these things will happen in the future. Today I intend to enjoy every sweet second of my free afternoon. Bye!