Buggy is awesome!!! I got to roll three times last weekend and four times this weekend, now I know how the game goes. First, I get up at 4:30 (and yes, this is what my weekends will look like from now on!), eat a yogurt and walk to CMU. There, the drivers get into their buggies and do the drop testSounds dangerous! - They don't actually drop us from the air, they just let us go on a downhill slope, to test the brakes every morning before rolls. We get rolled back to our headquarters, which is in the Atrium of a building, so we're actually inside. Other organizations only have a tent...
Hey everybody! Life has been really busy and I'm sorry I didn't get around to posting earlier. This morning was the Pittsburgh Great Race, and I ran 10km! It was awesome, perfect cool weather, water stops whenever I needed them, and a great atmosphere. This year, there were 14'000 participantsTeilnehmer, so it was really a huge thing. And I'm so proud of myself, I ran all the way, didn't have to walk or stop at all! Well, to be fair, I have to admit that there are more downhill parts than uphill, with a total difference in altitude of 150m. But it's still 10k!
The trip was really great! We traveled by greyhound buses, and it's quite strange. Apparently they sell way too many tickets, so there were about 20 people after us that couldn't get on the 2a.m. bus and had to wait for the 6a.m. connection! Luckily we knew we had to be there ahead of time, so we spent about 2.5 hours in the bus station. The drive was nice, I slept well with my neck pillow, warm cover, eye cover and my ohropax ear plugs.
My life is awesome, but I'm really tired, so this is going to be a short post. First: I'm going to be a buggy driver! Second: We're going to Washington DC next weekend!
My first week here is already over! On the first two days we had information sessions and immigration check in. During the breaks, we were taken very good care of by the International Student Union and met many other Exchange Students. We started organizing ourselves and spent most of the week together, we're a group of maybe 20 people from all over the world, it's really great!
Our apartment is really cool and quite big. It's a bit old though and very dirty, we'll have to clean everything. Mostly the kitchen is in quite a bad state, with random food everywhere. But then, I arrived one week before the classes start, so we thought we'd have time to clean everything. Now it's Saturday and we only did half of the kitchen (but the worse half). We'll see!
I arrived at 2pm14:00 in Pittsburgh, with a time zone difference of six hours. Once outside the airport, it was really hot, about 30°C and still heating up. Compared to the cold airplane and cool airport it was quite a shock. So I was pretty happy to get on an air-conditioned cab, and 50$ later I was at our apartment!
To make it short: it was cancelled. When we arrived at Zurich airport, we saw that the plane to New York wasn't going to fly, apparently they had some technical problems. So we waited for 5 hours to be rebooked, fortunately my dear family and boyfriend were there to keep me company and provide moral support. We spent the time reading and playing Jass.