My Days off and The Supper Club

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I woke up having felt a bit of accomplishment which was nice. I still didn't enjoy the cold shower though. I wasn't sure what to do with my day since I didn't have any plans. I decided to do some laundry and catch up on my blog. Hopefully soon I will be all caught up. I spent most of the day in my room writing, then I would go to MUBS to use the internet then afterwards just go and watch some soccer. The good thing is is that since so many of the interns have irregular schedules there is always someone around to talk to or hang out with. As I was walking Blonde Tim (one of the Dutch Tims) invited me for dinner in one of the interns rooms. I looked into the room and saw a small gas stove and an electric burner with some pots boiling pasta and cooking vegetables. I was then introduced to "The Supper Club". All of the interns pitched in money to buy plates and cutlery and some cooking utensils. I enjoyed eating at the hostel for two reasons because 1. the local food is quite bland and not satisfying after a while and 2. I enjoyed the company. We had pasta with a mushroom type sauce. There's not much that we can do with the tools at our disposal. I still enjoyed it. Afterwards a couple of us crammed into a room and watched the movie "Amelia" on Iva's computer. It was very boring and I wouldn't recommend it.

On Wednesday I once again woke up not having anything specific to do. I tried writing more of the blog. It's disgusting to say that I started to feel a pimple forming on my face and it was at this point that I realized I had not looked at myself in a mirror since I was in the bathroom at the Brussels airport. There are no mirrors in the bathrooms here I don't have one myself. I generally see my appearance in photos that I take. Sometimes I see a reflection of myself in my computer screen or in a window but it's never very clear. It reminds me a bit of the book "The Beach".


So after my first session on Monday all I needed to do was plan for my 2 hour session on Thursday. Since the material is very basic I decided to put this off until the last minute. It is quite remarkable that the only thing I find constant in my life is my ability to procrastinate. I didn't start writing the session until Wednesday night and finished it Thursday morning. Writing sessions for how to use Microsoft Word were much easier and very different from writing my tutorials. However there are struggling factors. What do people think when they use a computer? What is their opinion on using it? What do they struggle with? They're questions that are hard to answer from the perspective of someone who has grown up using a computer. I was writing the presentations and wasn't exactly sure how many steps I need to tell someone to click on the "bullets" button to create bullets or to create columns in your paper you click on the "columns" button. I figured I would go into as much detail as possible and if it's too much I can always ignore the extra steps. I ended up creating over 15 slides for how to use bullets, numbering, columns, outlining. I also had to explain why there were red squiggly lines or green squiggly lines under certain words and then how to remove those lines. I also made a couple of documents for the students to recreate. The problem is if I want to hand out papers to the students I would have to print it myself which will get a bit expensive. Instead I'll just have to put it on the projector and hope they they can read it.

Wednesday day I watched the US soccer game. It's a bit late to talk about my reactions for that though. At night we went to an area called Centenary Park to watch the Germany v. Ghana game. It's a pretty interesting area. It's not in the center of the town but it's not in the outskirts either. It's a large grassy area that is split up with sidewalks and filled with outdoor bars. One of the bars that we went to had the game projected onto two large screens under a large tent. This is where we would go for a couple more games as well. It's a fun atmosphere although it was when we were hanging out here that I finally noticed the mosquitos. I normally get bitten alive by bugs yet although it hadn't been an issue since I arrived. I think here since there were more plants around there also seemed to be more mosquitos. It was fine though. I just put on my bug spray and hoped the bugs would go for everyone else. I managed to come out unscathed.

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Photos

Supper Club
Cooking in the rooms