Graduation.
Senior week was a blast. Highlights include floating down the river, nights on the roof of Sevy, bowling, moving madness, and walking away with my diploma, seeing all of my professors.
I went home for a week before diving into the "experience" that was swim camp.
Swim Camp.
What to say... It wasn't the best experience of my life. In fact, the actual job was possibly the worst month of my life. But our weekends were fantastic. The first weekend, we went to San Fran with some of the stayovers, 2 Russians from swim camp and 2 Swedes and a Russian from tennis camp. We wandered around, saw the Golden Gate Bridge on a ferry ride, and went to a Giants game. It was excellent. The next weekend, we went to a beach with the Russian stayovers and 2 Hong Kong stayovers as well. One of the highlights was renting a kayak with Erin (she worked there too) and rowing in the Pacific Ocean. We were surrounded by a family of sea otters, one of them even had a baby. Overall, the rest of the staff was fantastic. The problems at camp involved the behavior of the head coaches at this place I happened to be. The lack of professionalism and the prevalence of cursing/insults to the campers, staff, and even other coaches was frankly shocking. I had some great kids and problem kids, like you can always expect. One of my kids' dad was president of my favorite tv channel and I got to meet him, which was sweet. The pay was decent, mostly due to the stipends they gave us for food during the weekends. It could have been much better tho. Overall, I'm glad I went, but I'd never do it again.
Traveling home from San Fran was a bit of a nightmare. I arrived at the airport to learn that my flight to Dallas was delayed an hour and a half and that I was going to miss my flight to Wichita, the last flight of the day. So after searching for tickets, it was decided that getting me to Wichita on the same day was entirely impossible, but also that they couldn't get me a hotel room because it was a weather delay (clouds in San Fran). So they told me that I had two options: spend the night in Dallas or spend the night in Chicago. I was able to quickly contact Ken and see what he was up to, and I decided to go to Chicago and spend the night at Ken's apartment in Hyde Park. During my commute, I realized that transportation to the University of Chicago is likely the least convenient part of attending: the L doesn't go even close to Hyde Park. But I made it, spent some time with Ken, and managed to make it home in the morning.
Fulbright Orientation.
Orientation was awesome. The government bought us plane tickets and payed for our rooms in the Renaissance Hotel and provided us with most of our meals and gave us a pre-paid credit card with a lot of money on it. Lots of drinks. They also brought in several great speakers, including David Hoffman, an editor of the Washington Post and Pulitzer Prize winner. However, the highlight was by far meeting the other Fulbrighters to Russia. Russia is a huge country was a large increase in Fulbrighters this year and learning about all the different types of research was fascinating. I'm very excited to be able to visit other Fulbrighters all over Russia.
DC.
I was able to stay in Washington for a few days after orientation. I saw several friends, including a friend from high school, Kelsey Sloan, Free-Ho, Elliot, and Kevin McGrath (Carleton '10, on Moscow Program with me). Elliot was hosting an epic pool party Saturday night and I was able to spend some time with him, Free-Ho, and their colleagues in DC.
End of Summer.
So, I have exactly one month left in the United States before I fly out to Russia. During this month, I get to spend time with my family at home and travel to Branson with my family. Nothing too exciting, I'll mostly just be worrying about getting my Russian visa before I fly out. I will be blogging here about Russia when I arrive, but I will likely also start another blog and just copy and paste.
That's pretty much all I have now, I'll try to blog more in my down time this month.
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