Morning started slow! Woke up late and read lecture slides. Then went to work on ML. Worked, had lunch, read more lecture notes. Then off to Höngg campus for class. On the bus, read more lecture notes. Class was another soup of intense linear algebra. After that, hit a random table and started plowing on algGT. Got the first two problems solved (still need to LaTeX them up for this week’s written homework).
Then it was off to the Challenge Run that the dude I’d met playing frisbee with Abhi, Michael, had invited me to.
#ifndef HIGHLIGHT_MODE
#define HIGLIGHT_MODE 1 // A week behind...Meet up with my teammates,
- Michael,
- Cameron, smooth CS bro and Michael’s housemate,
- Mihaela, a feisty, elegant Bulgarian,
- Jenny, an excited, flighty Brit,
- Sara, a Swedish girl who you can tell dances just from her balance.
An awesome bunch! After some waiting and conversing, the race begins. It’s scored on time and individual challenge scores. The first challenge, go 20 meters with 4 feet and 4 hands. Simple elegant solution: me and Cameron piggyback and wheelbarrow the others. Next up was a 1 min treasure hunt, then a slackline plagued with mosquitoes, then a precarious egg traverse under guy wires of death.. then catching water balloons, then walking on milk crates.. it’s great! Jenny and Mihaela, though exhausted, keep running from station to station, while Sara and Michael and Cameron and I encourage them. Mihaela forges on with a fiery defiance, and at the end of the race has to go to the gym to get pain relief for her burning lungs.
After the race, we play volleyball outside for more than an hour as the sun sets around us! It’s amazing. I keep laying out in the sand.
Then we go for dinner at the Höngg student pub (yeah, in Europe the student bars are part of the university, a highly logical setup). The Challenge Run organizers have provided a feast of grilled sausage and bread and salad that we tuck into heartily. After I naively ask for a second sausage and am denied, Mihaela goes and gets me one by just not admitting she’s already had one.
After food, beer! \(We-Sara\) find a squishy couch in the bar and camp out.
I’m sandwiched between the bros and the gals, and converse with both. Jenny regales us with a tale of her weirdo roommate, who, stripped to boxers and soaked in oil, came into the kitchen and asked her, “Wanna hug?”. Cameron and Michael keep up a robust and entertaining chatter about random Estonian girls glimpsed from across the room.
Get into a game of foosball, get my heinie handed to me. Mihaela wants in, and we have to wait a while (we go outside and chat for a bit), but eventually we get into a game of foosball. We literally cannot score a single goal, but still have fun. Cameron and Michael and Jenny have at this point left, so Mihaela and I walk to the bus stop. She takes my arm in what is apparently a Bulgarian gesture of friendliness :D
Bus back to Culmann and collapse!