Wednesday – Day 68
October 5, 2012
It’s rather exciting to be almost caught up on the blog. It means I can almost remember things that have happened. One of the most amazing things about studying abroad is the sheer number of experiences that get packed into such a limited period of time!
For example today was my first ever ‘midterm’; in algorithms. I knew the material relatively solidly going in however as soon as the test started I panicked a bit and stress overcame me. As a result I don’t think I did too well, thankfully all my subjects here transfer back as pass fail, even though I am assigned grades by Penn.
I wasted much of the rest of the day, not caring too much, as I was too put off by the exam.
The evening was a PGC rehearsal combined with our band, and involved us attempting to dance and sing both at the same time. Whilst combined, it was something of a failure, the individual elements worked well and I’m sure that with practice, we’ll improve greatly.
After rehearsal I had a quick dinner at Hillel in the Sukkah, followed by a walk to the Penn Arts Shop. Shop in this case being shorthand for workshop, where all the performing arts groups at Penn construct their sets, build their props and, design their costumes. I was quickly set to work by Sarah Tomberlin, the stage manager for Legally Blonde, scraping paint off chairs that had been painted on, layer over layer, for years. The paint was thick and hard to remove, and the scraper blunt and ineffective. I was also working by myself, in my own corner of the room. Another dud job, but one that had to be done. About one hour in it hit 9PM when I knew the presidential debate was going to be started, and I and a lovely but highly partisan ‘democrat’ girl petitioned for the laptop playing the music to be switched to a live stream of the debate. After around fifteen minutes of fumbling around the stream came on and we set to analyzing the debate, or in her case ripping Romney to shreds. I neglected to mention to her that though I didn’t necessarily support him, I thought Romney had better presented himself. Finally, after a second hour of scraping, this time with her, I finally set back off to Rodin where I worked for a few hours and then headed off to sleep.
Shabbat/Sunday/Sukkot – Day 64/65/66
October 3, 2012
I’ll keep this post brief in an attempt to try and catch back up to date! The major event in these few days was the Newman shopping trip which essentially involved a full day’s worth of shopping. Locations visited included Macy’s, the Salvos, the ‘Coat Depot’, Florsheims and Reading Terminal Market.
My purchases were as follows:
Two pairs of dress shoes (one black, one brown, same style) – $140
One black suit – $170
One blue suit jacket – $40
Thee shirts – $60
One tie – $4
One reversible belt – $20
This took a good full day and plenty of walking about!
Late Sunday afternoon was a rehearsal of my big scene in Legally Blonde, set in Harvard Law School, where my character is an admissions counselor deigning to refuse entry to Elle Woods, the protagonist. Thankfully Anil had helped me learn my lines so all was well in that department.
Other than that, of note is the large number of sukkot that have sprung up around campus as part of a sukkah-thon in which students from Penn vote on their favorite sukkah and the winners are presented with some sort of prize.
Shul on sukkot was nice, nothing special of mention there, meals fine too. However, the best thing about being a Penn on sukkot was that many of the Jews weren’t there which meant I had a little time to get to know some of the others a bit better.
Rehearsals never seem to end for me! Monday night, as well as being Sukkot, was a two hour PGC rehearsal, followed by a two hour University Choral Society rehearsal. The policy for the most part being that missing for Rosh Hashana/Yom Kippur is all cool, with other festivals less so.
Tomorrow hopefully I’ll post some photos of the sukkot, if it stops raining!
Yom Kippur – Day 62
September 28, 2012
Today I woke up feeling a little worse for the wear, and made it to shul (synagogue) at roughly 10AM, well after the 8:30 start. As could be expected, the majority of the day was spent in prayer, and much to my disappointment most of the tunes were different from those that I had previously heard, forcing me to learn new ones quickly.
In the afternoon I had a brief meeting with Joel Wittwer, the USA Exchange Adviser from the University of Melbourne, who was visiting for a few hours, in order to a) plan my future studies at Penn and b) help encourage Penn students to attend the University of Melbourne on exchange. Aviva Kolosky came with me, and by the time the session finished, we were both so tired that we decided to go for a short walk before returning to mincha/neilah.
Breaking the fast after shule was so so, with the food at the Hillel for once not being so excellent. Thus, afterwards, I made a little sandwich in my room and worked for a few hours before falling exhausted to sleep again.