Week 3 Update

Hey everyone! It's wednesday morning, and I'm sitting in my dorm room, staring out the window at this ridiculous blizzard.  DC is not supposed to get this much snow. Any how, today is a weird day. It's supposed to be Ethics and Leadership, but due to the white out snow conditions, we are having our thursday classes in the dorm today.

Alright: Here's my update of the past 5 days or so. Blogs are very hard to stay on top of.

Friday:
1. For our Ethics and Leadership class, Bud Krogh returned to talk to us about one of his many ehtical dilemmas during his time on Nixon's White House staff. We talked about the BIA protest and how he resolved the problem without bloodshed. It's a really interesting story. You should look it up.
2. Later that night as  Ethics and Leadership continued, we all watched a documentary about Rwandan genocide.  The movie was  PBS production and it was called "Ghosts of Rwanda." It was a fascinating and eye opening movie. The movie certainly had a different effect on everyone. Some were furious, some were stunned and silent, some were in hysterics. It was a very powerful movie that led to us all asking the question: Why?
3. After the movie a very heated argument, or discussion if you will, occured in the foyer. Trevor and Caity were arguing about the existence of God and how he could let something so horrible happen to so many people in Rwanda. Eventually everyone got into the argument and it turned into abig 2 hour ordeal. Robbie, the RA, said that this would be the first of very many of these type of argments.

Saturday:
1. Due to Epic Snow Part 2, my french class this morning was held over the telephone. It was rather strange, but I guess it worked. My french class tonight (wednesday) will be held them same way because of Epic Snow Part 3. Thank you Washington.
2. DC basically shuts down in any snow, so, of course, the airport was closed so our guest speaker couldn't fly in to talk to us. Fortunately, skype exists. So for our english class, we skyped with Pastor Carl Wilkens, who was the last american in Rwanda during the genocide. He answered our questions and provided us with a lot of hope about the situation. He is a very powerful speaker and a very special guy.
3. The snow kind of cramps our style here at SEGL. Our saturday night plans were cancelled again -- but we made do with what we had, which was a lot of snow! So all of us ran down to the park and had a giant snow ball fight.  It ended up in a truce though because everyone was cold and wanted to go back and get hot chocolate. After that, we all watched EuroTrip in Will, Teddy, Tracy, and Winson's room. That is one funny movie and it was a great bonding time! We do a lot of bonding. After dinner, we watched Up! and then we had a spontaneous dance party in Kyra and Emily's room. It was a lot of fun. We are planning on buying some strobe lights so we can have awesome dance parties every weekend. Although, a lot of think that we needt o make some friends in DC to invite to our dane parties. 17 people isn't that much of a party.

Sunday:
1. Sunday's are chill days. We sleep in and have brunch at like noon. It's great. We also have lots of free time to sign out so we can do fun things around the neighborhood. Kyra, Audrey, Caity, Emily, Trevor, Aaron, Tracy and I all signed out so we could go hang out at Union Station Mall. I definitely remember being there in 8th grade on my DC trip. It's so weird because back then I would have never guessed that I'd be spending this amazing semester in DC right now. I love ittttt.
2. An integral part of Sundays is homework time. I'm getting to be a pro at doing my homework with lots of distractions because living in this house means constant distractions, but I wouldn't trade that for the world. We help eachother stay motivated to finish our work and we help eachother with things we don't understand. We even have giant study parties for math tests and history tests.
3. SUPER BOWL SUNDAYYYYY! We had a giant super bowl party, complete with all the unhealthy game time snacks you could ever want. Everyone pretty much cheered for the Saints, so it was awesome to see them win!

Monday:
1. Every Monday marks the beginning of a new case study. This week our case study is about the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in Washington, DC and the world.  Also, every Monday during our Ethics and Leadership block we do a simulation to kick off the new case study. This week we were all members of a tribe in Africa that had been infected by AIDS. We had viles of fluid that we had to exchange with three other people so we could see how quickly the virus spreads. We did that three times, but each time more and more people were using condoms instead of freely exchanging fluids which showed how protection can greatly reduce the spread of the virus.
2. I also had an APUSH test today. I think it went pretty well. It was a lot different than KP's tests, but I liked the format because there were no multiple choice which is what I'm really bad at.
3. Finally I got my phone fixed! Yay! I'm back to texting. Unfortuntely though, they couldn't transfer any of the software or data over so I lost all my numbers. My number is still the same so feel free to text me your number.

Tuesday:
Today was a regular school day. Although, we were given $5 dollars to go out to lunch. I went to Chop't, this great DC area salad restaurant, with Kyra, Nitika, Audrey, Winson and Jorge. It was a jolly time. Recently, the subways have been super delayed because of the bad weather -- they are calling it the "snow-pocalypse." It's blizzarding today. Sweet.

That is all. Maybe I'll start to update more frequently. Bye!