October 8-10

I went to a dinner for the Mechanical Engineering section Wednesday night. It was good, but really awkward. I'm glad Gwendolyn, the other American in MechE, was there. We sat with a professor and a secretary from the section. I guess Gwendolyn has this professor, but due to confusing scheduling, she's missed 2 of the 3 lectures. The professor works in a production and robotics lab and the secretary works in the Turbomachine lab. Anyway, I asked them if it is possible for bachelor students to work in the labs. I need to do an internship for my French major. This could be working in industry or doing a supervised project in a lab. I explained the idea to them, and it sounds like I going to be able to do it.I think that I'll probably just be working on my own project under the supervision of a professor, but that's cool with me. They both gave me their contact information, and I'm going to email them this weekend. I was checking out the turbomachine lab website, and I've actually already visited it. I think I'd prefer that over the robotics lab, it's more up my alley. Yeah, so I'm really excited about it right now. The food was tasty. They were showing a movie afterwards, but it was the Simpson's movie, and I wasn't that interested in staying, so I decided to go home. So I had the most bizarre metro ride home. It turned out that the secretary that I met was taking the same metro, so I was talking to
her. Then i noticed that we were moving quite slowly after leaving a stop. Then, the train stopped completely, and the conductor came out and slammed the door very loudly, I jumped because I didn't see him. He stomped to the back of the train, and then we started going the opposite direction, back into the tunnel we just came out of. All of the sudden all the lights went out. It was a bit freaky since it was about 10 at night and we were in a tunnel in a metro. Don't get me wrong, the metro, and the whole city are very safe, but still. Luckily they came back on and the conductor came back, but he was not very happy. We sat there for another minute or so, then we slowly made our way to the stop. After that it was fine, there must have been an electrical problem, and he just had to restart everything. Yeah, very strange.