Happy Birthday to Me

Please forgive any spelling errors and/or sentences that don't make sense. it's 4:27am as I start to write. But for the last week i've been saying...i'll write later, i'll write later...but as someone once told me, later never comes.

So here it is..celebrating my second birthday in a row in a foreign country and having a foreign birthday dinner. Last year it was eating Sushi prepared by Nory, Alvaro and friends while living in Denmark, and tonight (last night - depending on your perspective) it was eating spanish/catalunian food prepared by Vladi, Hind, Manuel, Ashish and Bruno.

So it's been a couple weeks since i posted...man time flies. So backtracking, the weekend of Sept 8th we had the integration weekend with some of the current masters students, last years masters students and even some two year previous masters students. In all i believe there was 26 of us or so. We headed west towards the Atlantic Ocean and the beach town of Mimizan. All in all it was a fun weekend, we simply layed on the beach, took surfing lessons, cooked, partied and got to know everyone. It was good to talk to all the previous years students and ask about the course, life in France, teachers, tests and all that good stuff.

After that came the first week of school which simply flew by. It's hard not having a set schedule like i was used to at the UofA. I knew that MWF from 9-10 i had this class..throughout the semsester. This schedule is random, I think partially having to do with the fact that many of our teachers are guest lectures working in industry etc..so it's whenever they have time. As such our schedule is all over the place. And since they all are specific in aircrafts i have a hard time remember which class i learned what in. Did I learn about Winglets in Aerodynamics...or was it Aircraft Techniques...or Structures.....

But the teachers are really good. I mean they all, either past or current, have been involved in the design of airplanes, mostly at Airbus. So to hear them talk about the tests and analysis they did while designing these planes...you know they know what they are talking about, and there is a lot I can learn from them.

Last weekend, Emmanuelle planned a small road trip south to the Pyranese. We drove about 2 hrs and took an 1.5hr hike through the mountains up to a nice lake. They Pyranese are really pretty...different from the rockies though..since they aren't as high, they aren't nearly as....well rocky or jagged. Often the trees/forest continue all the way over the top of the mountain. But beautiful nonetheless.

This week was more of the same, classes and classes. The workload hasn't piled up yet, but it's getting to the point where I'm going to start needing to do nightly reviews to keep straight what i learned where, and such.

As for today, well it was my birthday and it was a really nice time. From the moment i woke up in the morning, I noticed Ashish had put a note on my door saying Happy Birthday, to Manuel wrapping up some chocolate for me in the first class, to the Spanish meal Vladi organized and cooked and of course the singing of Happy Birthday..twice actually. And then to come home here at 4am turn on the computer and see all of the emails and facebook messages of Happy Birthday. And lastly to call some of my friends who were all gathered at Chad's house and talk to them.

It's nice to know that wherever I am, whatever I'm doing that I can celebrate a great birthday with friends new and friends old.

Good night all!

Logan

P.S. I'm busy transferring my photo album to the Picasa online photo gallery, so although i haven't moved over the old pictures from last year, the new pictures are there. So i have pictures from the Integration weekend and also the Pyranese weekend. Check it out
http://picasaweb.google.com/logan.jones/