The 25th week was pretty quite - therefore I did not write an own blog post for that week and will combine it with the current week. At the first week I went to a boxing class on Wednesday, which was really interesting - we learned some basic techniques and also tried it at a living object (who obviously held pads that we used for practicing punching). Later that day we went out for 25 cent pitcher night at Jake's. On Friday a pretty big group of international students met at the gym and we played a lot of badminton, racquetball and walleyball. The next day I went to a basketball-game of the Herd. The stadium was pretty full as Marshall played against Western Kentucky University which is really close and therefore the atmosphere in the stadium was really nice. I also went climbing that day after a break of about 1 and a half weeks - and my elbow did not hurt anymore, so I was pretty happy. We also went out at night. We went to Jake and as it was Valentine's Day, we all put some hearts on our clothes as a party gag. On Sunday I just had to do a lot of work for my courses and worked the whole day on assignments and projects.
The 26th week was really influenced by a lot of snow. It snowed the whole night from Sunday to Monday and at the morning there were about 15cm (6 inches) snow lying on the ground. As Americans don't have winter tires, I can somehow understand that it is a risk to drive under that conditions. The university decided to close for Monday and Tuesday, so there were no classes at these days. We obviously had to find something to do at that time :). So, to celebrate the great amount of snow, we decided to run around the campus only wearing swimming wear. According to Google weather, it was -12°C (10°F), but in my opinion it did not feel that cold. We ran a little bit more than 1 kilometer (about 0.8 miles) - our route was from the gym to the administration building (Old Main) and back on the 5th avenue. The run itself was nice, but there was a crazy guy, who tried to tackle us in the snow, as you would image someone would do it in the NFL :). He got Matheus immediately after we left the gym and he also tackled me in the snow just before we came back to the gym. It was cold, but the whirl pool in the rec center let us warm up quickly - I'd do that again :D. We also found our way on twitter (
video), where someone just recorded us from their dorm and even the town of Huntington posted a meme about our run.
I also went climbing at the same day - and unfortunately my elbow hurt a little bit again. I just hope that it get's better again... As classes were canceled for Tuesday, we decided to pre-celebrate the birthday of an American friend. We had a few beers at a dorm room and then went outside to enjoy the snow :). On Tuesday I first worked on a few assignment and at night I had my first racquetball game of this season's tournament. I won with 2:0 and I'll have my next game next week. Afterwards we had the real birthday-party at a flat a few minutes away from the campus. Despite the fact that the people in West Virginia don't celebrate "Fasching" (which is something close to Mardi Gras or Carnival), we decided to dress up for that evening - I wore my Lederhose. We played card games and it was a really funny night.
On Wednesday I had my only two classes for this week, because the university decided to cancel classes on Thursday and Friday too. The reason was that the weather was too cold (-26°C or -15°F, respectively) - Americans are sometimes just big wimps ;). My schedule for this week looked like this:
Besides all that, this weekend (beginning with the 20th of February) 7 international students and I will travel to Washington, D.C for a long weekend from Friday to Sunday. We'll rent cars and drive to D.C. and hopefully have a good time there :).
