Exchange week 5: Badminton, Portraits and Girls Cooking Night

MONDAY: Lessons were cancelled at the morning because of the weather (that looked actually normal winter day for me). I went back home to carry on sleeping. 😀 When I read my student email I realized that it’s the last day to drop a class. During weekend I realized that studying medicine by my own or watching operation videos would help me more with my career than cultural history. So, I dropped off my American Popular Culture History course, five books and topic I don’t know anything in prior was just too much. Instead I ordered suturing stuff from Ebay so, I can use my extra time with suturing (or give more effort to my other, more important classes). On Monday I also studied in library a little and went to Habitat for Humanity meeting – that’s the organization via which I’ll go volunteering at Spring Break. After all that (around 9-10pm) we went to play badminton with my Finnish friend as a Finn girls team. Badminton was so much fun and we met nice Americans who wanted to play against us. 🙂 That open badminton thing were you don’t need your own bracket is every Monday from 8 to 10pm during whole semester. Yeah! TUESDAY Studying, downloading Photoshop CC and having fun with it. I have survived like two years without Photoshop – the first one went by reading to entrance examination so I didn’t had time to shoot or even think about editing anything and the last one was surviving with iPhoto. Now I have free trial for 30 days with new CC (I used to have CS4 so I really have to learn new places to find everything). After 30 days I’ll either buy Elements, CS6 or CC. Maybe someone wants to sponsor me for CC? 1500USD for photo editing program is a lot in my opinion – even though it’s the best software I’ve ever had. Persimon from Korea, yummy! WEDNESDAY Regular study day with four classes. I also did an hour pole work out at home. At night we had girls cook night with another Finnish girl and two Korean girls. They show us some Korean foods and how to cook them and we made them Finnish pie called Mamman marjapiirakka (or American version of it because we didn’t got all actual ingredients). 😀 Night was all about new friends, good food and wine. Four hours felt like an hour that means we had really good time. I really look forward to next time! THURSDAY We had visiting speaker in Healthcare management, he was Chief Quality Officer from one American healthcare organization. He had very interesting presentation about quality and problems in American healthcare system. Did you knew that for healthcare managers here it’s expected to be willing to work at least 60-70 hours a week and it’s also told in job description? In Finland we have that expected but nobody says it out loud. After class I went to Sports Center to do cardio exercise: 60minutes with cross trainer, burning 550 calories. After that I did some stretching. Then I went to my apartment to help my friend with essay for her Swedish class (oh wow, I didn’t knew that I remember any Swedish, it’s five years of my last lesson). In Photography we have to do portraits for next week so Thursday afternoon went with three hours shooting with my Finnish friend. We took about 600 photos with eight different themes of her (and 30 pics of cute squirrels). Night went with photo editing. It was so much fun! I think I will publish some of the photos here when I’ve chosen best ones. I love photographing but portraits have never been my strongest area but the photos were actually quite good. 🙂 Ps. I got email from Quest Nutrition that they will send me some of their products for blog review. I think I’ll make review with some friends – we can do like group tasting and evaluate the products. Everything I have tried from that brand has been between good and perfect and I’m so happy to let my friends try and tell you about them! 🙂 I love to recommend people things I really love.