The beginning of the end: Paper Plates

Tonight we reserved the pool house of one of the bars in Centre Ville and hung out for three hours, giving out our end-of-the-semester "paper plate awards."

I was awarded first with a "golden ticket," a plate with an old tram ticket stuck to it. Me and everyone else who had been caught riding without a ticket.

I was also given "best blog," a semi-compliment but mostly a sarcastic reminder of the not-so-smart way I went about writing my first few blog posts here, which ended up sounding a lot more...let's just say judgmental than I had ever intended. (Still sorry!) While I would have preferred for that mistake and the memory of it to slowly die, it was all in good fun and quite frankly I deserved it. There were many, many hard but necessary lessons learned here, and that was just one of them. (Good thing they didn't hear about my issues in England, I'm sure I would have gotten "most likely to be deported." Still bitter.)

I was also given most lively (lovely?) scavenger. Because I'm the strange one who eats random crap off of trees. Okay...that's fair, I accept.

And also most likely to get kicked out of a museum from Brooke, from that time we got yelled at for eating figs off a tree in a museum in Toulouse (see: plate number 3).

And from Nathalie :), best friend in stressful situations without killing each other. Because we were in many stressful situation and did not kill each other.

And...sigh, I mean, we all saw it coming: most likely to eat out of a can.

So in conclusion: I am a non-law-abiding hobo with bad blog etiquette. Sounds about right, although I think I've cleaned up my act in the blogging category (still tons of typos though, I keep rereading old posts and catching them, blah). And after having a three-day long stomach ache I think I'm going to cool it with the canned food/preservatives in general. I will, however, continue to eat random crap off of trees, that will not stop.

Overall it was a hilarious night full of stories, ones some of us had never heard, others we had all forgotten about. I was laughing the whole time. Half a year ago I had no idea these people existed, and it's been fantastic getting to know all of them. It'll be weird not having any of them around.

 As I've said time and time again, I'm torn between here and home. Nights like these remind me how much I like the people here, how much I wish I had been more social and outgoing. But at the same time I'm kind of done with Troilet. I got used to it well enough that I can tolerate it just fine, but I never quite got comfortable here. In any case, I'm glad I decided to hit the accept button that one day on the UW campus so many months ago. Good job old me, you made a good choice.

Now: time to pack for one last trip to Belgium and go to sleep.