As Cassie already mentioned in her blog, we got to work together on Preview Day this past week which was a BLAST!!  I just loved being able to work with some of the coolest people at ERAU!  Granted my fingers did get a little tired from all the balloon tying, but hey, that’s okay!  I had a great time with Cassie and people I got to meet on Saturday, and I hope that the prospective students enjoyed it almost as much as I did!

Unfortunately I was not awake enough at 6:30 am to grab my camera so I could take pictures with Cassie, but Lauren always has her camera, so this is the Lower Hangar during the Activities Fair after my afternoon shift was over.

This week heralded in one of ERAU’s famous traditions on campus: Sigma Chi’s Derby Days!  Derby Days is a week-long competition between teams of girls (aka sororities, sports teams, etc.) and it is so much fun to be involved in anyway, but it also helps raise money for cancer which makes it about twenty times better!  All week, we’ve been having competitions and dressing up for different days of the week to earn points for our team.  I am on the Volleyball team, and my roommate Lauren is on Alpha Xi Delta’s team, so we’ve been documenting our awesome costumes together!

Sleeping Beauty and Leonardo!

Western Wednesday!

Here’s my Derby Days team (which is most of my volleyball team) with our “Coach” who is from Sigma Chi.

This is my (orange) team and Lauren’s (pink) team playing Dodgeball in our “Decathalon” portion of the competition.  THAT was fun!

Tonight, the activity was “Survival Game”, where Sigma Chi brothers would run around campus with different animal names taped to their backs, and we would have to either tag them or hit them with socks to get points (pretty much like an arcade hunting game, only it took over the entire ERAU campus!).  It was pretty epic. 

There’s also a Penny Wars portion of the competition that raises money for the cure for cancer.  Each team has a jug to put money in, pennies and bills are negatives, so the point is to get as much silver money in as you can and sabotoge everyone else by putting in tons of pennies!  The good news right now is that Volleyball has the most coins in our jug.  The bad news is… they’re all pennies.  We’ve been sabotoged already.  That’s alright… we’ll pull ahead!  And all the money goes for a great cause anyway, so either way, we win!  (However, if you go to Riddle and you want Volleyball to actually win, not just metaphorically… remember: silver coins.  Thanks!)

So the rest of this week will be very, VERY interesting, so I will update you all with the Derby Days winners at the end of the week!

“I am no stranger to healthy competition- working hard and playing hard.” (especially when it comes to working for a good cause! )

-Richard Branson

Well, it’s finally SPRING! And four weeks from today is the last day of classes! I can’t believe how quickly this year has flown by! I’m almost halfway done with college, which absolutely blows my mind. My classes this year have been awesome. I also registered for my classes for the fall. I am taking Chinese 3, Studies in Global Intelligence 1, History of Modern Europe, Introduction to the US Legal System, and Deceptions. I am so excited. The good thing about going to Riddle is that you have to take only a few general classes and the rest are completely focused on your degree, so you don’t have to have two full years of classes you couldn’t care less about, like at other community colleges or universities. Right at the beginning I was able to take classes that were pertinent to my major, which I absolutely loved, and it just keeps getting better from there!

ERAU Volleyball is getting better every day as well! This past weekend we played in a spring tournament at University of Arizona in Tucson. We left at five in the morning to play a nine o’clock game, and we played all day to keep in shape for our season in the fall. There were a lot of teams from nearby schools at the tournament, like NAU, ASU, UNM, NMSU, Yavapai, GCU, and of course, U of A. It was a blast for our team, and was a blast from the past for our assistant coach, Jill Blasczyk, who played for U of A when she was going to school there. We even got to see pictures of her playing in the hallways of the stadium. What a stud. After the tourney, we got to hang out at one of the restaurants on the U of A campus called Gentle Ben’s, where pretty much the whole school was rooting for their team in the March Madness basketball game. I think Jill was cheering louder than everyone… ha!

Here we are after the tournament in the U of A stadium. Go Eagles!

I just love the spring semester. This spring tournament was a blast, and I’m excited to be registered for the fall semester, and now I have to get ready for…. FINALS! Gotta love it!

“Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.”

-Anthony J. D’Angelo

Any of you potential GSIS majors thinking about taking the Chinese language, my recommendation is… DO IT!  It is SOO much fun!  Yang Laoshi is teaching me so much.  Even though it can be pretty tough sometimes, it is so worth it.  I found out how much fun it really is knowing Chinese when Yang Laoshi and Chen Laoshi took us students on a field trip… to the Chinese Cultural Center in Phoenix for the Chinese New Year!  (Just so you know, it’s the year of the rabbit!)  All of us students packed onto a fancy bus (that was really more like a plane, because the teachers handed out drinks for everyone!!) and headed to the valley.  We watched a movie on the way down (because there were TVs on the bus!), but the real fun started when we got off the bus.  The festival was AMAZING.  Tons of Chinese vendors were packed into the square selling everything from Buddha figurines to traditional Chinese fans to stuffed panda bears.  Just the atmosphere was amazing!  A picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll let you decide for yourself!

Yang Laoshi and Chen Laoshi are so sweet!

Dragon… RAWR!  Haha.  Don’t worry guys… he didn’t eat me.

Tai Chi!  And thanks to volleyball, I know some of it!  WOOT!

These fish were on sale.  The cheapest was $20, and the most expensive was $40!

There were probably hundreds of these little vendors.

I bought a little dragon to “keep my apartment safe.”  It’s worked so far!

These guys just ran by with a huge dragon in celebration of the new year!

The food market was pretty intense, if you know what I mean.

Teri and I!  We got to catch up while wandering around the square.

Notice that the black and white rocks are formed into a Yin-Yang.  Cool huh!

So overall the whole thing was just a fantastic experience.  I found out just how awesome it is to know Chinese when I asked the vendors how much the item was… in Chinese!… and they got so excited and, well, to be honest, spoke too fast for me to understand them… but still.  It was just a really great experience to be able to see how Chinese is going to help me later in my life and in my future profession.  I am so glad that I chose to take Chinese!  There is even a Chinese track in the GSIS program for any and all interested!  But for now, 新年快乐!  Happy (Chinese) New Year!

“The firm, the enduring, the simple, and the modest are near to virtue.”

-Confucius