What about the future?

picture by Sporadic Soul.

When I got back from Erasmus and Nicaragua I was loudly making clear to everyone that there was no chance of seeing me in a working environment after my college graduation (hopelfully in june 2012). But university started again and every 5 minutes you hear the serious people talk about the future and careers and the economic crisis and blablabla...
On top of that it seems that every single company of Belgium throws a "meet&eat" lately for bio-engineering students. Forced by peer-pressure I felt that I should attend at least some of them and damn these company-people are good at their job cause I started doubting...


But when I think of myself right now (stressy, always in a hurry, procrastinating to the max because I'm bored with what I have to do,...) I always find myself thinking about all the stuff I always wanted to do since I was little but never found the time to do it. And now I'm 23 (in my eyes, almost a granny) and my to-do list only got longer.

TO DO:

-have a band and sing for a living, f*ck yeah

-continue my once started violin education

-take some time off on an island to learn to play properly  guitar instead of just rambling and squeeling around every now and then when I get depressed or extremely happy

-write my (sober & drunk) memoires into a soapstory

-make photographs for a living ( and finally read all the user guide's of the camera's I use)

-save the world from starvation and the diminishing tree population or become some kind of Nelson Mandela/AlbertA Einstein so  I can use my (hopefully soon) bio-engineering degree for at least some purpose

-make a world trip on my own for at least a year and do some journalism on the road

-surf like madderfakking Kelly Slater

-kitesurf like aaahm... a ninja

-be an Après Ski bar waitress for a winter season and become a snowboard ninja

-read allllll the books and novels I wanted to read the past years while drinking rivers of hot cocoa

-be a housewife every now and then, so I can finally make all the recipes I ever bought a cookbook for 

-find me a decent man (probably I'll have to wait until travelling to space becomes affordable because on earth they seem to be extinguished.)

-live as a fashion-blogger in the (luvofmylife) city Barcelona

-ride with a hippie van through Europe in festival season with a bunch of crazy in the coconut friends 

...

As you probably can see my to-do list hasn't got a lot to do with what I studied for the past 5 years of my life. Duh.  I mean every day when I'm supposed to start writing on my thesis, I'm browsing the world-wide-web (thank you God for sending us internet) in search of art educations in La Cambre, music studies at conservatories, volunteering programs in Africa, exchange masterstudies in  far far away from here,...


What to do what to do, Dear Santa Claus bring me the solution...
For now I decided maybe the best thing is just live from day to day. Seize it, or not and finish this year and maybe for once start working properly on my thesis and then we'll see... But a girl can dream right? And you only live once... so in order not to be a grumpy one when I turn 60 I think I should go for at least some tags on my to do list.


Nighty night.
Love Luis. x

Call your hairdresser...

...you've got a masquerade to attend!

Friday November 4th 2011 

Eskimo Fabric

Pre-sale:

faculty of bio-engineering

café Koepuur

     Point Final (Overpoort)

more information?

Home Is Where The Heart Is.

Moody Mood Status? Everyday a little less post-erasmus depressed Best Buy of The Week? Starbucks Soy Vanilla Cream Frappucino... OMNOMNOM Proud of...? Baking thousand walnut cookies for a bday gift and only eating a quarter of them myself and I finally started running again  Listening to...? Elbow's performance @ Rock Werchter Best thing about last week? Catching up with friends and family Best thing about this week? Catching up with more friends and family Funniest thing? My sister who got shoppingcrazy at HM and scared off other customers by running around as an escaped hippie Saddest thing? First year that I'm not a lifeguard during summer
Aim for next days? Not forgetting to take my malaria pills (^^Nicaragua) and starting to get some travel info

Granny

Ghent.

Hometown Glory.

Hometown Glory².

Rainbow from my room.

Antwerp.

Don't forget.

Eugène + Schaar

Sisters in crime.

Last days of magic.

And then it's there before you know it, the day to leave Erasmus paradise. My last weeks in Montpellier I've just been ignoring the fact that day would come and now I'm already 3 days home and I just find myself scrolling the whole day through pictures of these last wicked 5 months.
Last week my dad came to Montpellier to kidnap me back home and finally on tuesday the car drove us back to the country of beer. A car filled with roadsigns, other collected stuff from the past months and a grumpy daughter with loads of precious Erasmus memories spinning trough the back of her head.
Before my lapse into post-erasmus depression, lucky me still did a lot of cool stuff.
Camping on the beach with a bunch of friends, crashing some goodbyeparties, attending "Le Apéro Géant" which was a bit overrated so we all decided to dive into a fountain, a short visit to St. Guilhem Le Désert, buying some muscat for on the way home and then finally attending my own last dinner in Montpellier...

Sunset on the camping night

waking up at the beach.

Apéro Géant

Last Night in Montpellier

Benji and Samuel, hero's for walking home at night over the aqueduc.

So Mr. Erasmus, thanks a lot for these 5 wonderfull months of my life in  beautiful Montpellier but most importantly for all these friendships and hilarious moments carved in my mind untill I get alzheimer. I return back home with this bittersweet itchyness in my mind. Bitter, to know that I won't see all the people I've spent 5 months for a while. But also sweet, cause I'm about to see my loving friends and family back after a long period of abscence.

"Ceci n'est pas une fontaine!"

Friday Wisdom.

A little tornadoooo.

Round 3 of the most annoying exam period ever is happening right now. Studying makes me a bit twisty so folks be warned and walk in a circle of at least 500 m around me if I cross your path. The last exams went "comme ci comme ça" so we keep or fingers crossed and hope for miracles and forgiving professors who are mentally incapable to read my scientific epistels in Erasmus french.


So what did we do in between these periods of nerdmodus lifestyle?


Visiting the FISE (festival internationale des sport extrèmes every year in Montpellier!) and extreme it was!

"holy guacamole"

wakeboarding or as Lien calls it "watersnowboarding :-)"

And it rained in Montpellier and if it rains it rains for a loooong time so...

Little raincloud above my room

... let's go to town and buy weird second hand stuff

Sarah tried on the granny hat

...or a Kazoo and scare the hell out of innocent people or try to start a conversation with a pigeon

... and rain or no rain a bbq is always possible

awesome garbage bin construction

Theresa thought it was all fine.

Sebastian and Jenny

Sofie and some FISE fellows

Mexicans, how awkward

 And if you order " un petit steak pour le bbq" in a hallal butchershop this is what you get...

I still feel sorry for the cow.

And in the meantime seven more days waking up with the thought of starting a carreer in the fruitsection of Lidl's supermarket and never ever studying again...

And after that only five more days of Erasmus cause I'm going home the 21first of june... I'm getting nervous if I see my lonely planet standing silly on the bookshelf above my head cause there's so much stuff in it that I still need to do.

And still many people are leaving... but some come back like Anaaaa (crazy supagroparadisewomen who turned her room into a bar/hotel/restaurant)... So happy.

So my brain needs some sleepytime cuz the next days are gonne be legen -wait for it- dary, boring. (yes I finally started watching HIMYM)

Physiquement, je suis fou!

Finally a minute to write down my last adventures here in “I think I’m gonna melt to death” Montpellier. After the exams I had two weeks ago, I urgently had to “debrain” myself. Thanks to my crazy Erasmus entourage that was absolutely no problemo. The most exhausting thing I did that weekend was buying mint leaves for our “Mojito-afternoon/evening/night” and carrying another “found” traffic sign to my room. Life can be tiring.

But to every wicked weekend comes an end, on Monday I left Montpellier with school for 5 days to Olargues. Goal of the week? To study “le bassin versant du Jaur”. I study “water technology” here so every year a class of my school leaves to this village to do all sorts of experimental studies relied to the river Jaur. Hydraulics, microbiology, botanic, hydrobiology and more shizzle were daily bread those days. The last day of the stay we had to present our results to the village so they can see how their beloved river and relied features had changed over time.

Waking up every morning at 7h30 and doing all these research things can be quite exhausting. Especially if you just had a week of exams and a party weekend following to compensate that, so the second night in Olargues I decided to nap just for a few minutes after dinner but I woke up the next morning at nine and missed breakfast. Sounds all very serious but luckily I’m in France and work or no work, French people make party or at least soirées! So thanks to some party minded people of my class at night we could all drink away our research troubles. One night we went to drink at a medieval tower on the highest point of the village and the guys of my class found it a marvelous idea to climb it, so after 10 minutes the whole village was awake cause they started sounding the bell tower. Never heard a bell tower sound like that in my life before. Hilarious.

Doing some measurements

Au travail!

Also important: La ripisylve!

Roomies: Lauryanne, Caroline, Elodie, Mathieu (last one tried to kill me dropping a cellphone on my head when he entered our room "un peu bourée" at night ) haha

Pretty pretty Olargues

drinking at the bell tower with STE!

This weekend then were the last days before another awful schoolwork period (j’en ai ras le bol!!!!) so we went camping to this mini hippie festival “All in Wood” in the village Saussines. Ellen and François, friends of Lien at supagro knew the people who organize it and spread the news. On a well hidden field in the middle of nowhere suddenly this woodstock like place appeared with a mini stage and a wooden bar, crazy people, bbq, tents and even a swing and a petanque field. So cool!

the UKELELE band

Bartender with awesome hair

New roadsign for my collection

weird people

Fooood.

And now back to nerd-reality, a week of labs from 8h till 18h and two exams coming up. Did you ever do a lab in 34°C with a labcoat that feels as winterfur? NOT COOL.
Within three days I’ll be shouting the sentence “physiquement je suis fou” 100 times a day I think.

Time is running out.

Thank you weekend,
finally a few minutes to write some Montpellier-updates on my blog again. Time just goes sooooo fast here and I want to slow it down.

Last weekend I finally went to the beach ! We took a road along the river "Lez" and arrived at Palavas plage and cycled further to Carnon plage. You're there in just an hour and along the road I even met some flamingo's. Some people of my class were there as well so we played a bit volleyball and I tried to understand the last schoolgossip (in french !), apparantly there's a sports tournament next weekend in Marseille between all Polytech schools of France. It wouldn't be me if I just kept on saying: "I wanna go I wanna go I wanna go", until the sportspraeses just gave in and promised me a place if someone cancelled.
And faith was in my favour because someone cancelled her place and now I'm going there! So happy.

The concept goes as follows: We leave friday morning at 5h30, when we arrive in Marseille we do a "défilé" and represent the Polytech of Montpellier by dressing up like blue aliens and scream and shout and sing these funny french Montpellier songs. During the day you do sportscompetitions and during the night you go out to these disguisement soirée's. We stay on a camping, so it's like some festival to me. The theme of friday is "cuir & moustaches" and the other one is "dress up in you're region's most famous celebrity". I really don't know where they get inspiration for these partytheme's but it's awesome. But the whole event stays a sportevent after all so I inscribed myself for the volleyball and footballcompetition. I have no clue what level these people expect me to have so I went to two volleballtrainings this week. Once with Ana at her school and that was quite chill but then yesterday there was training at my school... There was a trainer (I don't think he knows i'm not French) who kept on giving overenthusiastic game instructions and I kept on saying "oui oui oui". Feels great to play a groupsport again. But 4 hours of volleyball in one week plus all the cycling I do here really tires me so much and I'm getting Kim Clijster legs. Yeeeiks

The schoolweeks here keep on being crazy. We have test of so many courses or we think we'll have them so I'm kind of freaking out every now and then. On the other hand I spent a lot of time in school and get to know the french friends better and better.

For today my bike broke down again so I'm gonna start this saterday as a usefull human being and find a way to fix it.

A plus mes petits patates.
Bisous Luis



schoolmates



Plage Carnon

the road to Carnon beach



flamingo's on the way to the beach