Meals
- Breakfast – Sausage and Cheese Sandwich & Tangerine Yogurt & Orange Juice
- Lunch – Fish and Chips & Watermelon & Lipton Mango Ice Tea
- Dinner – Tantanmen from Ramen Dayo!
- Desert – Churro Oyster from Loop and Scoop
Weather
- Another beautiful and sunny day. It seems we’ve brought the California weather over for a few days.
The Happenings
I woke up at 8:00am or so today. I feel pretty good for only sleeping for four hours but I also took a two nap after class so maybe i really got like six? Anyways, today was exam day. . . The funny thing was that a lot of us weren’t that stressed even though we didn’t feel that confident in our mastery of the material. On the walk to breakfast today I looked over the engineering tutorial questions. I hoped there wouldn’t be a question about cross products on the exam.
After breakfast I went to the main room to go over some more multiple choice questions and frqs. It felt like finals day, where you knew the final was in just a few hours but you don’t want to intensively review and burn out so you just look at a few things here and there and try to relax and stay calm. We were walked over to our exam room at 11:40 and started the exam at 12. The professor said that the exams are usually an hour long but he got the time extended to 90 minutes for our summer session because of how intensive it was. Nevertheless, I took a fairly good amount of time on the 20 multiple choice questions and had about 40 minutes left to do two frqs. There were three frqs given and we chose two to solve. i chose to do the elevator problem question and the position, velocity, acceleration one. The third one I skipped was a question about projectile motion. It asked about maximum range and stuff like that and while the book did not cover that, Mr. Lawrence did. However, I didn’t feel that comfortable deriving those things so I skipped it. I finished with a minute to spare and didn’t check my work but I get the exam back on Wednesday so I’ll let you all know how I did.
After the exam we got lunch and went back to our dorm to relax for a few hours. On the way back to the dorm, Anabella, Raya, and I looked through the botanical gardens. It reminded me of the zoo because it was really hot and there was so much greenery. i took a few pictures that I’ll post below or somewhere on this page. WE ALSO SAW A WEDDING!! Or it was more like the wedding walk. When I exited one of the botanical gardens, I heard a bagpipe playing and I walked towards the sound and saw a man playing a bagpipe followed by a bridge and groom. The man playing the bagpipes led them through the park and they went into another botanical garden to take pictures. It was a really cool thing to observe. As they were walking through the park, people sitting on benches and on the grass started clapping and quite a few people took our their phones to record the procession.
On another note, the park has been filled with people for the past three days. Anabella noted that people were sunbathing in the park like how Californians would sunbathe at the beach and I was like wow, that’s like exactly what’s happening. The weather has been warmer than average, with the sun being out everyday and I guess people really were soaking up the rays. Many of the benches were filled, and families were sitting on blankets in the grass, with a few people taking off their shirt and laying in the grass. It was a cool cultural difference to recognize.
Dinner plans were ramen at Ramen Dayo! We got there at about 7:00pm and ya… it was pretty busy. The wait was 50 minutes so we went to get ice cream first at Loop and Scoop. Loop and Scoop is an ice cream parlor that also sells churros. Their line was quite long but the inside was very homey. It reminded me of a diner but brought to the 21st century. I got the oreo churro oyster, which is basically an oreo ice cream sandwich but with churros instead of cookies being the bread. Let me tell you, it was amazing. The churros are made fresh to order so we had to wait 8-10 minutes but the first bite was great. The warmth of the churros against the cold ice cream. My mouth was going to town. The best part of the dessert for me were the churros. I’ll have to go back against to buy their churro bites with dipping sauce! Shout out to Richard for telling us about this place. It’s a good thing it’s only a 15 minute walk from our dorm.
After eating our ice cream we went back to the ramen restaurant and had a table waiting for us. I got the Tantanmen, mainly because I eat the tantan ramen at Rende and I wanted to see what real tantan ramen tasted like. We also ordered a side of pan fried gyoza and some sake to drink. The Tantanmen tasted pretty good, but I couldn’t really taste its flavor. I knew it tasted good but I couldn’t tell exactly why it was good but I would eat it again. The soup was a different consistency than Rende’s but that was about it. Of course Rende wasn’t as good as Ramen Dayo! but it wasn’t that far off from the original (unlike some of their other Asian specials). I also learned that alcohol is not for me. i took a few sips of the sake and the taste gave me a headache so I didn’t really drink any during dinner. The gyoza were okay. Nothing special but not bad.
After dinner, Anabella wanted to go to a club, but we went to a bar first. The bar was in an old church and I thought it was funny because Christianity discourages drinking yet here we are buying drinks inside a church. Everyone in the group bought a drink for themselves except for me, but I did try a little sip of everyone’s drink to try it out. The most bearable drink for me was the beer they had and the strongest thing that I absolutely did not enjoy was the whisky. Ya, alcohol really isn’t going to be a thing for me when I turn 21.
After chatting and drinking, some of the group wanted to go to a club, but that wasn’t really my thing so I headed back to the dorm. i looked at some more classes for my UCLA schedule next fall and listened to some nice symphonies. It was a pretty fun day and I really enjoyed it. The food was great and chatting with everyone was a great way to enjoy life after the test. Work hard Sunday to Thursday then play hard Friday night and Saturday.
