Sydney's Fieldwork Blog

          So for swim team, my mom originally signed me up and I wasn't too excited about it. My first two practices were really hard and I wanted to quit. I've never really trained, swimming-wise, before, and it was a lot harder than I expected to be. I was the only new girl, and I was the only one who hadn't been doing swim team since I was a toddler. I didn't feel left out necessarily, but I felt really slow.           My times from the time trials don't show that I'm slow, but I felt slow. After the first couples practices, the practices got slightly easier, but it was still really hard. I went to practice 3 times a week for 4 weeks, and then there were the hours for going to meets. I competed in 2 meets, and each lasted around 4 hours. I had never been to a swim meet before and it was really interesting, and long. I swam in 5 heats and because I'm in one of the older age groups we were waiting around a lot. The first meet I got goo...

         For one of my 10 hour "projects", I went to mathnasium 2-3 times a week all summer and each session is 1 hour. Mathnasium is an organization for all ages that creates a math curriculum based on the child's level. You can show up whenever you want and they will assign you to a teacher for that day. The teacher can help you with anything you don't understand and it's actually been really helpful. The only weeks I didn't go was while I was at sleep away camp and when my family went on vacation. But the weeks I have gone have been great. The teachers are really helpful and they are really helping me understand the packets they're giving me. I actually enjoy going, and I'm going to continue going during the school year. I even feel like I'm improving a lot. Maybe.        

          So for deciding what my summer homework was going to be, I talked to my college counselor Beth. I've met with her a couple times this summer and she helps me set goals, and make decisions about extra curriculars and things like that. I was telling her about the things I was going to do this summer and when I mentioned that I was going to mathnasium all summer she was all for blogging about it. I also mentioned that I was joining swim team this summer and she thought that I could also blog about that because it's something I haven't done before and she thought it could count as summer homework and something I learned. My mathnasium counts as 10 hours for math and my swim team counts as 10 hours for PF. She had the idea of me writing about my sleep away camp experience because it was a leadership program, but there was no school subject that I could get graded on for writing about that. So I decided to stick to the math and swim team.

Saturday, March 6, 2017           TODAY WAS OUR LAST DAY OF SCAVENGING OMG OMG OMG!!!!!! This was a very happy and sad day. Sad because this was the last day of seeing everyone, but happy because today was a good day. Because we kind of already knew what the end results were going to be, we just spent the day relaxing and doing what we wanted.            We went to the top of the Empire State Building first, which was super cool and also super touristy. I saw where daddy proposed (it was next to a trashcan) but it was cute. We also got really good pizza, and spent like an hour eating it. After that we just walked around for a little bit and kind of went where we felt like it. We were going to go to the Met, but I was doing the directions and I sent us to the MetLife Building. Which is more of a life insurance place than an art museum so, that didn't really work out.            I had wanted to buy...

Friday, May 5th           Today is our last day of international scavenging! Tonight we head back to the US! It's bittersweet. I loved Europe and I'm sad to leave, and it also means the trip is almost over. But at the same time I CANNOT WAIT to be home.           Today we got an early start because we drove out to Hotel Budir, (which was apparently really fancy) and it was 2 1/2 hours away. Catherine slept for part of it, I slept for the WHOLE RIDE THERE. We had a really nice breakfast there, and after we all talked for a while we went to look at this church/graveyard place, and it was actually pretty cool. We looked around to try and find the oldest death date (which turned out to be the owner of the place).           After that we came back to Reykjavik to do scavenges here. Some of which included sending postcards, we saw an indoor mini street market (European style I guess), and we got the most AMAZING HO...

Thursday, May 4, 2017           So this stop is ACTUALLY our last stop before NY. We had an 11am flight to Reykjavik, and that plane ride was very interesting. We flew on WOW Air, and everything was violet! The uniforms, the floors, the seats, the outside of the plane, just everything was violet and I really liked it! It was so vibrant and happy. We also had out most thorough peer-review on the plane which was a good experience. After our peer-review people just talked for the rest of the plane ride about a whole bunch of stuff, which was really nice.           So we are in Iceland for a total of 28 hours, and it's a par 2, which means it's one of the easier legs. We ARE allowed to rent cars for this leg. Which would normally be super great, except my dad doesn't have his license because he lost his phone. So we teamed up with Greg and Catherine. Teaming up with them was a great idea, today was so much fun.       ...

Wednesday, May 3, 2017           So today was SUPPOSED to be our last big push of the trip, however that is not the case. But I'll get to that later. So today was probably our biggest travel day transportation-wise. We took two trains and a ferry to get to Dublin. Our first train was from Liverpool to Chester, where we had a 50 minute layover before our train from Chester to Holyhead.           While we were waiting at the station for our next train, Avni and Roshi showed up!! I was just saying yesterday how I really wanted to see them, and then we saw them! I was so happy to randomly run into another team. It was so nice to see people we knew. We just talked the whole time on the train, and it was really very nice. Once we got to Holyhead, we had to go on a ferry to get to Dublin. While we were at the station, we saw Tom and Paula! Seeing them was also random and also really great! We all went on the ferry together (which was hug...

Tuesday, May 2, 2017           Today was England! I had never been to the infamous Great Britain, and now I have! It was totally amazing. We took a train through London so I was there for like 10 minutes. However, throughout the day I went to Cambridge, Birmingham, and we are spending the night in Liverpool. We did have to get up early, but England is still a very very nice place.            We went to Cambridge first, and we biked EVERYWHERE. We rented bikes right when we got there and we used them for 3 or 4 hours. That's the best way to go places because walking would've hurt so much and biking avoids traffic. It was a lot of fun, except for when I sort of crashed into a car. We were going in between the edge of the street and a lane, which was like 2 feet of room, and my dad made it through and he was speeding ahead. For whatever reason he didn't go in the biking lane and I didn't see it so I followed him and then I was s...

Monday, May 1, 2017           So today was not like yesterday, it was actually kind of crappy. We woke up kind of early to check out, and we were off to the Netherlands. We took the metro to the Midi station where we took the train to Den Haag. There were multiple Den Haag stations, and the train had no signs or anything telling us which stop we were at, so we ended up missing the train station. This was one of the really fast trains, so the next stop wasn’t for a good 20 minutes. We ended up getting off at the Amsterdam Airport, and took a train back to Den Haag Central. Thankfully that train ride took only about half an hour.           At the train station they had a place to leave our luggage, and half of it was out of order. We had lost about an hour of time because we missed our station so we were a little bit on edge. We were having trouble getting some of the lockers to work, and we were going to try for the last time, ther...

Sunday, April 30, 2017           Today was our only day in Belgium, and I really liked it. Belgium is such a nice place, besides all the beer cans and broken glass in the morning. We got up pretty early to get an early start, not realizing that 1 It was Sunday and 2 it was 6am and nothing is open at 6am. I had avoided thinking about all of the scavenges because the book had so much stuff in it for a SHORTER amount of time than we spent in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lanka leg was extremely hard to win, and we were constantly on the move. For this, I’m sure it will be like that, just more. Today was a good way to start scavenging for the Europe leg.           While we were at the train station getting some help from Sonia, the helpful but intimidating lady at the station, we saw teams Thundersnow and Travelling Bohemians. We all decided to go around Belgium together. First we went to Mass with the Travelling Bohemians, while team Thundersnow...