across the bridge and across the mountains, threw a nickel in the fountain

so i am leaving in 3 hours to meet buses full of 97 other people, and all together we will take an overnight ferry to the island of bornholm (sleeping on the floor of a ferry...) so that we can bike around all weekend.
so that'll happen. i'd be significantly more excited (read: at all) if i wasn't deathly ill. okay, that's a slight exaggeration, but i've been fighting a stupid cold/cough/other weird complications for a week and i just.. could use some tea and bed. but i figure, at least this is an excuse to not do any homework all weekend.. which is actually terrible because i feel behind in classes. although i've heard that other people never even read the homework for classes anyway. can't help it, i read the syllabus ahead of time and try to do all my homework. apparently this is a unique phenomenon. whatever.
an interesting difference between danes and americans arises here. in denmark, your education is free, and you even receive a stipend once you're in college to help cover living expenses. obviously, as most of you readers know (since i'm pretty sure the readership here consists of my mom, kat, maybe tom(s), and sometimes sam), that we pay an exorbitant* amount of money to go to college. i believe the current tuition at lehigh is around 45,000 USD a year. well, my Sustainable By Design (henceforth referred to as SbD) prof said something about, "normally, we assign reading and assume you do it. but since teaching american students, we have discovered that sometimes you just don't.. we don't know why. so i will discuss the reading in class to make sure you have been doing it." i realized, i think this is because of the attitude towards education developed because of money. in denmark, since you're being paid to go to school, it's like, of COURSE you'll do the reading! your education is a privilege and you are awfully lucky to live in a country that will have people assign you reading for FREE. in america, we think, "i'm paying so much for this! i DEMAND to be smarter, preferably nowish! after all, i'm paying this money, i shouldn't have to do much more work than that... "
so that's my opinion anyway. and of course it's a huge generalization, as i hope to be an example of, since i try to do all my reading. but i have noticed that most dis students laugh in the face of homework reading. curious.

anywho, i hope the shape of my goneness isn't flairing up anew**, friends at home.
have a great weekend. i'll get back to you on how mine went, what with the biking and the sick and the hostel and the whether-or-not-they-can-handle-a-vegan.

h.


*oh my gosh, i think i made up another word. it's like how i knew the word "engulf" but i also made up a word "enfulge" when i was very little that was similar but not quite the same, and i grew up thinking it was a word. i knew the word "exorbitant" but i made up a similar word "absorbitant" that is apparently not a word.. i need to stop doing that. but it's not my fault, my theory is that i read so much as a kid and i was reading pretty hard stuff, so no one was using those types of words around me when i was that little, so i had to make up a lot of pronunciations and whatnot on my own. (hence: archives pronounced "ar-CH-ive", etc. can you blame me? that's what it looks like!) however, this doesn't exactly explain creating spinoff words and then convincing myself they exist...

**if you get that reference, you get Hayley Hero points. but only if you identify it to me, and don't google it. although googling isn't that helpful anyway with this.