Samstag, 27. September 2008

Boat Cruise & Ballard Insides

Ok, I have some catching up to do: letzgo!!
Saturday was mainly used to deal with the effects of Friday (see picture for visualization):



but by Sunday we were all ready for a new go at "meet as many international students as possible in as little time as we give you", organized by FIUTS.
So we went to a boat cruise around Seattle harbor.

Since my neighbors had decided to fix their roof at 8 am (on a f***ing sunday morning!!), I was up early and went to Pike Place Market


to get some Shrimps



and have a look at respectless T-Shirts



In order to understand this T-shirt (and totally crack about it like I did), one must know that Bellevue is the high class fancy part of Seattle, where Microsoft is located. Ballard (where I live) on the other hand is pretty down to earth. It is mainly inhabited by Scandinavian people, used to be a fisher town until it turned into a ship building town during the war. Of course, Bellevue doesn't have the best reputation in Ballard.

Another of Ballard's favorites is this little fellow here:



Ballard for Obama was originally planned to be a joke for a fair. However, it turned out that people bought the shirt away like hot buns ;-). The shirt is now constantly sold out. It is Ballard's own viking way of supporting Democracy in the country.

Although I hardly met any new people on the Cruise (at some point you just stop to care), I did learn a lot about Korean and Taiwanese education, talking to people I had already known. Apparently their students are really competitive until they reach university. Everybody tries to prove him/herself in order to go to the best universities. When they finally get there, though, they do not have that pressure anymore and supposedly become pretty lazy. Also, usually only rich people's children get to go abroad. However, a lot of our Internationals seem to be the exemption from that rule.

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