As this year my colleagues have celebrated 10 years since our graduation (and yes, without me, as I'm in a different country all together), I figured I should write down what my small brain remembers until I'm really too old to remember anything at all.
So here are some good/great/fun moments I remember from my 5 years spent in Poli:
- getting to share a room with a high-school colleague who I didn't know very well - and managing to become very close friends, despite our differences in every.single.thing.you.can.think.of. My memory of her in high school was that she had ripped apart a sandwich poster someone has put on the wall of our class, just because this made her hungry :-) I still bug her with this memory once in a while. She calls me a mean bitch and I laugh about it. This has to be true love, right?
- discovering I was the only girl in our class. I could pick any guy I wanted, they had to be all single, and they had no other choice than to like me, right? In the end I picked one from a different class. Can't blame me, he had a very-cute-Mr-Darcy look :-) No way to resist that.
- going to a show down-town with some friends and then walking back to our rooms, at night, at -15 degrees C. It took us two hours and something, and it was terrific! And the (not collective, get a hold on yourself!) hot shower at 3 a.m. to start feeling our legs again was the most appreciated shower I ever took. Or closely competing with the one I could finally take after a week of too-close-to-nature camping in the Danube Delta...
- going to my first Brad Pitt movie and falling totally in love with the guy. Yes, even if he's blond. Nobody is perfect.
- being called by one of my colleagues "mini-technicus" because I could fix a toilet. Hey, I had to, no one else would come to fix it. And I could drive a car in Bucharest... Even if for a couple of months I strongly believed my car was a 4 speed one (and not 5, as it actually was), and I kept being shouted at in cross roads because it wouldn't start properly. (for those who didn't get it yet, I was starting it in the 3rd instead of the 1st, of course...)
- choosing to buy a book on Maths instead of going to class, because the bloody classroom was a renowned "fridge-room" around the campus. That, and I actually had a Math-genius in my class and he liked me so he was calm enough to overcome my stupidity. And my constant 'What the Hell do I need to know how to derive this three times, for each variable? What's a kernel got to do with Maths? What am I doing here?'. Luckily, Maths lasted for 2 years only, or he would have killed himself (or me) in the process.
- splitting the lectures at the beginning of the year between friends: you go to that one, I go to this one... then we copy each others' notes and be done with it. It worked pretty well, even though people seem to prefer my writing to others' and I got pushed into attending more classes than I wanted to.
- our 'exam routine': 4 friends, learning together all day (reviewing our notes - actually, my notes), then playing bridge during the night. When we finally went to bed around 4 am, I dreamed about bridge, not exams, so the strategy worked pretty well.
- being part of a European student association - BEST - (even if only in my last year). Amazing experiences, people and that is also how I discovered travel.
- Establishing together with a handful of guys from our Bucharest local group (of course, no other girl was weird enough) the "BEST RoM" group, which actually had the only mission to drink Rum+Coke at any occasion. "Rom" is the Romanian word for "rum" and we found the choice of words quite funny - but of course we were under the influence of the spoken drink. There was a group called BEST Ro - meaning BEST Romania, gathering all local groups at that time in the country. In the end, I think BEST RoM reached a national audience and I hope there are still members of this group following its mission as I
speakwrite this...
- Meeting my future husband: I was standing with my classmates in front of a closed door, waiting for our first tutorial on Artificial Intelligence to start. One person comes, looks at us standing there and decides to go for the door. It's locked. Of course it's locked, you silly person. OR, we could be just 20 idiots standing in front of it just for fun. A second person comes, looks at us, goes for the door. yup, still locked. This starts to get on my nerves. So when a next one arrives, I tell him flat out "the door is locked" before he can even reach it. He answers: "well, sure it is, but I have the key". So yes, he was our new teaching assistant for that tutorial. He was smiling at me (of course, the only girl in there, remember??) and was so cool, calm and ... zen that I just knew then and there I had to make his life more... interesting :-) 10 years later he keeps begging me to let him be bored every now and then.
