La vie est tres belle quand il est le mois de juin

I'm back home after a month-long rendez-vous at the University of Memphis. There are some experiences where you just have to be there to understand. No words of mine could ever describe the feeling. I and about 100 other people were truly in our own microcosm of happiness and no sleep and pure bliss.

So I kind of studied for a week. Because we did have real classes. But then I realized I was missing out on life and so I stopped studying and reading and had amazing times playing hide and go seek in the library, being threatened with police for being loud, dancing, grinding, building huge structures out of plastic and CRAWLING through them, eating frozen yogurt and so much more stuff.

I also had my first summer fling. It was bittersweet as these things usually are. Like a true romantic, I have to note that my experience was straight out of the book - everything happened at the most appropriate, raciest time. I don't regret anything.

Reintegrating into the real world will be hard. The real world is such a disappointment right now. But, enjoy some pictures while I go off on a tangent!

I better start with our Bengali class. The whole 87 people were divided into 4 language groups : Latin America (Portuguese), Africa (Hausa), East Asia (Mandarin Chinese) and the best CLAS EVER South Asia (Bengali). We met ever weekday and studied the language, but we also got to put on a dinner for everyone else - complete with ethnic food and entertainment. We also did a bunch of activities together over the weekends - like this Scavenger Hunt.

Not only did you get to do mind-numbing research in the library,  but you also got to walk around and explore the campus, stage a fashion shoot, cook ethnic food and come up with a skit.We thought the boys would look amazing in ethnic dresses - we even put makeup on some! BTW, the guy in the middle is a total model and is also wearing my German dress...his fake boobs kept sliding sideways though...

And these are team Africa's boys.

Did I mention the Scavenger Hunt was a competition? And  that our team totally blew everyone away with our fashion shoot, our pretty boy models and our slightly politically incorrect skits?

Then of course we had our team dinner. I was so excited to do a Bollywood movie - I had grown up watching them in Russia and Kazakhstan. The story is (obviously) a love story loosely based on how my teacher's parents met which is really adorable! I got to play the main girl, Jaya and a short Indian guy played Bishu, my husband. (If there was ever a time to feel like a big white girl, this was it). I was sooo excited when we got our costumes - a friend of mine stole the pretty gray green outfit, but I was told I looked like Jasmine in this purple one.

Enough talking! Here are the pics!

 

My roommie and I are in the middle - the girls on the outside are roommies in our hall! Hall <3

Team Baanglaa (it's how the Bengali say Bengali) with Mr. Jay Dasgupta and my Indian "husband" next to me.

As for the actual performance :

My costar and I, with  a friend creeping in the back. :)

And the pre-performance picture we all took. These are, by far, my favorite although iPhone photo quality sucks.

And accompanied by videos of our performance! <3

 

This post took me almost a week to make and I am emotionally tired. I will be spamming soon enough. <3