Week One

Well, it's that time again.  Real classes haven't started yet, but Georgetown has a program called "Week One" during which we spend a week analyzing a complicated international law problem as a group.  Ours has to do with the contract surrounding the construction of a dam in Laos.  My group is playing the role of the American company that ordered barges from a French company in order to help with the construction.  The French company was burning tires in order to keep their costs down, and the outlawing of that practice in China sent their costs skyrocketing and as a result they are trying to rescind the contract on the basis of impracticability/impossibility.  Fun stuff!

As another part of the week we're doing teambuilding exercises.  The first one asks us to imagine that we were in a helicopter crash somewhere in the remote snowy wilderness and were able to salvage twelve items.  We are to rank the items in order of survival importance, then rank them again as a team, and then compare our rankings to the rankings of survival experts.  With any luck, years of watching Man vs. Wild will help me out here.

But I'm getting ahead of myself- before I got home (where I received a heartwarming reception from Ben/Davia/Jeff/Emily/Margaret/etc... (a surprise-attack on my way to the elevator was involved)) I went up to Boston to visit Beau!

As an added bonus, David also lives in Boston (he's studying at another law school up there- not a great one, but, you know, pretty good.  Forget the exact name.  Starts with an H.  Anyway...) and was getting out of class just as I arrived on the T (I am now excellent at navigating large cities).  We set up camp at a bar and then met with Beau and Jen once he got out of work.  We went out to dinner with them and Beau's roommate Ben (I have really got to stop meeting people named Ben-it's starting to confuse me, even) and had a great time.  As would be expected, my former roommates got along swimmingly.  It's as though they had something in common.

We all went back to Beau's apartment so that he could test out his new Margaritaville machine.  I must say, it seems to have been an excellent investment because it made some pretty great margaritas.  While there, someone (it may have been Jen) pointed out (with no prompting from me) that David looked like Vince Vaughn.  Someone pulled up a picture for comparison, and we took a picture.

It's not super close, but it's closer than it should be.

The next day Beau and I woke up at 4:30AM (three hours of sleep yay) to hop on a bus and go to Stowe in Vermont.  I had never gone skiing in Vermont, and so I was expecting some variation of the east coast skiing I was used to: the kind where it takes about one minute to get all the way down the mountain and twenty for the chairlift to take you back up.  I was pleasantly surprised that this was not the case.  The mountain was huge, had a gondola lift, and had really excellent snow.  The last time Beau and I went skiing together, we were both either sixteen or seventeen (I forget which) and Beau decided to try snowboarding for the first time (I did too, but after three days I gave up on life. Not just snowboarding, but life.  Never before and never since has an activity so utterly sapped me of my will to go on.). 

But Beau was pretty good at it so he kept doing it.

This picture was supposed to have a mountain in the background.

We made the most of our time on the slopes between 9 and 4PM, breaking only for lunch.  On our last run I pulled out my camera and filmed a bit, because I can and I do dumb things like hold expensive technology while heading down a steep slope.  Because, you know, nothing bad could ever happen there.

Well, it didn't this time, at least.  

Come for the views, stay for my scintillating commentary about fog and cameras.  

At four we returned our equipment and had time for a drink at the lodge.  There was a very decent band playing.

Then we drove back to Boston where I pretended for Beau that I was interested in watching football because the Saints were playing.  (Actually it was a good game, so I did sort of grudgingly enjoy it.)  A most excellent weekend!  Special thanks to Beau for planning it all!