"to reach heaven you must first go through hell"

Those awe-inspiring words were delivered to me by an awe-inspiring 9th and 12th grade English Lit teacher Mr. Bud Mayfield (see sarcasm).

But if they do hold true, as he frequently showed us in chosen title after chosen title, regarding the journey that any good protagonist must take before reaching the promised land, I sure hope it works in my favor as well..

Ps. Sorry about the length of this post….

So after the sad departure of Abby I had a few days to work on some bschool apps. As most of you know I’m applying to bschool for the fall of 2009. I’ve been working on my GMATs forever, and while they haven’t gone as well as I hoped I still have a great story and great skills to get me into the school. So firs app up, Harvard. So by this point im probably half way through the essays, in the middle of editing most of them when the motherboard on my computer just dies…..GREAT! I think it had something to do with power conversion, which is BS since lap tops come with built in converters…

So while I had my homeboy Kumar Walia go to my storage unit in the BK and pick up an old lap top of mine I still had to bang out the rest of this application. That saw me sitting in ghetto call center/internet (I don’t wanna say Café cause there was nothing café about them and they didn’t serve any caffeinated drinks..) spots paying at least a euro an hour to use the net. It also saw me in numerous moments of total frustration and aggravation whilst I tried to sum up my being, weaknesses and accomplishments while 10 little kids, with no idea of what personal space is or just being quite, yelling, screaming and kicking me while playing video games all day….didnt these kids have anything better to do? Like go to school????

The internet cafes also closed really early so I couldn’t hit them up after practice, so all work had to be done during the day (which meant waking up early…lame) and I couldn’t do stuff when I’m usually most productive….So with tons of time wasted in the cafes I really didn’t have time to study…for my GMATS. Yes in some sort of weirdly organized way I had allowed myself to be able to take 3 gmat tests before the Harvard application was due (you can only take it once every 31 days, so I had to space them out perfectly). However Barcelona and other Spanish cities unfortunately did not have them on the day that I needed them, either before or on the 15th of October. Thus after finding a cheap flight with easy jet I flew to Lyon for a 2 day trip, basically to take the GMAT. After getting to lyon and spending the better part of one day in an inetnet café, struggling with a French keyboard, which is similar enough to make u think its regular but a few key keys are switched around, like A, M and W I didn’t get to see much of France. The next day all psyched for the test I got to the testing station a bit early, with my proctor not showing up until at least 30 min after I was supposed to start the test. The good news, I would be testing alone, so no annoying outside noises, and with a us keyboard, the bad news, I did worse than I did when I took the test the second time….AWESOME! So not only did I pay all this money to fly out to Lyon, and spend a night in a hotel and pay for the test, and TAXES, YES TAXES, on the test I did worse….Oh on top of all of that after the test was done I was still freaking out cause my last recommender still hadn’t finished, AND I had no where to stay the night…my hotel that I booked was only for 1 night.

So after spending another 2 hours at an internet café, this one was actually a café in France, I waited until my recommender got it done, thanks MIKE! Had me sweat a bit but last minute is the way I like to do things (obviously) …then I spent the rest of my time trying to find a hotel…which turns out in a Lyon there only about 70 hotels….

So what did I do next? Freak out? Nah, went and smoked a habana and chilled on some steps watching French people pre party in the streets….i actually like the idea a lot…wish we could do that in the US, would save us on bar costs for sure as well as the issues with driving places back and forth all the time….just do it in the street outside the bar area then go to the bars….After hanging out in a bar or two at around 1ish I decided to take a walk around town and also a good time to check out and walk into hotels to see if they have any space. After about 2 hours, with a stop at Mcy D’s which I was trying to parlay into a short term spot to stay at (which I guess that late it was only for take out) I wound up going to over 15 hotels all of them being full….so at around 3am I made my way to the bus station, which was of course closed and finally resigned myself to how I was going to be spending the rest of the night…

…since I was tired from the test and walking I couldn’t stay up all night, so I tried the first hour on a concrete bench in a park. The park was kinda shitty as it was all under construction but wasn’t to big and not to much foot traffic so I got a bit of sleep…but concrete is COLD, and doesn’t warm up, and I had or thought I had little bugs biting my ankles making it impossible to sleep!!! So after struggling to get any quality sleep for about 2 hours I walked around till I found a wood bench which kept my body warmth…

Things I learned: find a hotel earlier than a few days before especially in smaller French towns where no one speaks English
2) concrete is cold
3) the cardboard that homeless people use is for this cold
4) sleeping outside in a park in a country that uve been in for 20 hours is NOT FUN
5) the gmat sucks, and I suck at it…as well as all general standardized testing…

So I then got back to Barca and my perfect week ended with being told by UPS that in addition to the 360$ that I needed to pay nitin back for to send my computer over night, which didn’t get here until a week later, I had to pay 200$ in customs fees…what an awesomely expensive shitty back up computer…but its better than the internet spots so I cant complain that much…

…sorry about the gripe session or for lack of a better term “bitch session” but it feels good to get that all out…but back to my earlier quote, I hope that this was my week of “hell” in this case and that “heaven” will be getting into HBS…lets hope, pray, or whatever it is we may do…

Now onto waterpolo…

So since I last reported we’ve had our first 2 actual league games. The first one we won by 1, with me picking up a trash goal as the game winner with less than 2 minutes left. It was great to start our first official game….The second game which was yesterday was a mess. The refs kicked me out, and both our 2 meter men, thus we were left with no real 2 meter defense or offense….Despite being down 3 goals we came back and my teammate scored the game tier with about 20 seconds left….
Our league is kinda like Premiership football where you can have ties, and the winner is not decided by a tournament but rather by accumulative points. Win-3 Tie-1 loss-0. So right now we have 4 points…

Still having some issues with how we are spending our practice time, but I’m hoping that will improve this week….we Play Olot another Barcelona team this weekend, then have a weekend off which I’m going to spend in England visiting my parents…

Just got back from a bar meet up with some Americans that I met trying to find work as a teacher through the Spanish version of Craigslist and got some dinner and watch the barca game…cool to meet some other people in a similar situation as me and see what they were doing and how they were handling it ext….

Hope all is well with everyone in the us, I’m going to be sending out a short update email soon with my schedule on it so if anyone wants to come visit they can feel free to do it around and during my games in Barcelona….

Sorry about the length again.

J$ out…