Bomb alert (again)

It is 8 a.m. on March 26th, and my landline phone is ringing, which is quite unusual since nobody knows this number. Generally, when this phone is ringing, I pick it up and listen to the robot encouraging me to go and support the WIU Leathernecks at their next game, but the season is over for months now.

No, this time, this is the University calling: they discovered two pieces of paper in Horrabin Hall announcing that "a terrible tragedy [will]occur Thursday 3-26-09". Then at 10:15 a.m., a piece of paper is found in the restroom of Stipes (where I in class), saying that a bomb would explode at 10:00 a.m. Fortunately, nothing happened that day.

This is not the first alert in Macomb. In October, two student have been arrested for driving at night with face masks, bulletproof vest, grenades, guns, and rifles with silencers. In December, there was a similar shooting threat found in the library during the first day of the finals' week. In February, an explosive device was found outside the Pace (one of the main student bar of Macomb). Even though most of the threats were obviously last resort action for student who did not study enough for a test or final, one cannot be somewhat worried. As these bad jokes multiply, people tend to ignore these threats. What if it happens someday?

Spring Break!

New episode of my journey through the U.S. and the college experience: Spring Break! This one-week holiday is the favorite time of American college students for several notorious reasons. Anyway,  I did not feel like spending a thousand dollar for an all inclusive vacation package to Cancun or Panama City, so I decided to do a quite different trip. Per, Max, Stephan, and I could not figure which destinations we absolutely wanted to go to (USA is a wide country!!), but we found a compromise between the two cities of New Orleans and Las Vegas. Since we could not decide which one of those two we would like to see most, we simply decided to visit both! Yehaw!

Actually, this trip was a triple city journey as we stayed a few days in Chicago. Apart from Max Percherskiy's birthday, we had the opportunity to see the green rivers of the city for Saint Patrick's day, which was pretty cool! It was also quite nice to be able to see a bit of the city and walk around without fighting against heavy snow and icy wind!! The weather was warm and Chicago instantly felt like a more pleasant city.

Direction New Orleans. First of all, I have to say that what I imagined of New Orleans was VERY different from the actual experience that we had there. I imagined it to be a calm city, still hurt in its feelings by Katrina (alright, it might still be true), with a lot of nice and calm jazz bars. Instead, it happened to be one of the most exciting party city ever, everybody was so excited about Saint Patrick's day that we met a lot of people from almost everywhere (China, Ecuador, Georgia, France, or Haiti!!). The bars and restaurants were far from being calm and jazzy, but instead very loud and animated. The weather was also very "tropical", very damp and hot, which gave it a special feeling. All of us were extremely happily surprised by New Orleans, and this is definitely a place I would want to discover further.

A very unpleasant Southwest flight later, we were in Las Vegas, the famous gambling city! I must admit that I was quite disappointed the first days, since I have seen the town over and over on TV and did not have this feeling of seeing something completely new. However, you cannot not be impressed by Casinos such as the Bellagio, the Caesar's Palace, or the Venetian. Besides the overwhelming facades, the interior were meticulously designed, the casinos are huge, and I thought that it was really beautiful despite its "fake" aspect. Fortunately, I managed to loose "only" about $20 dollars gambling there, not too bad! As our budget was running low because of New Orleans, we did not see any show, or did anything extraordinary, but that was a really good time, very refreshing! Perfect way to kick off the last 8 weeks of this program (Time flies way too fast)