Leprechauns, Rainbows and Lucky Charms

Walking to school today felt nice. It was a beautiful day. When I got the uni after a little extra walking because the trams won't take us to the uni anymore, the students blocked off the entrances...me and another girl were like um whatever so we pushed through, opened the door where they had just tried to block it and crawled under some boys and under some desks and chairs in order to get through so we could take our test. I was annoyed that they are doing that and trying to make it so we can't even get our education. I sometimes want to punch them and be like - hey guess what...this isn't helping!

I took my test, and after we did an exercise in groups of 2 to write in French. Our teacher matches us up with someone that doesn’t speak our language. I was put with Yung. He is from China and really nice. I was trying to explain what Ireland was to him in French but he didn’t understand. Suprisingly, the word “leprechaun” wasn’t in my trustworthy French/English dictionary either. Haha. First I tried to explain it by talking about eating lucky charms cereal…then I decided to draw a picture of a rainbow and pot of gold. Nope- nothing. I was telling him in French the whole time it was a little man who gave you a wish if you found his pot of gold. It was not getting through and then I realized wow- I must look like an idiot right now trying to get a Chinese person to understand what a leprechaun is. Haha. Kinda funny.

After class, we were walking through the uni and there is this homeless man who somehow manages to live at the uni. He has bags of his stuff and it’s really sad and he really smells so whenever you walk by him it’s hard to not gag. Anyways, today we noticed he moved!! This is a big deal! Ha, so I took a picture of him. I think he found a lot of new things in the garbage because the garbage men have not been picking up the garbage because of the strike. It has been pretty gross because you walk through the streets and there is just a ton of rubbish EVERYWHERE. It’s like heaven on earth for the homeless people though. I haven’t seen so many happy homeless people in a long time! So maybe that is one positive thing about the strike? Haha.

Tomorrow the government is going to make a decision about whether or not they are changing the retirement age. That is what the whole strike is about. The government changed the retirement from age 60 to age 62 and people are not happy. It seems like more and more is adding to the seriousness of the strike daily.

Something kinda funny – today on the tram, I was standing and there was a man sitting down off to the right of me and apparently I was blocking the sun, so when I moved closer to the door I noticed he immediately was blinded by the sun and put his hand up to guard his eyes. I felt bad so I jumped back over to where I was blocking the sun’s rays from him, him being in my shadow. Then he looked up at me and I just smiled at him. He was a really heavy guy with piercings and spiky hair and I could smell alcohol on him but I was trying to be nice. He smiled back and then I noticed his face just seemed a little brighter. It was kinda funny. But then my kindness ended because my stop came and I wasn’t going to continue providing shelter service for the rest of his tram ride… I didn’t want him to think I was crushing on him or something!