Pre Departure Classes... Id rather be on a plane.

Boston, Mass.
Vienna, Austria.
Budapest, Hungary.
Athens, Greece.
Naxos, Greece.
Prague, Czech Republic.
Venice, Italy.
Zurich, Switzerland.

Boy that sure seems like a lot for not even 30 days.

So far we have had two days of class.

It was our first day and the room which we were assigned was on the 4th (top) floor of Ryder. They must have been re-doing the roof because when I walked in the room there was dust on the chairs and tables. The roof was made of wood timbers and it couldn't have been very effective because you could see rays of sunlight shining through cracks. Sure enough, as class started, so did the machinary of the work crews above our heads. Ferdi actually tried to calm us down and convince us to stay in the room, meanwhile August sitting next to me is talking about how this is probably asbetos! The machinary started causing dust particles to fall though the cracks and that's when the TA went to find an empty room. She came back and moved us down the the third floor.

Yesterday we listened to Ferdi talk about contaminate properties and water quality topics. Maybe we should talk about air quality for a second? Anyway, good way to start.

Today we met in the 4th floor undergratuate environmental lab. We did the two different experiments to detect E. Coli in a water specimen. E. Coli will be our indicator of fecal matter in water for this trip. One experiment we run water through a filter and count how many bacteria colonies form. The other experiment we mix the water sample with a liquid and the two solidify to a gel (EZGel is the test's name) where bateria colonies could grow.

The labs did not take long. I got there at 9, screwed up one of the labs, and still left by 10:30. Since most assignments are group projects, Ferdi combined Dana and I with August and Stacey Gold (health science) in order to make sure there is more than 1 civil engineer in each group.

Dana and I also sent out two more emails to people in Prague because we do not have a water offical to interview for the Vltava yet. Professor Novotny of the Civil department is from Prague and has given us some contacts which he thinks should be useful. Hopefully we here back. The last guy Novotny gave us hasnt written back and it's been a few weeks.