Homecoming is finally here, but I’m nowhere to be found in the Swamp stadium, what happened? First of all, I have been to all other games, and no I was not sick during this one. Truth to be told, I sold my ticket for this game because I would get most of my investment (the season ticket purchase) back on this. For me, it was not worth more than the money that I would get back, so that’s what I did. This day I tried going out downtown as well, but it was too messy, crowded and pricey, a direct result of winning from the Auburn tigers!

On Monday, we went to see the Joker movie. The thing that surprised me the most were the reclining seats. A foreign concept to me, but amazing nonetheless! For me, it felt like the watching experience was improved a lot by almost laying flat while watching the movie. But that could also only be the case for the first time you experience something like this.

The day after, Keri and I decided to go to Reitz plaza after going to the gym. There was an plant drop event happening with 250 plants, previous year they were all gone withing 2 minutes so we waited for 30 minutes this time. Totally worth it!

EVS, the official organization that creates activities for UF exchange students, posted an event where we could join to the Newberry Haunted House and Cornfield Maze. In the end we ended up going by ourselves by cars. It was not too scary but I enjoyed that night. The cornfield was high enough to not be able to see everything, and there were masked people with fake chainsaws to scare us. Which resulted in Jessica giving one of them a phycho-analysis/ therapeutic session back to one of them. After Newberry we met up at Hurricane BTW for burgers and milkshakes.

This game was one I knew was going to be one of the most boring ones. The game against Towson had a 97% chance of winning on the ESPN site. It was fun nonetheless, and I met some amazing people before the game started. And they had an amazing half-time show with fire!!

I was very lucky that I could go shopping with Didier, a good Haitian friend of mine who luckily owns a car. I did my shopping at Walmart (as I do from now on since I can purchase my groceries beforehand with the app and then just pick it up with the car). After this we wanted to get a cheesecake from the cheesecake factory, however the line was waaay to long, which is probably because a lot of families moved into Gainesville for the Homecoming game next weekend. Also: Didier had a longboard which he wouldn’t use at all so he let me borrow it for this semester, which means I can finally be a skater boii.

The first of October, a friend of us had her birthday. Of course, we wanted to surprise her with a birthday part one day before this date, on a Monday. I used my Spanish roots to make a nice tortilla (not the wraps) for this surprise birthday party. We gave the Weaver basement a makeover, and we all had fun until the Resident Assistent came by and wrote down ALL of our UFid’s, just because two of us (21+) were drinking beer.

On Friday, no one had classes because it was Homecoming, a holiday put in place just because the day after there was going to be the biggest home game of UF. This game against Auburn made a lot of families go to Gainesville, a week before the game itself. This Friday there was a parade, with high schools as well as different clubs and other parties participating. It was funny to see some floats with a tiger being fed to an alligator (the mascotte of Auburn is a tiger). Also, I saw a friend dancing in the Colombian group in the parade.

After the parade we went to the Oaks mall nearby, where I visited the Spencers shop, which is an alternative-like shop with sketchy/dry humor products.

Saturday, gameday, we have a homegame against Tennessee and the outrageous amount of commuters already started moving two days ago. Since the game starts at noon, tailgating started for some at 7 in the morning. Something that I cannot do so they can start without me. The game was not all too interesting to watch (it ended being 34-3 for UF), and it was very hot that day, so we decided to skip the last quarter😅. To cool down after it was a good idea to get some froyo, it’s time to make froyo a regular thing (I might come back as fat as a beached whale when I get back in The Netherlands).

The next day, I had to pay a visit to the UF Bookstore, I had been there before with a problem about not getting my philosophy textbook and they told me it was almost ready. That was fine by me, until I got a surprise quiz with open book (something which I only had on high school), and a third of the grade was literally copying a sentence from the book, which was put in there to compensate for the difficult questions that followed. So I went back to the bookstore and they told me that apparently my billing information was not from the US, and that they were sorry for not telling me that it was a problem, for more than a month😣.

To be fair, I chose two of my courses (entrepreneurship and innovation) to be a bit more easy. This would give me more time to focus on exploring Florida and taking on projects. However, as I said previous week, not all things I had to do there seemed a useful dedication of my time. Once I started making graphs about stakeholders in a puppy from adoption/breeding program matter, while staring at cute puppy pictures in shelters for an hour, and my brain with zero activity, I realized that I also could have taken another course for this…

I joined the programming club, and decided to participate in creating ClubFinity, an app that will be able to connect UF clubs with their users. For this I had an informal interview, to decide what I would be working on with the app. Truth be told, I am bringing literally nothing to the table, since my Java programming experience is only from the Java course I am currently following. However, I am willing to work on this and take online videos to learn more, so we will see how this turns out. The plan is to let UF support this app, which would mean that a lot of people would be using this in the future.

On Tuesday, a friend invited me to join for kickball. The name sounds a bit ridiculous to me, but I should at least try it. This was a young life (club) event and they used a giant ball instead of a normal one, just for funsies. Apparently kickball is like baseball but kicking the ball, and it can not be played normally if more than 20 people are on each team (the catchers in the field and the kickers on the side).

Wednesday, of course, we went to Grogs.

The day after, special MasterChef Dennis (the other Biking Dutchman) gave us the opportunity to have a taste of his culinary specialty: Gnocchi. However, I have noticed that I do not conform myself anymore to eating at certain periods, and eat whenever I’m hungry, so I only got to taste one bite of the superb gnocchi.

I have been working hard on getting giving this blog an upgrade! I bought a domain (danielblog.eu) and signed up for own hosting, which would remove the annoying wordpress ads. Besides that, I let my creativity run free and made my custom design for the blog. I can humbly say it turned out very beautiful!

With the Navigators, there is a trip coming up to Howl-O-Scream, in Tampa. This could be a fun experience to get scared to shits from haunted houses and whatever other plans they have. Maybe I should go…?