The weekend was incredible--from Saturday's mega- albeit expensive dinner--good (by the rather low standards here) Chinese food (fish! although it was pathetically un-fresh, and good pork cooked the REAL Chinese way! and whole chunks of garlic and the incessant battle for it!), to Sunday--the real crescendo as Pittsburgh went to the pits and burned up in bonfires, overturned cars and massive street explosions as the Steel Town went crazy over the Steelers' historic Superbowl XL win.

Although I only managed to figure out how to watch the game on Sunday, and although I was there only because I'd (rather reluctantly) promised to cover the campus side of things while everyone else (the rest of the world) was where the stuff was happening--down at South Side with mounted riot police and all--I felt the victory all the same, and it was overwhelming.

Entire streets turned deserted just before the big game, and the minute the match was over (actually, as early as an hour before), people started pouring onto the streets, cheering, shouting, waving their Terrible Towels, all decked in yellow (the Steelers' colour), and all.

And just as I thought the evening was over, walking up to the newspaper office, someone shouted, "Hey there's a bonfire over there!"--and that was it, as I dashed out, cameras and all, in the freezing subzero temperatures in the ravaging winds and blowing snow (like, -4 degrees Celsius with 40km/h winds? haha)--and headed right into the warzone, as I went into action and started grabbing shots like crazy in the short 10, 15 minutes that I was there.

It felt amazing, being right in the middle of the action, where it all was, capturing it, getting all the people, that (albeit rather small-ish) bonfire in the middle of the road, campus police all ready to arrest people and armed with fire extinguishers and all. That was REAL news--well, kind of, though it paled in comparison to the overturned car and the REAL Pittsburgh police some 10 blocks down arresting people for real for rioting haha.

And that was it--a huge leap into the air, a great adrenaline rush (norepinephrine--sorry revision for Psych quiz later haha)--before it all came crashing down the next day.

And so, here I am, a quarter of the way into the depths of fire of this fortnight--with two quizzes, three exams, one major paper and two intractably difficult pieces of homework (somehow homework is countable here--homeworks; but it sounds wrong to my British English tendecies still, even if our pronunciation is atrociously pronounced haha).

It's been quite a ride these past two days--but hopefully I'll ride it out well--there really isn't any need to make things any tougher than they are right now (and they are pretty bad). So it's time for some good discipline, good sleeping habits, and hopefully this storm will pass. It really has been quite a ride.