Tuesday: Rice with a Side of Yoga

The search for Rice began at 8:30 a.m. and the students of Eastern Disciplines were prepared, backpacks and all. We embarked on our journey with the hope that Rice may feed our hunger for knowledge. After all, each of us had just chosen a topic to write a research paper about and the Rice University's Fondren Library is filled to the brim with resources. We walked down a long, winding trail under a continuous tree arch until we saw a sign stating Rice University. As the great teacher Dora the Explorer once said, "We did it."*

From right to left: Claire T., Claire L, Grace L, Iris, Grace A., Isabella (me), and Franz

Upon arriving, we sought out public computers with which we would look up books and later, locate them using their special ISBN code. At first, I was disheartened because there was no free rice and all the sources I needed were only in Japanese. However, the day was saved by the discovery of OneSearch. OneSearch is this awesome search engine which gives you access to PDFs and lets you choose the language as English. Through OneSearch, I was able to find online PDFs all about my research topic. In fact, below you can see me (white shirt) searching. (No, not for my inner self. Although I'm working on that too.)

Isabella and Claire L. search for sources while Franz reads one of his sources
as he waits for a computer to free up.

Left to right: Claire L., Claire T., Grace A.

The final and most unexpected part of our journey at Rice was that Claire squared and Grace A. became the President of the United States for a brief moment. It appears our A Term truly taught them how to become one with each other.

We left Rice University content with the knowledge that our research would soon become one with our future papers and as such, produce the rough draft that is due tomorrow. If only Buddha had written a guide for how to write high-quality papers in short periods of time. Luckily, we have Ms. Harrison for that, which is pretty much the same thing.

When we arrived at Post Oak, we feasted before going into our individual spaces to work on our papers for an hour. After that was yoga.

Here, you can see us in savasana, also known as
 dead man's pose.

There are three great things about doing yoga. First is yoga pants because comfort levels. The second is savasana. The third is the spiritual aspect of it. (Some might say that there is a fourth. This fourth would be that physically, you become so fine you might as well be a Sharpie.)

What I found particularly enjoyable about doing yoga was that it embraces the body as it is now and that it takes emphasis on the journey of bettering yourself as a whole rather than focusing solely on the betterment of the physical body. As someone who tends to over worry, I find that yoga allows for me to have a peaceful conclusion to my school day.

Overall, today was absolutely lovely. I look forward to reading other people's topics and learning about them during our writing workshop tomorrow.

* You can hear Dora the Explorer say these truly inspiring words on YouTube