Dear Reader,
On Monday (the 1st February) after my English lessons we (the whole class including our teacher, Robin) went to Sakura (a Japanese Restaurant near the campus). After the other guests were sent off by the noise we caused and left Sakura looking for more peaceful restaurants, we had a dinner in a quite pleasant environment.
Although I like my Chinese classmates, I shouldn’t have sat among them. Despite the fact that we strongly asked them to speak English, they were talking exclusively in their first language. Thus, I told them different things in Hungarian. After three minutes our conversation became really boring...fortunately, the sushi was delicious.
I attended John Bonine’s (Environment and Pollution) classes on Tuesday and on Thursday as well as Svitlana Kravchenko’s class (International Law and Climate Change) on Tuesday. (maybe you are curious about this: http://www.law.uoregon.edu/academics/docs/0910springhours.pdf)
The Environment and Pollution classes were about the best practicable and best conventional control technologies for existing sources (we analyzed several sections of Clean Water Act). We talked about nationally uniformed effluent limitations and primarily focused on the question whether these limitations should be based on environmental quality, technological feasibility, or some balance of costs and benefits. On Thursday making easier to understand other legal problems, John gave us an overview of the federal legislative process as well.
The language of UNFCCC was the object of our analysis in Svitlana’s class on Tuesday. I was more familiar with that, because at the end of the third year at university I wrote my final paper about international treaties on climate change. At the beginning of the lesson I shortly introduced the activities of EMLA and our cases. After the class Svitlana asked me to write a summary about my cases against coal-fuelled power plants.
On Wednesday I met Rita who works for ELAW and gained many experiences in practicing U.S. criminal law, thus, we discussed the similarities and differences between our criminal legal systems with special regard to environmental crimes, environmental criminal trends and the practice of sentence.
I wouldn’t like to write too much about the 5th and 6th February because the photos uploaded can tell those days better than I could.
I didn’t take photos of Friday evening when we (Maggie, Keith and me) were on the First Friday ArtWalk (http://www.lanearts.org/communityarts/firstfriday/). It was the best ending of that sunny and beautiful day. We saw impressing pictures and funny sculptures which looked as if they were pictures… or pictures which looked as if they wanted to be sculptures….
On Saturday I attended an excursion which was organized by AEI. We were at the Hoodoo Winter Carnival. (http://www.hoodoo.com/) Our busses departed at 9:30am and we arrived in Eugene 9:30pm. We (my Korean friends and me) can’t or didn`t want to ski, that is why we rather chose tubing, live country music and bonfire at the Hoodoo Mountain.
Favorites of the week:
- class: International Law and Climate Change
- theme: criminal environmental law of U.S.
- cultural program: First Friday ArtWalk
- day: I cannot decide… Friday or Saturday
- food: sushi in Sakura
- other activity: tubing
T.b.c.
Agnes