Our spring university life.

One-third of the summer is gone, and I was sure we just barely stepped into it. Trying to catch up on our blogging is a bit overwhelming, so in this post I will try to hit some highlights from our spring 2018 at NU campus (I decided to do a separate post on our spring as a family).

In March and April, we attended end of the year concerts for the NU Orchestra and NU Choir. Somehow, we got on their VIP lists, so we had very nice seats reserved for us. Yay! Both events are always very well-attended, and it is almost impossible to get the tickets. Both Orchestra and the Choir did an amazing job as always. Spencer and I were talking about how it would be great for them to do a tour in America, showing Kazakh culture. One of my favorite pieces from orchestra was the Believer (Imagine Dragons) played on national Kazakh instruments. The choir did songs from famous musicals which was a lot of fun!

Waiting for the show to start (NU Orchestra)

NU Orchestra (some of the national instruments they play are very cool)

They even had a base guitar! If you want to see some of their pieces, just search on YouTube for NU Orchestra) 

NU Choir had in my opinion their best performance in all of the years we've been here!

Spencer was nominated for Professor of the Year Award (in total only 5 professors from the entire university were nominated), so we went to that fancy Award Ceremony where the students, clubs, and one professor get an award for being awesome. I mean they even rolled out the red carpet, how fancy is that?! And even though Spencer didn’t win the award, the students cheered the loudest for him when his name was read! Another positive outcome of this event was that I got myself a new dress and new shoes! 😊

 

Who are these two handsome people?

At the ceremony we had a front row seats!

We also had our annual award ceremony for our basketball team. As always it was held at our house with a lunch, laughter, and some tears (tears from saying goodbye to our two graduating basketball players). We love our basketball family!

Some of our second year girls

Aigerym  and Ayim, our two graduates this year.

Our basketball family minus Nika who is taking this picture.

NU does a year book (kind of like in any US high school), but this is the first year Spencer decided to get one. Maybe it was because this year was the first year his students that he led from the very first year, graduated. I don’t know, I should ask. But we made it into this year book (besides his picture on the list of the faculty). I think students like him!