First Week of Classes

Rapid succession posts to try and catch up with where I actually am.

Classes started last Monday. I had two with a two hour gap between them. After arriving late to breakfast I hastily ate before heading to the student union store to buy some notebooks. Overestimating how long it would take to buy the notebooks, find the building and find the classroom, I arrived 30 minutes early. Luckily I was not the only one and James, Mimi, and Jess entertained me for the 30 minutes.

The first class was my Civ. of 5th Century Athens course. The class takes place in a large lecture hall where each row is one large bench with table tops per every 3 or 4 students that fold out from the back of the row in front. It reminded me a lot of church pews. The class seemed like it would be pretty good. Then I headed back to my hall to grab some lunch before going to my next class.

This one was my Egypt and Greece class. The room didn't have enough seats/tables for everyone so we had to steal chairs from other rooms. We were assigned the task of copying a text of Hieroglyphics before next class. The lecturer is a grad student and seems like a really nice guy. This class looks like it'll be pretty interesting as well.

Tuesday I didn't have any class because the one class I normally have on Tuesdays wasn't starting until next week. So I went to the library and got one of my books and figured out which classes I would be taking at home in the Spring. After Nathan finished class we went into town with some other people from the program and bought some groceries and other necessities before coming home.

Wednesday I had my Environmental Science class at 9am. I stupidly decided to skip breakfast and ended up regretting it. Lucky for me we got out an hour early and I was able to snag a bite to eat. This is the only class I'm really not looking forward to. We spent the 2nd hour of lecture going over the components of a paper and how to do parenthetical citations. That only made the hunger worse since it was a huge waste of my time. The prof is super nice at least and so were the people. After lunch I had the 2nd meeting of my Athens class where we went over the actual information about the course.

Thursday I had the other lecture of my Egypt class and the first lecture of my British Society class, which is offered exclusively to foreign students and includes a lot of people from my program. Due to technical difficulties the class was a very very brief overview of what we're going to discuss throughout the term. After dinner that night me and Jamie, a girl from my program, went to the Reading U's Tennis Club Social Tennis night. It was freeeezing but a lot of fun to play some games with locals. Afterwards Nathan and I hung out with Breezy in my room for awhile.

Friday I didn't have any class again. I went to the library again and got another book that I needed. I got a bunch of reading done Thursday/Friday but still not nearly enough. I did my laundry for the first time here and it cost a freaking fortune. We hung out with Breezy again some more. The dinners in the dorm have been pretty crappy lately.

Anyway that basically concludes my first week here. I've got tons of reading and tons of papers to do this semester so it should be pretty interesting. That being said I only have one short multiple choice quiz at the end so no major cramming for finals. It's all just a matter of getting my papers done!