The above is just a little indication of how chaotic things were today on the first day of school (btw i felt like soooo touristy standing at the edge of the pit taking this picture - if i were to see someone taking random people pics at say the forum in NUS i'd give a puzzled look, wondering why in the world this person may be wanting to do something like that...). Well today's classes went quite well, at least am more in tune with the system here now, and potentially what's in store for the next couple of months.
Am kind of dreading how at least for the history courses there's so much writing involved - like in handing in weekly written assignments on top of all the readings and all that - think i may be getting in way over my head here, especially since of the courses i have at hand (or at least hope to get), three are higher-level history courses which will definitely require a lot of writing and reading, while my intro to American government class is full of, well, Americans, who obviously would know more about their government than i do so that means i'll have to do a lot of reading up. The saving grace of my courses is the linguistics class mandated by the people upstairs in the national potters' ministry (geddit?) cos it appears that though i mapped it to a course that i've never done in nus, the content overlaps somewhat with another course i did last sem, so it shouldn't be too bad methinks (the prof brought his young daughter into the class to play btw - a perfect indication of the more relaxed teaching atmosphere that is prevalent here...) And of course i am really interested in what's to be covered in all of the classes so far, so i guess that's a step in the right direction =)
And of course there's also the issue of buying of the necessary books - which in case you haven't heard are beepingly expensive - did a rough estimation and in the student store (which does have higher prices) the total cost of the books that are part of the reading lists of all my courses adds up to almost US$200 (though think that it's actually more, owing to my bad math) - i'll have to start scouting Amazon and the off-campus stores really soon...
Anyway, today was a good day overall - after classes ended i went to meet up with Greg and his friend for dinner - haven't seen him since he left S'pore - went to eat at another great Mexican place on Franklin [btw think i've eaten more avocado since arriving in the US (by means of guacamole) than in the rest of my life combined] and once again stuffed myself silly. After i said goodbye, i was walking along Franklin on the way home when i bumped into Jon and Clement and SJ and Stephanie and Carol and ended up following them to - yup you guessed it - dinner - though i was way to stuffed to eat anything else. Met up with SJ's roomie, her brother and her friend - was great to meet them too. For dessert i had what basically is the frozen yogurt equivalent of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups - no complaints there =)
Well, tomorrow i have to approach the prof of the final class that i really want to add - hopefully there'll be no problem with doing that - or i may have to do a last-minute search for another available class, and then after securing it, take on the daunting task of attempting to map it with an nus module solely through online communication with the other side, and then forwarding all this to the national potter's ministry for their reference...
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