Universal misery: the first day of school

After almost three weeks of vacation in sunny Spain - even though I´ve done some serious work in the meantime too, dad - the first day of school is always a bit of a bummer. Especially if you get up at 7am, thinking you have class at 8:30, arrive early, wait for 20 minutes, only to find out that inside the classroom hangs a note from the professor that there will be no class today! Grmbl. I thought I might employ the extra morning time that had just fallen in my lap to go grocery shopping and to get some school supplies, but at this early hour all the shops were still closed. So I truly had nothing better to do than return to my bed until 10am, when all the shops open and when I could also finally get into the cybercafe around the corner to check the timetables of the other courses, to make sure I wouldn´t get up early for nothing again.

At 1pm there was an informative meeting for all the erasmus students, where the vicerector explained how we have to enroll in the separate courses we want to choose. The University of Valencia has really good accommodation for Erasmus students and at first sight it all seems to be very well organized. Until they start trying out new things... This year they have introduced the new concept of ´erasmus buddy´. Each erasmus student is coupled with a spanish student who has studied abroad in the recent past to help him/her out with all sorts of things. A great idea, I think, to have a Spanish student to fall back on in times of despair. But the international office clerks could think of nothing better than to call each erasmus student to the front of the classroom to receive a piece of paper with the name, phone number and e-mail address of his or her buddy. This might not seem such a stupid thing to do, were it not that the classroom was huge and completely filled with over 200 erasmus students! It took hours to give everyone their slip of paper, one by one! After I got mine, I was glad to leave to finally have lunch! As the meeting was at 1pm, and the Spanish never have lunch before 2pm, I was quite hungry when I finally got to my apartment as 2:45pm.

After a quick lunch I hurried back to campus for my first real class: Análisis y Gestion Bancária. The professor was very friendly and disposed to help me as an erasmus student. But what´s slightly problematic is that this course builds on a previous course that I have, of course, not had. So I spent two hours puzzling over what "izquierda" and "derecha" mean in financial Spanish. Actually, I still haven´t figured it out 100%, so if anyone knows, do tell me... The professor offered to send me the course notes of the previous course by e-mail, so I would have something to fall back on. The problem is I still cannot print them out because to be able to use the university printer, you need to have a password, in order to have a password, your university e-mail address must be activated, and that won´t happen until next week. So I´m kind of stuck with this course for at least another week. Well, I guess I have to relax... I´m in Spain! Clearly...

Enough complaining about courses and administration! Let me show you some pictures of last week, when Kobe visited me! We did all the heavy duty tourism in and around the city. Look and drool! :-) And after drooling, come visit! ;-)