Life Calms Down a Bit Again

Well, after a couple weeks of some pretty intense homework, I finally have a chance to sit down and provide and update. For the most part, classes are as they were, though I've finally started my Gender Studies: Text and Context course. I'll be presenting Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own later in the semester. Should be fun!

I of course need to show you my FABULOUS bike. I am very much hoping it looks too old and rickety to be worth stealing.

Earlier this week, for two days, the weather was GORGEOUS. On Monday, it wasn't as windy as usual, and the weather was warm enough I didn't need a hat! Both Monday and Tuesday were sunny and bright without a cloud in the sky! And today it is gray and drizzling and the wind as I rode my bicycle back from the grocery store threatened to knock me over. Ah, well. I suppose there's an end to the miserable weather in sight.

I have now gone to two big international parties, and let me tell you, hearing some 20 different languages being shouted over each other in the same room can be quite disconcerting. My friend Mattias (Belgium) and I hung out two weeks ago, and I heard (besides English and Dutch, of course) Turkish, German, French, Spanish, Arabic (I think), one or two Asian languages (I couldn't have said which) and Finnish. At least that's what I'm assuming they were speaking because I knew one of the guys I saw is from Finland. Mattias let me have a bottle of his Belgian beer. Yum!

Last Friday, my friend Kristen (Norway) and I hung out at a "sangria"-themed party; apparently the theme had something to do with a type of drink, but basically everyone present was dressed up either as a bull or a bullfighter and the proportion of Spanish speakers seemed to have skyrocketed. We each had a can of a German beer that two of Kristen's German friends confided wasn't actually German. It was watery and....less tasty. We only spent about a half hour at the party before deciding that if we were going to chat, it was much more productive to do so upstairs in her room where we didn't have to strain our ears or our vocal chords.

In other news: I got a haircut!

I'm quite pleased with it.

Otherwise, I don't have much to report, besides the fact that homework is calming down again. Tomorrow I am presenting the novel Jenny (by Nobel Prize winning Sigrid Undset) to my Scandinavian Lit class, so I'm off to review for it some more!