Queen's University Belfast Classes - Day Two

Today was my second day of classes. I would normally have a tutorial for my Number Theory class this morning at 9:00, but tutorials don't start until next week, so I didn't have class until 11:00. Actually, I had two classes at 11:00 - Mathematical Investigations and Accounting II. These are the two that clash, obviously, and I'm supposed to be trying it out for a week to see if I'm okay with missing one or the other, or if I need to drop one entirely. As today was the first class of Mathematical Investigations, and I'd already been to Accounting yesterday, I figured I should go to the math class.

I walked in, and to my very happy surprise, saw a familiar face! Arne - an international student from Germany - was also in this class - hooray! I've never really had a friend in my math class before, ever, so this was very exciting for me. As the professor began describing the course, I grew more and more excited. It is not a typical math class in that we do not have any exams. Instead we have three problems that we work on at various points in the semester, and at the end we give an oral presentation. It sounded kinda gross when I read about it online, but the professor passed out the first problem today for us to start working on, and it turned out to be a lot of fun! I'm such a nerd, but what can I say? Also, the professor said that attendance is not compulsory (they use that word a great deal here), and from what I can tell it will be just fine for me to go to Accounting for both days and then miss Math Investigations on Tuesdays, but be there for Thursdays and Fridays. From what I can tell, I may not even need to go at all... ever. However, I'm sure it won't hurt to go. Plus Arne is in my class, so that's cool. He promised that if there was ever something I missed on Tuesday, he'd fill me in on it. I'm so excited!! :D

Arne lives in Elm's Village, too, so we walked back together after class. We ran into Melissa, who was just getting in. She has left on Sunday to fly back to Germany to sit a final exam. Apparently in Germany, they do not really have fall and spring semesters but rather winter and summer ones. (Arne lucked out because even though he was technically missing a week of classes in Germany by being here now, he had no final exams that he had to take. Instead he had presentations, and he'd gotten all of them done before he left to come here.) Melissa was supposed to get back in last night, but her flight had been delayed because there was "snow" at Heathrow. I'm not sure what the quotes were for, but that's how she put it.

I needed to go grocery shopping, and she did, too, so that's where we set off for. I managed fairly well, shopping for groceries in a foreign country for the first time. The only real problem I ran into was that they don't have peanut butter, or at least not the kind I like. I could only find 2 types there, and they were both crazy healthy with tons of nuts and oats or something in them - not at all like my faithful Kroger-brand creamy peanut butter from back home. Sigh. Maybe some certain parents of mine will feel like sending me a care package with a hefty jar of peanut inside?? (hint, hint)

On the walk home I learned a very important fact: when one does not own a car and has to walk a bit of a distance to get home from the grocery store, one should not buy everything all at once. It would behoove this person much more to simply buy a few things now, make the trip home to drop them off, and then come back again for more, repeating the said pattern until all necessary shopping is completed. As I said, though, I did not learn this until after I'd purchased the contents of my four, quite weighty grocery bags. I'm already a slow walker compared to everyone else here, and I had to walk even slower with the bags. Poor Melissa. She claims she did not mind, though. What a nice girl.

Speaking of how nice she is, she brought be back some presents from Germany - can you believe it?! We've had numerous discussions over the past several days, two of which included pretzels and chocolate. Apparently, the pretzels here are much too sweet. Germans pretzels are better because they are salty. German chocolate is also better, although I can't remember her reason why at the moment. Suffice it to say, she wanted to prove it to may, and thus brought back a German pretzel and a bar of German chocolate for me. How thoughtful is she! I have yet to try them, though. She's so cute!

Oh, by the way, there is a street right next to Tesco - the grocery store here - called Chadwick. I have a friend at CCU named Chad, and we sometimes call him Chadwick, so I had to take a picture. I uploaded it on facebook and tagged Chad in it. It was just too good to pass up. Hehe! :)

Alright, well, so long for now!