New faces

After spending an entire weekend completely on my own, I’m slowly starting to connect with people, both on my course and along my corridor. I walked into the kitchen this morning and found Sandrine sitting there having breakfast, a French girl who happens to live in the room right next to mine. She’s a small, unbelievably freckled redhead who single-handedly helped me to solve the Internet connection in my room, and who I have therefore now elevated to sainthood.

Sandrine tells me that a group of boisterous young Mediterranean undergrads have been coming over to use our kitchen. I can’t imagine why they would want to?? But it does explain the dismal state of said kitchen – I still haven’t cooked there yet. And it explains the noise over the last few days. According to Sandrine, there is at least: one Greek guy, one Turkish guy, and one Cypriot-Mexican guy (??). They crowd around the kitchen at mealtimes, then in the evening crowd into one of the rooms and watch football in the dark, punctuating this with a lot of masculine shouting. Oh dear.

As I said, I’ve got an extremely international class. We sometimes share classes with the others taking Conservation & Tourism, Ethnobotany, and Social Anthropology. During our first lecture we all had to take turns standing up and introducing ourselves, so I now know that we have a healthy mix of: Malaysia (me), Korea, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, India, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Colombia, Palestine, Ireland, oh yes and the English. As a matter of fact, one of the English students, Richard, like me also studied archaeology and worked as an archaeologist for about a year before he got fed up with it. Hmm what a coincidence. I wonder if this is some sort of pattern.

The first lecture went by straightforwardly enough, but as the second and third ones wore on I started realising that I actually know very little about any of it. And that we have an awful lot of reading up and studying to do, and that we’ve actually got quite a packed timetable, and that I am probably going to end up failing this course. Umm, did I really say I wanted to do this??

In one of those happy twists of fate though I ended up sitting next to a Korean girl, Daria (“My name is Jeong Hee Han but I find it is an effort for you to pronounce this, so just call me Daria”), who is every bit as lost as me if not more, and is every bit as scared, worried, panicked and freaked out over the course. It’s good to know I’m not alone.