Events 9/6-9/9: Classes

First, a couple things I left off yesterday; during the orientation, we were split into groups and given a topic, to give a presentation on, on that Friday.

Right after the orientation, I got food with some other students. We went to a more US-style burger place. It was delicious.

On Tuesday, I started working on homework for my Thursday class. I was also studying my Hungarian, since we had class in the afternoon, and blogging. In Hungarian, we had a bunch of verbs, including some grammar, which I enjoy.

In the evening we had our central european history course. Professor Kim is great, he's very enthusiastic, and I'm excited to learn the subject. It'll be a great class. One of the other calvin students made cookies for all of us. Yum.

On Wednesday, I finished my Thursday homework, and did more blogging. At night I had my renaissance art history class. It was interesting, but I was tired. Art isn't really my thing, but it should be an interesting class.

On Thursday, I had a bunch of classes. I had my class in the morning (which I accidentally missed half of, through some mistakes of my own, and having trouble figuring out where class was). The first half of class is lecture, and the second half is a seminar, where we're split into groups, get a question, research it, and a member of the group present's the group's answer. The question Thursday was about the potential maximum size of the EU, specifically looking at Turkey and the Balkans. I presented our group's answer, which was that the northern balkans, with their stable economies, could join quickly, while the southern balkans needed to work on their economies first, before they could join. We decided Turkey would not join any time soon, with their poor treatment of the Kurds, they're poor history and acknowledgement of ethnic minority treatment, and the recent restriction of democracy implemented by the ruler, Erdogan.

Soon after economics, I had my late antiquity course, following the Roman Empire from about the 4th century to the 8th. This is Professor Kim's specialty. It was great on Thursday, and I'm excited for where class will go. I had Chinese for dinner.

On Friday, we had Hungarian in the morning, lots of going over our favorites, which was fun.

In the afternoon, the other calvin student in my presentation group met early with the other two Karoli students in our presentation group who could actually attend the presenting. We accidentally told them the wrong time, oops. But we met up, went over our presentation, which was terrible. All 10 groups presented, ours was near the bottom. I presented on the wine festival, but didn't have much to present. They were all a bit ridiculous. The winning one was on food with a weird video showing (badly) the group trying some Hungarian food. (I found out later, they won by stuffing the ballot box; they voted for themselves (which they weren't supposed to do), and ripped their voting paper in half (they were already just ripped pieces of paper) to double their votes.

I made it through the first week of classes, to the weekend. Phew!