First day of Classes

Woo. Slept until 9, with effort. But let's go back to yesterday.

Sylvia arrived at 11 sharp, and we went to pick up her key. The people at the housing office were very kind and quick, so we decided we had some time before the meeting to move her in. We walked to her hotel, and were picked up by a very funny and sweet Armenian cab driver who had much trouble with the bags (and was surprised we kept smiling. Hm. Americans maybe not so nice after all?). He talked all the way, about things like his trip to Zandvoort (after he heard we were Dutch). At Sylvia's apartment, we discovered two things. a) she lives on the fifth floor. b) the elevator was out of order.

Sylvia started ringing doors on the second floor to see if someone knew how to operate the elevator, and a guy came out and offered to help us carry the bags upstairs. Which he did. And they were heavy! I guess being a girl has advantages from time to time.

The first thing we noticed about her apartment was that it was, well, very smelly. The second thing we notices is that it's also very very big. It's a three people apartment, but they have two bathrooms, so much closet space it's impossible to fill, and a big room that does not really seem to have any use. And the best part: when we went out again, we found out that there's A POOL just in front of her door. Conclusion? When it's finally sunny and warm, I'm going to be spending a lot of time at Sylvia's.

The meeting afterwards about the visa and all that was boring and uneventful, with the exeption that there is now kind of a Dutch club here: Willem, from UC, was there too, and so was a girl who studies Life Science & Technology in Leiden and Delft. According to the EAP guy we visited later, there are 5 Dutch people in total this quarter, so just one more to discover. He also gave us a T-shirt.

Of course, a T-shirt wasn't enough, so we spent something like an hour in the UCLA store, trying to decide upon which UCLA sweater to buy. It's kind of like the uniform here: of all the people on campus, at least half has one of those sweaters on. I picked an anthracite (that's what they call it...I call it dark gray) one, and Sylvia a light blue one with yellow letters.

That was pretty much the day. We had dinner here, (American cup-a-soup is not that different from the Dutch kind), then Sylvia left, and we watched Alias (big two hour season premiere. Terry loves the show and actually lets out little yells during it), an item about Nicole's middle school (a teacher slept with two thirteen year old boys. Eww), and I went to bed, for the first time with my room mate there. It turns out that when your roommate is not your sister, there's no problem at all.

Eggs are ready.

Cheers.

H.