On Sunday I had an exciting game of soccer (which lasted for two hours!) with some amazingly good European students. The pitch was terrible because the Americans don’t play soccer in a big way, but we pressed on and it was a lot of fun. Next week I have to jump through several flaming hoops to join a team (they don’t make it easy at all!) and start playing the rest of the campus. It’s going to be sweet – how can my team lose when it has been stacked with crazily good German and Italian footballers?

Monday was the first day of class and it is... interesting. For one it’s a vast amount of work – homework every day and miniature essays every week. I own about fifty textbooks for about five classes and I have literally thousands of pages of readings every week. It’s like being back at school with a vengeance. It’s also very hard to listen to the American lecturers – not because they’re not fantastically good at what they do, but because their accent is so soothing. I literally have time to think ‘wow – this guy is gre... zzz’ before I fall into a kind of trance-like state of relaxation. It’s a real problem which I am working on.

I have gone to the US Military classes and it is shaping up to be very funny. They have done even less field-time than me, but that us fine. What is even more funny is that in America the only ones with Green Berets are speical forces, so when they first saw me they started to freak out, and now every time I come near they all ask to be allowed a photo with my hat on. Their drill is also cissy (even more cissy than ours.)

Another problem I had was that one of the classes I picked I couldn’t take because they had timetable clashes with more important classes on my schedual. I had to change courses on the fly! Cheers to Massey University - you guys are great! The first class I picked to replace this no-go class I also couldn’t take, because the exam was on the same time as another of my exams. In America (as in New Zealand) they don’t allow you to enroll in classes with that kind of clash. The second course I tried to take sounded like great fun – Early Modern Germany. I was all set to go to the lecturers, but I decided to get my textbooks first - and it was a good thing I did! They’d have cost me $200 USD! So I couldn’t take that course – rent and food has left me flat broke and I simply can't afford $200USD . (I AM STILL ALIVE AND HAVE PLENTY OF MONEY ENOUGH TO LIVE! DO NOT SEND CARE PARCLES (UNLESS THEY CONTAIN CHOCOLATE). THANK YOU.) I swapped to a course on Early Britain instead, meaning I could get my books second hand and save myself a heck of a lot of money.

I was also invited to a dinner party, and went. Unfortunately there was this weird anarchist there who high-jacked the entire evening thing and made it a vehicle for his weird ideas. I was bored silly by this guy who went on for THREE HOURS, constantly contradicting himself and roundly patronising everyone. Luckily everyone else was drunk. He also claimed he didn’t want to be president, but you know he’s lying. I was pretty exhausted by not saying anything scathing – I wanted to poke fun at him but he was frankly scary. He kept talking about his ‘humanitarian work’ in Palestine, which seemed to involve a little less peace and joy and more violence than normal.
So that wasn’t a success. But I am in Berkeley, the home of radicalism, and now I have been to a subversive group meeting, which I suppose you have to experience at least once.

Seriously, this place is wicked, but sometimes I wish I could come home and listen to a crisp and inflected voice on the news telling me about some sheep problems in the high country or something. I am getting more and more exhausted from the constant mental translations. But hey – I’m going to be great at University when I get home! Think of the work ethic!

Cheers everybody – this weekend is a public holiday (yes!) so I’ll try and do something exciting, so I can take photos and show you. (Yes that’s right – I do these things all for you!)

Wish you were here

Margie

written by  Crosswood on August 31, 2007 from Berkeley, United States
from the travel blog: New Zealand Student, American University.
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What she meant to say was "don't send me care parcels, send them to Bex! (Specially if they have chocolate)

Read V for Vendetta for and incredibly clever view of anarchy. I wasn't convinced bu still, really clever.

written by  Rebecca Haris on September 2, 2007

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