First day of school

So today was my very first day of Master's courses. Right off the bat I realized one thing and one thing alone, I'm not in Texas any more. I'm in a foriegn country, with people from all over the world and I am the minority. There is even a Dutch student who is the only student from the Netherlands. The only student from the same country as the program. This is a World program. There is a person from every livable continent on the planet. We could hold the Olympics with this group if we wanted, however Africa and Asia would be greatly represented and everyone else would have to have some great athletes to keep up. Oceania would have to be the greatest athlete in the world because she is all alone.

Before all the diversity though, the day started as most autumn days in the Netherlands do. Cold, gray and rainy. Nothing quite like a brisk bike ride into a sprinkler. In all honesty, there is one thing and one thing alone that made the trip tolerable, rain gear. I was a little skeptical when Alyssa decided to get some at Wal-Mart 3 months ago, mainly because of how expensive it was. After today though, it was worth every penny. It rained just about all the way to school and the whole way back. The rain gear came in very handy when my bike chain decided to hop off its gear and leave me a hamster in a wheel going nowhere. So with a quick fixerup and a wash off in rainwater, I made it to school on time.

School consisted of meeting, greeting and meetings today. It was very informative but of course not the most exciting of topics. After lunch though, we took a bus ride to the Netherlands Architecture Institute. That is a cool place. So many city designs, crafty ideas, and Legos. There was so much information that I really would need a few days to soak it all in. The theme of this exibhit was how to approach the problem of informal cities (slums) to make them more livable. This made it even more interesting for me since my Master's program focuses on the same type of issues. They even had a focus on Indonesia where many of the students in the program are from. Just awesome stuff.

So in conclusion, I am looking forward to this academic year and now I'm going to see if I can finish that friggin puzzle.  Tomorrow I go back to my U.N. (one of the students is actually from the U.N. ironically enough)