Hello from Amherst!! Yay first post on the Mac and at Amherst!! Every night I keep telling myself to post but something always ends up happening or I'm too tired or I get a phone call.

First, I should introduce my roommate, Shannon. She is AMAZING!! I love her so much! I'm SO grateful to the housing assignment goddess (yes, goddess, because women are superior) for pairing us two. We like the same music and movies and she's REALLY nice and she always says, "Way" + adjective, such as "Way sweet!" or "way cool!". She's from Iowa, and we both talk a lot and like to go meet people and explore, and it's hard to describe, but we just click. It's probably because we live together and thus spend all our time together, but she's the most awesome person I've met thus far, and I've met a LOT of people. My floor mates are pretty nice too. We really need to branch out of our floor, so Shannon and I have been trying to get around to all the dorms and meet people and see what the rooms are like. She's at her XC meeting right now (she's a crazy runner), so I just wanted some alone time in my room so I can finally blog. Oh! And she loves Paris!!! So our room is very Parisian haha.

My mom and I got here Saturday night and we went to her friend, Heather's, house and had dinner and stayed over. I've never had fish (cooked the American way) that good before! This whole area is GORGEOUS! New England houses are SO adorable!! And trees everywhere!! And it's so rural, which is slightly odd to me. I'm sure I'll hate it in the winter, but the weather is BEAUTIFUL too. Sunny, but not hot. I love it! Too bad it can't always be this way.

The next morning we drove to campus, and as I found my room, Shannon and her parents were already in there. We hit it off immediately, and settled into our lovely dorm. It's on the first floor and it faces the quad, so basically from where I'm sitting I can pretty much see everything going on everywhere and every single person walking by. Shannon's favourite hobby is to sit in her window and stare at the people going by. I just like looking at the trees. :) After the flutter of speeches (very boring, btw), there was a party at campus center, which we went to for about five minutes and then just walked around exploring. Everyone is so nice and friendly (at least now when they don't know anyone), and we went up to North 4th floor to find Michelle Johnstone, who wasn't in her room, and this guy who lived at the end of the hall with his door open just randomly said hello and waved, so we went over and talked to him and his roomie for about 10 minutes. Pretty awesome. One of them was from Newton, MA, and went to the same high school as John Krasinki (Jim) and BJ Novak (Ryan) and they both came and visited them!

Monday, we heard the most boring and useless talk about financial aid ever, but then got to register for classes!!!! My advisor, who is also my seminar professor, is the nicest lady ever!!! She's a German professor, and she was actually born in East Germany and only came here after high school. At first appearance, she scared me, with her short, cropped hair, high cheekbones, sunken cheeks, and drawn face. She looked like an extremely strict German martinet, and reminded me of Professor McGonagall. But then she started talking and she was the nicest lady ever!! We spent the first 15 minutes of our meeting discussing Communism in our respective homelands, while a lot of other advisors didn't even really talk to their students.
And so my classes!
-Europe in the 20th Century
-Berlin, Metropolis (my seminar)
-Introduction to Religion
-Advanced Spanish Composition

I'm not actually sure about Spanish 7. Obviously, I would die to take French, but I don't want to abandon Spanish either. My advisor was asking me where I wanted to go junior year for study abroad, and my obvious answer was Paris, and she said that that should be one of my main criteria for deciding what language to study. But I would love to study anywhere in Spain too!!! She then said that if I wanted to take French, I would have to start now, immediately, to make any significant progress, whereas with Spanish, I already have so many years that I could just come back to it if I wanted or even continue it. I didn't want to take both, at least not this semester, because we're limited to four classes our first semester because they're afraid we're going to overburden ourselves, and so that would only leave one class to choose (other than the seminar). She then told me to consider what I wanted to do in life, because Spanish is awesome for art, theatre, and journalism, but for more academic, intellectual pursuits, French would be first choice. So for now, I'm not exactly sure yet. I'm going to shop the French classes in the first two weeks, and must hear what my dad has to say.

Oh! One piece of bad (painful) news. I split my toe open! We were going to the financial aid talk (SO not worth it), and it had rained in the morning, and I was going slightly downhill, and I slipped, ramming my foot into the sidewalk, and splitting my toe open. It hurt so badly, and my flip-flop was covered in blood (grotesque, I know). It's okay now, but I hope it doesn't get infected. Just imagine me in the winter... all that ice and snow.. and the entire campus is hills... great...

Another clumsy episode: In our dining hall, the napkin dispensers are really inefficient and difficult. They're basically like toilet paper rolls and you have to tear them apart. I was carrying a tray with two plates and two cups, and I was trying to balance that so I could tear the napkins, and the entire thing exploded onto the floor and made the world's biggest crash. I was absolutely MORTIFIED, but this upperclassman standing next to me was like, "Don't worry. It happens all the time," and this old man who worked at the cafeteria ran over and was like, "Don't worry about it!! Just go get a new tray and start over. Someone will take care of it. Go get your food! This happens like three times a day!" So I guess I don't feel like the world's biggest idiot.

The governor of Wyoming, an Amherst alum, gave us the most boring speech ever as well, and I fell asleep for part of it... this is not a good start!! I never fall asleep during class, but since it wasn't a class, I guess I'm off the hook for now.

This morning, Shannon got up at 6:30 to go running (crazy), but as we were discussing the night before, she didn't have anywhere to carry her keys, and so the plan was that she would go at 6:30, run for an hour, come back at 7:30, and call me from our window (first floor facing everything), and I would painfully and dangerously climb off my bunk bed (I almost die every time trying to get off that thing) and open the door for her. It is SO DANGEROUS. My bed is lofted, so I have to climb up and down, and on one side, it's next to the wall, so I go on the other side, which is next to the dresser with the TV on top. Climbing up is just painful, but not dangerous. Climbing DOWN, however, is another matter entirely. I usually just can't figure it out, and otherwise I feel like I'm going to knock the TV down, and then I keep missing rungs... it's terrible..

My mom left today after lunch. We tried out the Chinese restaurant in town... yeah... this is going to a depressing four years food-wise... We had this really long breakfast where they gave all these speeches about various school policies and then had us sign the honour code. They then had our RCs (like RAs) do all these sex/alcohol/drug related skits. We were SO shocked. They were all about how to put on condoms and how to safely drink... and they were so crudely presented!! OMG! The first one was a mock drill team, but instead of being an army, they were putting on condoms, and each one of them had made a common error and they explained how to rectify it. I don't even know what they were saying most of the time... and the hilarious thing was that this tour of parents walked by RIGHT THEN. Those kids are definitely not coming to Amherst. We then watched this film on social class in America, and broke off into discussion groups afterwards. It was actually really interesting, and it's amazing how a lot of people here don't appear or act intelligent at all, but when they open their mouths, they're actually eloquent. A lot of people are from really small towns too... I'm in shock

I should probably go be social or something now.... I'm probably the only one in the dorm alone.. haha.