The school library is definitely wince-worthy. Also included in this post: Autumn, Art and upcoming Aquatic Adventures.
The academic year has finally begun! My Heritage Conservation program has five mandatory classes, and I’m also taking a sixth class from the very similar World Heritage Studies program. Add in a bi-weekly language class and several sports, and it’s starting to look like my school year is filling up.
It’s been an interesting adjustment to “school mode” after several years away from academia. I’m re-learning how to plan my time for getting enough work done, while also making sure I don’t spend all my time in the library. Oh, did I say library? I meant this architectural…situation.
The university and city are Very Proud of the design of that building. I think it looks like a listing gummy bear. For reference, the outside has absolutely no angles; the aerial outline looks like an amoeba.
Those are some nice autumn colors on the trees though, right? Too bad the colors inside the library look like they were selected by a 1980s super villain.
Enough about the horror campus library. How about some more excellent autumn colors?
And a view of the main campus square. Note the Art, aka pallet box near the middle of the square.
I have no idea what that box is supposed to be about, and from what the other students say, nobody has an idea what it’s about. The posted artist statement is in German, and since it doesn’t include my primary phrases of “Where is food?” and “I don’t speak German,” I can’t understand it.
A view from the inside did not help, unless the piece is supposed to be about perspective.
Besides exploring the campus, I’ve been busy attending the first week of classes. My classes are setup as either weekly repeating events or seminar blocks. The weekly classes are pretty standard, what I’d expect from classes back in the States. The seminar blocks are interesting, and can run all day — some are scheduled for 10am until 5pm. I’m looking forward to seeing how those classes go…whether it’s too much in one day and causes information overload, or can be broken into manageable amounts.
We had a short version of a seminar block of Friday of last week. The lecture block was scheduled for 11am until 4pm…aka a long day of learning. Our teacher knew we were going to be fatigued by the end of the day, so she surprised us with the offer of a contest and fabulous prize.
She explained that after the lectures, we would divide into groups. She would present a pop quiz covering the material from the past hours. The team with the most points would win a…drumroll please…day-long canoe trip in the local river (scheduled for spring) and be personally chauffeured to and from the canoe drop spots by this professor.
Oh, yeah. Game. Freaking. On.
With the rules of the challenge laid down, my competitive spirit was ablaze. I definitely like not losing, and frequently get very competitive over smaller winnings — think unnecessarily enthusiastic cheerleading at trivia, where the best prize is $10 off our tab. If that was a prize I’d been excited about in the past, a day-long river adventure was definitely something I wanted to win.
Our group of five came together and faced our first challenge…picking the best team name. We settled on “Spree-lunking” — which turns out to make sense only in context.
(The first half of the name refers to the Spree, which is the local river where the aforementioned canoeing will take place. The second half of the name is a joke on “spelunking” and also a reference to a well-known and oft-repeated story of some other students who had accidentally capsized a canoe in the Spree a few weeks earlier.
Clearly our team name was funny for exclusively the five of us, and was incomprehensible to everybody else.)
We were up against seven other teams, and competition was fierce. We ended the quiz tied with two other teams, and went into the first of two tie-breaker rounds.
One team was dropped after failing that round, and we faced off against our rivals in the final tie-breaker. A heated discussion of heritage legislation later, we presented our final answer and…TOOK HOME THE GRAND PRIZE.
OH. YEAH. CANOE TRIP, HERE WE COME. IN, LIKE, FOUR MONTHS that is, when the weather isn’t cold and rainy, and we can actually tell the difference between being in the river and being near the river. In the meantime, we will be basking in our glorious victory and eagerly anticipating the Spree-ctacular adventure.
I am definitely going to forget we won this and it will be a FAB surprise come “Summer” semester!