Is It the End of the World?! Quite possibly so.
Today is quite possibly the end of the world as we know it.
Why?
Because the Japanese classes were cancelled today due to the teacher being sick!
Yes, with any other class this would be far from scandalous, it might even be seen as a normal procedure, but the Japanese class is *not* any other class! It does not get cancelled, ever. I tried to desperately think what kind of illness could be the cause and nothing short from something highly contagious and dangerous is an option. Mere cold or fever would not prompt cancellation, even the loss of voice has not been enough in the past, and we can rule out things such as broken limbs because there are wheelchairs etc. to get around that!
Another sign of the end of times being near might be that I have now officially passed the first phase of the Swedish required for University degree. I went to see the teacher yesterday and she went over the exam with me, which was mildly painful seeing how she kept asking me "Well, what's the right word for this?" and I had to bite my tongue to keep from replying that if I knew that, I would had written so in the exam. *shakes head*. Still, I was highly surprised by the amount of words that I had gotten correct, since I was sure half of them were utterly ridiculous and made up by yours truly. Funny how that goes, eh?
During the meeting with the teacher, I also discovered that there has been a slight, ah, miscommunication between us. What I thought I was doing is taking the exam for the first two credits and then going to a course for the remaining three credits. Apparently the teacher thought I was looking to self-study the whole 5 credits. *nervous laugh*. Naturally it is too late to set the situation straight aka I have already passed the first of the two things I need to do for the self-study, but it does not correlate with the courses so if I went to a course now, all the suffering for the exam would had been for nothing. Whoups? Basically this all means I'm kind of stuck doing the self-study option, which means I will have one more written exam and one spoken one. The written one will be making a 200 word summary in Swedish of some article that is in Finnish and spoken exam will be talking with the teacher, in Swedish. I guess that if I passed this first phase, I can get through those too, right? *scratches back of the neck*
Today I attended a seminar about contemporary China. While I have no particular passion towards China myself, I figured it might be a useful opportunity to get some information. A lot of people still see Asia, and especially East Asia, as more or less single entity. This leads to that there will likely be an assumption that I will know about China because I know about Japan. Thus, it can't hurt to try to learn at least some stuff. So, with this as my motivation, I dragged myself out of the bed at the ungodly hour of 6 am and dressed in nice semi-business like clothes and even did make up. I was somewhat worried of how I would stay awake for the 4 hours of presentations, but it all went quite well in the end. They offered us tea and coffee right of the bat and the space they had reserved was actually large enough to not run out of oxygen, which is sadly rare at Uni.
I've felt relatively good both yesterday and today. It might be the lack of horrible evil Japanese assignments for couple of more days, I think. Another thing I suspect to be part of the reason is that I've actually doodled some on both days. I can't claim I took time to draw, since yesterday I doodled during a class and today during the seminar, but it's still been rather nice. Even if yesterday was a bad art day, meaning that nothing turned out looking even half-way decent. Today was much better though and while none of it is high quality art, it's decent enough that I would be ok showing them to someone. Alas, still no webspace that would function for hot-linking, not to mention my sketches probably wouldn't be at all interesting for anyone. XD;;
Oh, and no, I was not slacking off by doodling, it generally helps me to focus on the listening the lecture, thank you very much. Unfortunately I can only do it during lectures that do not require insane amount of note taking, such as Japanese.
Still no working internet connection from my computer. *sigh*. Yesterday it worked for hour and a half before promptly dying on me. Again. I'm far from a happy trooper with this situation continuing to drag on until the unforeseeable future.
Why?
Because the Japanese classes were cancelled today due to the teacher being sick!
Yes, with any other class this would be far from scandalous, it might even be seen as a normal procedure, but the Japanese class is *not* any other class! It does not get cancelled, ever. I tried to desperately think what kind of illness could be the cause and nothing short from something highly contagious and dangerous is an option. Mere cold or fever would not prompt cancellation, even the loss of voice has not been enough in the past, and we can rule out things such as broken limbs because there are wheelchairs etc. to get around that!
Another sign of the end of times being near might be that I have now officially passed the first phase of the Swedish required for University degree. I went to see the teacher yesterday and she went over the exam with me, which was mildly painful seeing how she kept asking me "Well, what's the right word for this?" and I had to bite my tongue to keep from replying that if I knew that, I would had written so in the exam. *shakes head*. Still, I was highly surprised by the amount of words that I had gotten correct, since I was sure half of them were utterly ridiculous and made up by yours truly. Funny how that goes, eh?
During the meeting with the teacher, I also discovered that there has been a slight, ah, miscommunication between us. What I thought I was doing is taking the exam for the first two credits and then going to a course for the remaining three credits. Apparently the teacher thought I was looking to self-study the whole 5 credits. *nervous laugh*. Naturally it is too late to set the situation straight aka I have already passed the first of the two things I need to do for the self-study, but it does not correlate with the courses so if I went to a course now, all the suffering for the exam would had been for nothing. Whoups? Basically this all means I'm kind of stuck doing the self-study option, which means I will have one more written exam and one spoken one. The written one will be making a 200 word summary in Swedish of some article that is in Finnish and spoken exam will be talking with the teacher, in Swedish. I guess that if I passed this first phase, I can get through those too, right? *scratches back of the neck*
Today I attended a seminar about contemporary China. While I have no particular passion towards China myself, I figured it might be a useful opportunity to get some information. A lot of people still see Asia, and especially East Asia, as more or less single entity. This leads to that there will likely be an assumption that I will know about China because I know about Japan. Thus, it can't hurt to try to learn at least some stuff. So, with this as my motivation, I dragged myself out of the bed at the ungodly hour of 6 am and dressed in nice semi-business like clothes and even did make up. I was somewhat worried of how I would stay awake for the 4 hours of presentations, but it all went quite well in the end. They offered us tea and coffee right of the bat and the space they had reserved was actually large enough to not run out of oxygen, which is sadly rare at Uni.
I've felt relatively good both yesterday and today. It might be the lack of horrible evil Japanese assignments for couple of more days, I think. Another thing I suspect to be part of the reason is that I've actually doodled some on both days. I can't claim I took time to draw, since yesterday I doodled during a class and today during the seminar, but it's still been rather nice. Even if yesterday was a bad art day, meaning that nothing turned out looking even half-way decent. Today was much better though and while none of it is high quality art, it's decent enough that I would be ok showing them to someone. Alas, still no webspace that would function for hot-linking, not to mention my sketches probably wouldn't be at all interesting for anyone. XD;;
Oh, and no, I was not slacking off by doodling, it generally helps me to focus on the listening the lecture, thank you very much. Unfortunately I can only do it during lectures that do not require insane amount of note taking, such as Japanese.
Still no working internet connection from my computer. *sigh*. Yesterday it worked for hour and a half before promptly dying on me. Again. I'm far from a happy trooper with this situation continuing to drag on until the unforeseeable future.