Oct 20, 2009 18:03
Most human beings have an absolute and infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Aldous Huxley
Like stores being open 7 days a week. Especially pharmacies and grocery stores. If you get sick on a Saturday night (as I did), then you have the good fortune to suck it up till Monday.
Or having a dryer. I had not realized how nicely it gets out all the wrinkles in cotton for you, or just how much your jeans need shrinking after a few weeks.
Communication. Being the generation that I am, I simply cannot imagine how this happened across the Atlantic before the internet. Skype makes things vastly easier and cheaper, which is wonderful. Yet maybe because of that ease, almost everyone seems to have been completely unaware of the fact that there's a nice 6 or 7 hour time difference between us. And with letters taking a week to make it here on the good side, how did people manage before email?
Inches. Cups. Pounds. Miles. Degrees Fahrenheit. Why do we stupid Americans have to make it so much harder for ourselves when we go anywhere else?
Classes. That's not to say they're the five most rigorous courses I've ever taken. Some are quite hard, yes. But what I can't seem to wrap my head around is the expectations. We're told how different university systems in the US and Europe are - how Europe is much more for the masses. It's big, lecture-run, self-initive-based. You get out of it what you choose to put in, not what the professor does. So if we were running on a European system, that would be weird, but I'd get used to it. The thing that continues to blow my mind is that IES operates on sort of a cross between the two, and every professor has their own idea of what that means. Some of them talk without stopping for the entire class, some run a discussion, and some want input, but only a limited amount that moves along their lecture. And then midterms? I haven't had a midterm for a history class since highschool. It's a paper field. So what the heck is supposed to be on these things that are happening next week?
Tuesday makes me quite disgruntled. It is a long day, where I spend from 9 am to 7:40 pm, inside the IES center, in classes and doing work for said classes. I know this is study abroad, but honestly, who puts emphasis on the study when they pick their program? Everyone goes to have an experience. As nice and old a building as Palais Corbelli is, and as much as I may be learning there, I am not having cultural experiences there. Nope.
More detailed entries on teaching and language coming soon, I swear.
Love to those of you at home.
vienna,
classes,
changes