Orientation and Week One!

I’m sorry it took me so long to get this post together—the last couple weeks have been very busy!

The first Monday I was here we had registration and orientation. One of the first things we all discovered is that the university is maddeningly bureaucratic—pretty much the whole first week was spent running all over the campus and all over the city signing forms and waiting for paperwork to get processed so we could actually start going to classes. See, classes for the School of Humanities and the School of Social Sciences (where all my classes are) started on the same Monday we had orientation. BUT even though I registered old-school style on Monday morning by writing down classes on a sheet of paper, the registration is not considered official until you get your intranet username and password. The intranet is also where you get your timetables to find out where and when each of your classes is held. So, I didn’t get my login information until Wednesday afternoon, and at that point I’d already missed three classes, which was very frustrating. Also, once I got my timetables, I found out that two of my classes met at the same time, so I had to drop one and add another. I will say that this was much easier than it is at Wooster. At the University here there doesn’t seem to be any limit on how many students are in a class—if more people sign up for it, they just move to a bigger classroom. Anyway, it all worked out for the best, because I have a VERY exciting schedule! My classes are:

Icelandic Vocabulary I (Crazy language! So many vowel sounds! I’m really excited for it, though!)
Icelandic Culture (Every week we have one lecture by our professor and one by a guest speaker on some aspect of Icelandic culture.)
Icelandic Folk Tales, Beliefs, Customs, and Identity: Ghosts, Sharkmeat, Mountain Women, and Alcohol (I think this one’s pretty self-explanatory. And awesome.)
British Literature II (Misleading title? It’s actually the first half of British literature, from Beowulf through pre-romanticism.)

All of the classes meet for double sessions twice a week, which means that the way my schedule worked out, I only have class on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Hopefully in the future I’ll be able to use those long weekends to do some traveling!

Orientation was interesting, mostly just to see how many other foreign students there are. I think they said there are over 500 of us? I might be wrong about that, but regardless, there are quite a lot. The vast majority are Europeans; I think there are only about ten of us from the U.S. As international students, we can join the Erasmus Student Network, which is a club for international students that throws parties pretty regularly, and also organizes trips for us to go on—most of them sound like a pretty sweet deal!

Later that day there was a meet-up for the international students at a bar downtown, where we got discounted beer, which naturally made many people quite excited, because the government taxes alcohol like no other, so prices are NUTS. It was really nice getting to meet more of the foreign students, and some people had participated in a photo scavenger hunt earlier that day, and we got to see a slide show of all their wacky pictures.

The rest of the first week was mostly uneventful (like I said—lots of trekking all over Reykjavík to fill out forms), and then I finally got my internet set up on Thursday, and suddenly my journaling became much more irregular…I DID, however, get to attend my very first class, which was Folk Tales! It’s starting out a little slow, but is otherwise very interesting, and I’m really looking forward to the rest of the semester!