Saturday was a fun day to reunite with friends and I found the guys from Singapore and Hong Kong I share a kitchen with had returned. I tried authentic Chinese food that evening which one of the guys had made, and drank plenty of green tea with them.
I also have a roommate this semester! Kerry is from Oregon and has been a great companion. She's a geology/dentisty major and is quite athletic and plays the ukelele often. :) She's made the room a very fun place, and it's been great getting to know her the last few days.
Sunday I enjoyed a church service with my Scottish friend Miriam and afterwards we both were hungry and visited our favorite panini place for a takeaway lunch. We had planned on sitting somewhere by the ocean, but it was a bit chilly to sit still, so we walked for the next hour all around the town eating our paninis on the way. :) It's wonderful to be back in the town, the blue skies and the ocean continue to be inspiring.
This is a small beach area that Miriam and I explored. Unfortunately it was closed last semester, so it was nice to see it up close.
I also began classes this morning with American Poetry since 1950. I was advised to take it back when I chose my classes in September because the professor, John Burnside, is quite the accomplished writer and one of the most well-known educators in the English department. There are about fifteen of us and at the beginning of the class, Professor Burnside asked which students were American. Only myself and one other student raised our hands, and we found we were then told, "I don't care what they taught you in your history classes, Abraham Lincoln was not the Great Emancipator...Walt Whitman was!" That made us all laugh. I loved the lecture. It sounds like it will be a great class with culture and historical content explored through American literature of the mid-twentieth century until present-day. The past few days I've also found understanding the varying accents is coming back slower than I thought after being home for a month. Professor Burnside has a strong Scottish accent I had to focus much more on than I imaged I would, or that I might have in mid-December. My kitchen-mates from Hong Kong and Singapore too, sadly are consistently being asked to repeat themselves. Hopefully the fluency in understanding will return soon. :)
Today was pretty grey before turning quite wet. It certainly feels like winter with temperatures in the thirties and forties (fahrenheit) here, yet this morning the air felt and smelled almost spring-like. It's great to look forward to warm days ahead.
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