My Incomprehensive Harvard Experience

Sup guys, this is a somewhat incomprehensive update on my whereabouts and wellbeing so that I don't have to repeat myself over and over to people and I'll forget who I've told what haha. So, PUBLIC BROADCAST! :D

Anyway my time here has been really good so far. I was missing home quite a bit when I arrived, but it's a lot better now that I've settled into my new room and classes have kind of started and I've met some people I get along with well. Just a little bit less lonely :) I did laundry for the first time by myself yesterday! Aren't you proud? Haha last week my parents were still here so my mum was pretty much overbearingly taking over doing everything...

Canaday F, aka my entryway! :D These are the people I live with haha.

aaand, here's my room! :D

Haha other than that, the food here is surprisingly good for mass produced stuff. People complain about it but I don't think it's bad considering they cater for 1700 odd people. Maybe I'm just not picky / have no culinary taste whatsoever (if you're wondering why I have so many pictures of food, it's because my parents want me to send them a picture of every meal I have so here are some of them hahaha. This is mostly at Annenberg, the freshmen dining hall):

 

Also I'm still typing this on my old as laptop because when the one I ordered arrived, it was broken ): The bottom of the chassis was deformed and the screen was cracked and they only just picked it up 2 days ago for replacement so HOPEFULLY that'll come soon so I'm no longer stuck with this piece of crap that lasts like 15 minutes so I can't actually take it to any lectures rendering its laptop-ness completely redundant...

I'm pretty sad this year that I missed the first day of Spring in New Zealand. I tend to blog on that day every year and I couldn't this year because... it wasn't Spring ): there were no baby calves and lambs jumping around here, no first blossom, no warming of the weather... instead all I had to remind me of a change of season was a slight chill and some drizzle. But that's ok. Life changes, I suppose. I wonder what the turn of Spring in March here will look like.

In terms of classes, they just started two days ago but it's shopping week at the moment, which means none of our classes are finalized so we can go into any class we want to 'shop' it and see if we want to take it. So far I've gone into an Art History class on American art and Modernity between 1865 and 1965, a Science and Cooking class where they gave us this plant extract stuff that binds to your sweetness receptors on your tongue so that you can't taste anything sweet for a short period of time and it made sugar taste like sand and, IMO made cookies taste nicer cos you can actually taste the bitterness of the chocolate but other people beg to differ..., and a maths class that I wanted to take but I don't have enough slots this semester so I'll probably take in the Spring, an Ethical Reasoning class (Justice by Michael Sandel, perhaps one of the most famous here, Jono recommended it to me before I even came here hahaha), EC10 (Introduction to Economics), CS50 (the most famous compsci paper here, looks awesome, I can't wait to start this course like actually -- even though it will probably eat up most of my time), and my freshman seminar (I got Just Friends: I don't love you like that), which I already have 40 pages of reading plus a response paper for due in a week. But it's really flexible here and the classes are really interesting so yay Harvard :) But weirdly I still don't feel like classes have started, and I felt much more hard-working back at AU. Maybe because I live on campus now so it just feels like I'm bumming around alllll the time. It's weird.
[I apologise for my atrocious grammar in this above paragraph but I really cannot be bothered making it fluent in a literary sense since this is my blog and I do what I want so go away Yunbin :)]

EDIT: actually I wrote this a few days ago, I've pretty much finalized my classes now, I'm taking CS50, EC10, C&B30 (History of Photography) and Just Friends. Plus I'm probably going to end up auditing Science & Cooking just cos it's so darn cool. I mean just look at these liquid nitrogen marshmallows. No pun intended.

There have been heaps of random events during orientation as well -- there was intramural house sports, and then convocation (which is like the opposite of graduation, where you dress fancy and people give speeches and a ceremony and stuff). There was an activities fair two days ago as well, where all the extracurricular groups had a stall and gave away free stuff :D I'm getting spammed by groups that I signed up for to get free stuff from now though hahah.

Woodbridge international society tshirt ;) 

In terms of social life, there are heaps of parties going on all the time. It's pretty amazing. Went to a few and have seen a few people getting taken away by UHS from passing out after drinking, probably not a pleasant experience but I haven't drank since I got here. Other than that there are also lots of performances going on, and everyone kinda does their own thing. Went to an AAA (Asian American Association) mixer where it was too hot to be classy despite the dress code, an A Cappella performance last night, a dance group performance last week that I can remember off the top of my head...

You can't tell from the photo, but we're all sweating profusely.

Hmmm, apart from playing a lot of card games and hanging out in common rooms til the early AM during orientation, there's nothing much else I can think of to talk about regarding my current life.* Classes are soon to properly start, and I already have a CS project and a reading and response paper to write to Plato's The Symposium, so I shall go and sparknotes the hell out of it now :) Hope you're all doing well where ever you are, and I'd love to catch up sometime so just chuck me a message and I'll reply when I can haha @_@

*EDIT: actually I just remembered, one night we went to the science center at 12am in the morning to learn the gangnam style dance using the apple store glass doors as our mirror. Good times... but maybe that's a story for another day hahaha.