New Week

So I'm going to try to update this on Sundays from here on out. Obviously today is not Sunday, but its close enough. Last update was Thursday....what has happened since then....well, I had a bunch of lectures on Friday about not plagiarizing and no using websites as source in our dissertations. It was pretty lame. Then we learned about this really cool thing called digimap, where you can make maps of your site with multiple layers of information that can be added and subtracted just like those really nice ones in real research papers. We did actually learn how to use it though, so it was a bit of a bust really. If I end up needing to use it I'll have to go in and get some tutoring on it. I've already decided that I'm going to a class to learn excel. I'm going to be a master at excel by the time I'm through here. Friday night a few of us stayed in a watched bad dance movies and drank boxed wine...

Saturday I didn't do a whole lot of anything. That night another American brought beer pong to the Brits and we played in someone's flat. Then I met another group of girls and we went out for awhile. Then we ended up meeting up with the other group at the pub that's near our dorm. Its weird how small Poole is despite how many people live here.

Sunday we had a delicious Indian meal prepared by my flatmate Baitilikee. I helped with the prep and had to grate ginger and onions. Grating onions is just about the worst experience that you can imagine. Don't ever do it if you can help it. The food was great though. I can't tell you what we ate because I don't know how to spell one and I don't know what the other dish was called.

Today was my first day of real class. I had a human anatomy lecture followed by a human anatomy lab. Today was pretty much intro stuff, so we got a skeleton and had to put it together. I was pretty unequipped to do that, but luckily my groupmates were pretty good. After that I found a book that someone else recommended in the library and have marked all of the pages with pictures that I need to make photocopies of. I want to just purchase the book, but its super expensive, so its copies for me. Oh well. A few of us are going back to the lab on Thursday to work on bone identification, so I'll have to get my copies made for then so that I can use them. I think I'm going to be spending a lot of time in that lab. But it will be worth it. I think the human bone stuff will be a good selling point on my resume even if I'm mostly focused on animal bones in my thesis. And really compared to the animal anatomy that I start tomorrow, the human stuff should be a breeze. You already know that its human when you start. With an animal it could be a lot of things.

Some random observations of England: The elevator in our dorm talks to us. It has a lovely girly voice that tells us "Doors opening" "Doors closing" "5th floor" and so on and so forth. Then there are the traffic lights. These are great. They have green for go, yellow for slow down and red for stop, but then just before the light turns green again, the yellow light comes on along with the red one so that people can prepare to go. I think its brilliant. We can also use a variety of coins in the wash and dry machines. Pound coins, 50p, 20p, and 10p. Much better than having to collect a million of one type of coin like we do in America.

Some other things: I eat pretty much the same things that I ate at home. Cereal or toast for breakfast, sandwich for lunch, fruit, veggies. I found real dressing, so that's cool. I haven't had fish and chips yet since being here, so that's crazy since we're right on the sea, but I have plenty of time for that. If you have any other things you want to know I'll be happy to answer. But I suppose that's all for now. I'll try to update again next Sunday. Until then...