First Day of Class

My first day got off to an okay start in my Finance class. I was lucky to arrive on time considering this place is like impossible to navigate. To find your classroom, you have to enter it into the "Lift Selection Advisor" which then tells you which elevator to go to. Then you have to look up the elevator because by the way there are about 30 of them. So my first class was Lift 25-26, room 4503 or something. My professor has a lot of experience in the industry and seems like she's going to be really good, but she kept trying to scare everyone out of the class saying, "I'm mean and horrible!" She succeeded with some. About 5 kids just got up in the middle of the class and left. They do that here during drop/add. It's so weird. I think she just wants less grading. Then I went to Musical Theater which was a blast! We just watched clips of musicals. I even sang along when we watched Rent's "Seasons of Love".

My management class was the best. I walk into this big lecture theater, sit down. I'm a little confused because Beethoven is playing and and all the kids have these little remotes in their hands and they're pointing them up at the screen. And I'm like, "What the hell is going on?" So I ask the kid next to me, "Hey, is this MGTO 120?" He says yes, so I start getting settled and start checking out the scene more. My professor is wearing a double-breasted pin stripped suit and I'm thinking, "Yes...this guy is going to be the shit." And he is. He is such a character! He's from California so he's always making these jokes about America. My friend Alex, a guy from Michigan, and I are the only ones who get his humor; all the locals are always looking at each other like, "what's he talking about?" It's great.

So anyway, Alex and I head to lunch afterwards. We get to one of the dining halls, or the "canteen" as they call it here, get in this line for what looks kind of like Panda Express. We get up to the front and get yelled at in Cantonese (seems that happens a lot, doesn't it?). Luckily, someone in line spoke English and explained to us that we needed to go buy some sort of ticket at this other desk and then get back in the line we were in and then give them the ticket and then they'd give us the food. So we did that. Then we're trying to find a table and there's no open table. So we see this guy sitting alone, Thomas. Thomas is nice enough to let us sit with him. He's got this lunch in a plastic box of a cold chicken leg with a ton of rubbery skin, rice, a hard-boiled egg, and some black like vinegary stuff (it was NOT soy sauce). So we decide to engage him in a bit of conversation. He tells us he lives at home with his parents, it takes him 1 hour to get to school, he takes 9 classes (?? I was confused, maybe he misunderstood our question), he's a first year student, and he doesn't like dessert - he specifies definitely not chocolate. So as we're starting to talk about his major, Alex picks up his bowl of soup to take a sip (we didn't see the spoons) and as he's setting it back down on the table, he spills it all over Thomas' laptop bag! Like I said before, napkins are scarce. So Alex and I are running around trying to find something to dry it up with and Thomas is trying really hard not to get mad, frantically moving his stuff out of the soup stream. It was really awkward. After that, conversation kind of ended.

Afterward I headed to the "Computer Barn" where I ran into Maud and Laura. Maud looked very excited. "Do you want to go to the Philippines this weekend?" she asks me. I'm like, "Hell no!" It's just NOT like me to just do something so unplanned. So then I thought for a second and was like, well okay I guess I'll think about it. So after I was done with class, Laura calls and says the plane tickets are only $150 US and that we weren't leaving until Friday night (it was Thursday night), so I said, oh what the hell, let's do it! So the airline's website (CebuPacific Air) was so sketchy that none of our credit cards would go through so we had to have this guy, Ronan, a full year student who was going to be our "guide" in the Philippines, buy all of our tickets for us. And so, as Maud would say, we were "going to the Philippines!"