First Week of Classes

I finally had to start my classes on Monday.  First, I had Labor Economics at 8:45am.  Until now, I've always refused to take classes before 10:30 if I could help it, but there's no way to work my schedule to not have some 8:45 classes. It doesn't seem like it will be the hardest class, but the teacher is pretty monotonous which is not great for such an early class.  Although, he did start the class by saying "I don't think you need to attend my lectures in order to pass my exam," so we'll see how long I keep going to this class.  Knowing me, I'll go every day anyways.  On the plus side, this professor said we're stopping a month early because he'll be done with his lessons.

Next was International Business Research.  It seems like it's going to take some work, but it will be a lot easier then taking Research Methods in Economics back at home since all we have to do here is basically write a proposal for a research paper and start it, but we don't actually have to find any data.  Plus, we get to do that in groups. The best part of this class was that the teacher definitely sounded American.  It was nice to hear someone without an accent for once.  It makes it a lot easier to pay attention in class.

The last class of the day was Environmental Economics.  I'm a little worried about this class, it seems like it's going to be pretty hard, and pretty boring.  Plus, we have an assignment due in a week and a half that I need the book to do, but the book store is out of that book and might not get more copies until March.  In this class, for the last 3 weeks, we're going to have Dr. Gerking as our professor.  He's the Mathematical Economics professor at UCF, but he has been traveling to Tilburg to do research pretty frequently for I think the last 10 years.  I've heard he's pretty hard, but I don't think it will be any harder then the first professor.

On Tuesday, the only class I had was Development Economics.  Worst professor ever!! Ardavan had told me that this guy was "confused," and I had assumed he actually meant confusing, but he really did mean what he said.  He spent the 1st 20 minutes trying to figure out how to work his projector, and then told us we would have to skip our break cuz he would need the extra time.  But after another 40 minutes, he said that we could go on break, so he'll see us on Thursday.  He accidentally let class out 30 minutes early, and he didn't seem to realize it.  Plus, he was REALLY quiet.  It was manageable when he had his microphone in, but at some point, he took it off and started playing it for about 10 minutes, and that was causing some annoying feedback sounds, plus we couldn't hear him again.  Scotia asked him if he could use his microphone again, and he hadn't even realized he wasn't wearing it.

I had to go to Environmental and Development Econ again on Thursday, but nothing notable happened.

I dropped the Dutch class I was originally going to take because I could only get in to the Friday section, and since I have no other classes on Fridays, I want to be able to have long weekends to use to travel.  Since Dutch wasn't going to count for anything, I figured I'd rather have my weekends free.  Plus, to my surprise, every time I talked to someone from here and I mentioned that I would be taking a Dutch class, their only response was "Why waste your time? You speak English, you'll never need Dutch." So much for everyone hating Americans for not trying to learn their languages.

Some things about classes here that are different from back home:
1) Every class is 1 hour and 45 minutes which is longer then I'm used to, but every professor gives about a 15 minute break after the first 45 minutes.
2) A lot of classes switch professors half way through the semester.  Sometimes it's because each professor has his own specialty, so they teach the parts they are more proficient in.  Other times, I have no idea why they do it.  But it kind of sucks when normally I would partially pick classes based on how good the professor is.  In this case, I could love the first one and hate the second or vice versa, but I won't know till it's too late.
3) The schedules are really random.  All the classes are the same number of credit hours, but for some of them, I go twice a week, some of them once a week, and some of them, you usually go once a week but theres like 4 or 5 times throughout the semester when you go twice a week.  I even have one class where I have to go every Thursday and every other Monday. I don't get it.
4) Books are WAY cheaper.  I think I have to pay about 50 euros per book.  And those are NEW books! Granted, I don't think you can sell books back here at the end of the semester, so I'm losing some money there, but maybe I can sell them online.

Other stuff about my week:
We had mentor dinner on Tuesday in my apartment, so the mentors cooked some traditional Dutch meal.  It was basically mashed potatoes with what they called cabbage in it but it looked a lot more like parsley, and some sausage on the side.  Then we went to LG, the club all the exchange students go to on Tuesdays (but I had missed it last week cuz I was sick).  The Tuesday parties are usually themed, and this week was "Welcome to Holland," so everyone was supposed to wear orange.  The only thing I could find that wasn't a 60 euro soccer shirt was an orange construction vest, so that's what I wore.  Plus, an I got an orange Beesie from Stefan.  Here's what a Beesie looks like, its some kind of Holland World Cup mascot thing.

And here's me in my construction vest:


I still haven't taken many pictures of Tilburg, it's always too cold for me to want to take my hands out of my pockets.  I'll probably post pictures of the city in like 2 months when it starts to warm up.