Day 5: It's Like The Flight of the Bumblebees Over Here, I Mean Honestly

Last night, I finally read Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman - Larisa's been telling me to read it since I borrowed Drew's copy of Smoke and Mirrors after Christmas, and last night I found it online. While I want to say that it was a beautiful story, I honestly can't - because of the story's content, it was more fantastic. However, it was definitely beautifully written.

I found my bracelet! It was right where Lane had left it, although it was rather cold and damp from the morning mist, but that was fine. Originally, I had intended to get up at 7:45 to get it before any potential children and/or magpies found it first - although I didn't get out until after breakfast (which included discussing/generally being in love with Prof. Shrinivas's class last semester) and signing up for the Amsterdam activity (which was later changed due to scheduling errors on OSA's part, whoops), there it was! Yay, bracelet.

Today was generally pretty busy - class from 10-2 (Music), another class from 2:30-4:15 (Ethics), another class from 4:30-6:15 (The world since 1914), dinner, get my phone... rush rush rush. And yes, you read that right - I have a phone now. Woohoo!

Music class was fine, although I was tired all day - we listened to Stravinsky (among others), and can I just say that he is probably the most amazing man ever? From what I could tell, he was about 4.5 feet tall, but he was also a magician with sound, astoundingly old, and adored by the audience (for good reason). The class was a bit long, but we were also sitting in the dark for a lot of it. That class has now been moved to across the courtyard, so as of next week we're in a charming - no, really - atticky space above the computer lab.

Ethics was initially slow (I was still groggy), but we talked about what we'd each do if we had an Invisibility Cloak and future trips to a zoo where the monkeys can climb on you if they so desire. During the ten-minute break, I learned water, which is actually pronounced more like vataar, but definitely not like "Um... wasser, alstublieft?" which is what I tried. The "alstublieft" part was correct, but "wasser" is another country over. Oops. The bartender/ deBuun owner and my professor both told me not to worry about messing up, and I even got a thumbs up for pronunciation anyway. That class, for whatever reason, has been moved to KB 1 now, so there goes the perfect bike route.

History was fun! I'm doing a presentation on Stalin, who Ralph says was "sent to us from The Planet of the Assholes, and we had quite a few of those in the 20th century. I guess they thought one wasn't enough and sent the whole damn class." Something tells me this is going to be a very interesting class - for example, he started the class while we were still talking amongst ourselves by starting a video compilation of people dancing to I Will Survive, later with subtitles naming each of the concentration camps in the video. As it turns out, the older man was in Auschwitz and escaped, to later bring his daughter and granddaughters to the camps "to basically say, F*ck you Nazis!"

Currently, I'm sitting in Sophie's Lounge (after forgoing the flopped dodgeball attempt) surrounded by the cacophony of piano, speakers, trip planners, and students (mainly the first three), trying to do homework and meet up with Melanie to plan Italy in a few weeks. This is possibly the first time outside of mealtimes (and the fire drill, obviously) that almost all of us have been in one place at one time. As Najah said, "if OSA asks, we had a group activity tonight!"