A week ago

I cannot believe it. A week ago I was in Paris, cultural capital of the world, home to the sophisticates and all that jazz. Now, I'm in the tiniest town I have ever lived in. I can literally walk across the entire town in ten minutes. Which I actually did last night. I've never lived in a city with less than 3 million people in it before. This is going to be quite a challenge.

I should have known when I arrived, and promptly found myself in a taxi with a driver who looked straight out of Wrong Turn, that Eliza Dushku movie. Unfortunately, he did not remind me of the teenagers, who were, as all teenagers are in Hollywood movies, very attractive, but of the hicks who ran about trying to kill people with chainsaws and kitchen knives and whatnot. Seriously. Old man, long, straggly white beard, plaid shirt and jeans, red trucker's hat on the head. Can you get any more cliched? Then there are the accents, which are quite amazing. Still think the Boston accent is far less comprehensible though.

I cannot even think of anything to type about this town, tiny as it is. It's not a town, it's smaller than Choa Chu Kang. Of course, they still managed to charge exorbitant rates for hotels. I had to cross a river and a state line to get a room for less than $150. Of course, even though the hotel was two whole towns away from the school, it was still ten minutes by cab. Mindboggling.

Oh, a rather bizarre and quite irritating thing happened on Sunday. I called a cab from the lobby of the overpriced hotel to go to my slightly less overpriced hotel. So the cab shows up and parks across the street. My brow got a little furrowed at this point, but I can only shrug and cross the street, dragging my luggage behind me. Then when I got to within ten feet of the vehicle, the driver suddenly drives off. I'm left standing there, luggage in hand, slack-jawed. I release a markedly unsatisfying stream of curses, then haul my luggage across the street again to talk to the equally bemused parking attendant at the hotel who called the cab for me. I did eventually get a taxi, but seriously, what the hell? Did he not like my face? Maybe he objects to Lacoste shirts. Or perhaps he suspected that I was concealing a dirty nuke in my Samsonite, which would explain his dramatic swerve and escape.

Bloody idiot. Piss me off.

Classes here are damn heavy. Six hours a day. Hardly reasonable. In two days here, I will have exceeded my weekly allotment in Chicago. Then there are the readings and homework at night. I just spent a good half hour drawing out a spreadsheet. Why couldn't I have built the damn thing on Excel? Because he wants us to get used to planning on paper first. Curiously, for this assignment, I used Excel to plan, then wrote it out on paper. Professors seem pretty decent though. If nothing else, I guess I will learn something from this. Beats crunching numbers in a bank for summer.

Also another interesting development that I will keep under wraps for now. I'll try to avoid getting too excited about it. Emotions are liars anyway. Just ask Descartes.