Day 4 - New People

Today was the start of Introduction Days - an orientation-type program - that I was hoping would be a good way to get more familiar with the school and meet some people. Things got off to an inauspicious start when someone four alarms failed to rouse me from my slumber, and I woke up 2 hours after the program began. I furiously pedaled to the building in which I thought my group would be and thankfully found them. I missed the presentation from my faculty, but found my faculty peer mentor in time for a bit of lunch before we headed off to an academic building for some presentations. My group arrived late, and then filed into an overflow room to watch a series of boring, basically useless lectures about our time in Leiden.

The building itself was very cool.

It has a botanical garden - the oldest in the Netherlands - behind it.

Clusius brought the tulip to Holland, I think. He's a big deal.

There are maybe 100 total new international students this semester. I resolved upon seeing a large number of Americans group up together that I would not associate with them, and I was quite frustrated with the apparent summer camp mentality of a lot of the people there. The strong personalities stand out, attract lots of friends right off the bat, and everyone else is left wishing they had friends but disdaining how uncool the popular kids are. Frustrated, it took until later when we all gathered at the student center to socialize with a couple people I previously knew and get the ball rolling. I got introduced to a group of Americans, and as luck would have it, discovered three Yankees and a guy from Switzerland who are also staying in the Rijnfront housing. This was a positive development in and of itself, and the guys I ended up chatting with were all pretty cool and look to be good potential resources for coping with the housing situation.

After snacking out on various Dutch finger foods, all of which proved delicious if not strangely textured, we made our way to another student building for a dinner of a less than appetizing pasta dish and a celery-heavy salad. Dinner was fine enough, and I was just happy to have found some people to talk to - living in Rijnfront was a major development. After dinner three of the guys I met and I all biked home together - it was nice not having to ride the 20+ minutes home alone. The ride also reminded me to never leave home without my gloves. Ever. It's deceptively cold here, even if it's much warmer than back home in Michigan.

I still really miss home and friends, obviously. It's just very hard for me to adjust to life without them, and all I can think about when I'm laying in bed at night trying to fall asleep is wanting to go home to see them. I know things are going to get better as time goes on, and I'm going to take things a day at a time instead of thinking about this as such a long time apart from the people I love, but it's still hard. I guess I never thought about this before I came here.

This is a pretty place.

Tomorrow: more Introduction Days and an International Student Network party at some club that I've been told by everyone is awful every night that there isn't an ISN event there, so we'll see.