Am I Real Student Now?

The graduate semester finally started!

There are a dozen or so English MA students (all in varying stages of "I just have to finish my thesis and then I´m done") here and about twice that number of Spanish MA students. My cohort in the English department is a whopping three students (including myself), although there are supposed to be two more joining us in January.

Coincidently, three is also the number of classes I'm taking. There's the graduate class which is basicly an introduction to literary research, in which we're focusing on the genera of the pastoral. It´s either going to be really good or really tedious. The jury is still out on that one. I'm also in a linguistics class taught on the undergraduate schedual. I just turned in my first paper there (not my best work, but improving it would have required starting over completly and I just didn´t have the time for that, but it will probably be good enough) and took the first partial exam (a piece of cake). Today was also the first partial exam for the Spanish class I'm taking. I think I did pretty well there too, but that one doesn't really matter since I'm just sitting in, instead of getting a grade.

The important thing is, I am learning Spanish. Yesturday at dinner (half a chicken each and curry rice, with marizipan for desert) Ana was asking us all about how our exams were going and she complemented me on my Spanish. She said out of the six of us girls I had made the most improvement. I´ve gone from practically nothing to nearly always speaking in complete sentences in one month.

My absentee balot still isn´t here. (Any day now the lady in the mail room says, they've started to arrive.) I did recieve my admission ticket for the Subject GRE test I'm going to Berlin to take in November. When I registered for the test, I thought the name of the university there sounded kind of familiar and figured that it wouldn´t be to hard for me to track it down. Now that my ticket is here I have the street address and realized that the reason it sounded kind of familiar because it's right smack dab in the center of the city, on Strasse des 17 Juni. In other words, if you start on Under den Linden Strasse and walk under the Brandenberger Tor into the Teirgarten, once you enter the park the road changes its name to Strasse des 17 Juni. Just keep walking strait down through the park, past the Victory Column and out the otherside, and the place for the test is right there.

Later,
Ely

P.S. If the wear on the keys of the computers in labs here at school are any indication, the least used letters in English and Spanish are (from least to slightly more used) ç, ñ, q, z, x, and p.