I won’t be updating this one anymore, so please change your bookmarks/RSS feeds/whatever!

It was the best concert I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to quite a few. The drive back was a little sketchy, however, since it was SNOWING on the highway. It was crazy! It looked like a blizzard. It didn’t stick very much, though, so it we got back to school just fine. It was an amazing night. :)

Last night my bestie Eleni’s friend Ethan took us to Amherst, a really nice town nearby where Eleni is from. We got ice cream and wandered around the UMass campus – very cold, but fun.

I am currently in the library studying for my three exams this week, and just doing homework. I can’t wait to see John and Jenny next weekend!

The weather was gorgeous and surprisingly warm. However, since I’ve gotten back to South Hadley, the weather as been FREEZING. This morning it was in the 20s! But now I have an excuse to wear my pea coat and scarves. The combination of crisp air, bright leaves, and blue blue sky is amazing.

This coming week I have several midterms coming up, for biology and Spanish. I also have a statistics test lurking in the future. But on the bright side, tomorrow I’m going to a concert in Boston by one of my favorite singers, Mika! I’m really excited. :) Also this weekend Eleni is taking Jess and I to her hometown of Amherst to go see a movie and grab dinner – a relaxing night out. The weekend after that is Family & Friends weekend, and John and Jenny are coming to visit! I can’t wait! Then comes Halloween, and from that point there’s only a few weeks until I go home for Thanksgiving. So exciting!

International Whaling

Really, the number of comments I get partially determines my grade, so PLEASE add your opinion!

The weather has been fantastic, and fall has definitely arrived. The days are shorter, the mornings crisp, and the leaves are about halfway changed.

Last week we had a fantastic surprise: Mountain Day! On Tuesday morning the bell rang for a long time, signaling that classes were cancelled, and it was Mountain Day. My new best friend Eleni and I hiked up the actual Mt. Holyoke in Skinner State Park and saw the gorgeous views of the Pioneer Valley, and all the way out to Vermont.

It is an awesome tradition, and I can’t wait until next year!

But currently, I’m sitting in my hall’s food service are, serving chips & salsa while being paid by the federal government. I love work-study. On the same note, I also have a job with America Reads at a local elementary school. I will be tutoring kindergarteners three days per week in reading – I’m excited!

There honestly aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish everything I want to. My homework load has been deceptively light (I only have textbooks in two classes), but the rest of my time is filled with meetings, work, and eating (haha). I’m still loving my classes, especially World Politics and Biology. We had our first Bio lab last week, where we visited a gorgeous waterfall on campus and slogged around up to our knees in the water, looking at freshwater sponges, salamanders, and insects. It was so much fun! The professor is hilarious, extremely knowledgeable, and very approachable. I’m really looking forward to the rest of the semester!

On a random note, the food here is SO delicious. There are seven different dining halls on campus, and each one has a completely different menu for each meal. My favorite dining hall is at Prospect – they have fajita’s every Friday which are AMAZING. Actually, I like all the halls. Ham-MacG has softserve ice cream and gorgeous lake views, Abbey-Buck has a crepe bar for Sunday brunch, Rockies has a good deli bar, Wilder has interesting Halal/Kosher foods, and Kendade has good sandwiches for lunch. I haven’t actually eaten at Torrey yet (too far away!), but I will eventually. I’m actually eating a ton of vegetables and healthy things, since it’s mostly what they offer.

To continue on the subject of of food, tonight I went to my first official club meeting for Food Justice Society, one of the most unique organizations on campus. They’re really focused on supporting local farms, spreading awareness of where food comes from, and having potlucks. :D I signed up to be on the student garden committee, so I get to do physical labor and such. We’re also going to a ton of off campus events, like harvest festivals, lectures, and documentary screenings. I’m so excited! I have a ton of other clubs I want to join, like Amnesty International, College Democrats, Model United Nations (MUN), and Outing Club. Initially I signed up for more, but unfortunately some conflict with classes and other clubs. :(

I think the most intense will be MUN. We have a two hour general meeting each Sunday, plus a two hour training session each Thursday. But it sounds so fun, and will be a good way for me to use my argumentative nature haha. Basically it’s organized like the UN actually is, with schools being “countries” and debating real international relations topics. Teams travel to conferences – MHC is going to ones at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Taipei, Taiwan this year! Hopefully I’ll get to attend one. :D It will be a ton of work, but hopefully it will pay off.

I’m also really excited for Outing Club. They go on all sorts of trips, like kayaking, hiking, snowshoeing, rafting, etc. I haven’t been to a meeting yet, but hopefully I’ll be able to get outdoors soon.

Last Friday I had my first off-campus experience! My new best friend Eleni took me to her hometown of Amherst, which is only about 10 miles away. We went to a local farm called Atkins Farms and got some of their apparently world-famous (and delicious!) apple cider donuts and other groceries, Newbury Comics (an awesome CD/vinyl/comics/movies/everything shop), a nice Indian restaurant for dinner, and then to her house. She lives in a adorable neighborhood with gorgeous traditional white-washed New England homes. Her parents are extremely nice (and very, very Greek). Amherst is a really nice town, and I hope to go back soon.

All in all, I’m having an amazing time. I can’t wait for the leaves to change and the temperature to cool down. New England autumn is something I’ve always wanted to experience, and now I’m living the dream. I literally cannot even remember why I applied to any other colleges – Mount Holyoke is my home now.

I’m all settled into my room, and my roommate Jess is awesome – we get along really well. We spent quite a bit of time putting up posters and other decorations, like a really nice 15 foot oriental carpet her parents brought. All the other people on my floor are really nice, too, and we hang out in each others’ rooms a lot. We’ve become really good friends with a girl named Eleni, and our next-door neighbors Stephanie and Caitlin. When we have free time, we all play games like Apples to Apples, watch movies, or just hang. It’s kind of like a 24/7 sleepover.

In the academic world, I had my first day of classes on Thursday. In the morning I had Spanish, an hour break, and then Statistics. The Spanish class seems really similar to my fourth year of high school Spanish – total immersion, a focus on culture, etc. I think I’ll do well. Surprisingly, I’m really excited for Statistics. The prof actually worked for the CDC when the AIDS crisis was just emerging in the 80s, so she has tons of interesting stories and real life examples of stats.

On Friday we had a Wednesday schedule for some reason. That day I had Biology and World Politics. I LOVE both these classes. My bio prof is the same one whose class I sat on in April during my visit – he is so excited and passionate about bio, it’s infectious. He really loves philosophy and poetry, so he said he’ll mix quite a bit of that in as well – what a cool combination! We already have an extra credit opportunity involving collecting insects around campus, which I am definitely doing! And our labs sound amazing, with topics ranging from maple sugar to squid dissection. I already love World Politics, too. The prof has been here for 30 years, looks like Santa Claus, and is hilarious. The main topics we’ll be discussing are political realism and challenges to it, as well as balance of power, and hegemony. Half our grade in the class is weekly quizzes, based on lectures, readings, and international newspaper articles that the prof posts online each day. We took a practice quiz duringclass, and I was a little embarrassed to be the only student out of 150 to get 10 out of 10… The other half of our grade is from the building and maintenance of a blog or website about a topic of our choice, somehow related to international relations. I can’t wait to get started!

This weekend has just been for relaxing and homework. I had my first experience doing laundry (annoying, since people take forever to move their clothes!), but I also watched Pirates of the Caribbean with some new friends and went to a back-to-school dance party at the campus center. Tonight is NightFest, a big party put on by a school organization that includes a foam dance pit, rock climbing, volleyball, and other things out on the Green. I also have a meeting about my work-study job with dining services. I’m sorry this post is so long, but I’ll make more frequent and short ones in the future. I miss everyone back home terribly, keep in touch!

I probably won’t be able to post for a while, but I’ll be sure to remember everything for when I do. My schedule for the next few days is this:

Friday: Fly to Boston on 8am flight. Arrive, drive to Holyoke, MA. Stay overnight in hotel with parents.

Saturday: Spend the day buying last minute, big things (like a printer and wastebasket) that I couldn’t pack. Maybe go visit my roomie, who moved in early for tennis tryouts.

Sunday: Move in 8-11:30am. Picnic lunch 11:30am-1pm. Hall meeting 1-2pm. Computer networking tutorial 2-2:30. President’s welcome & reception 3:30-5:30pm. Dinner 5:30-7pm. Floor meeting 7-8pm. Orientation 101 (kind of a humorous play/showcase) 8-9:30pm.

So in other words, I’m gonna be busy. I will update ASAP, hopefully with some pictures of my dorm room. For now, adios!

Other than packing up 5 huge boxes and shipping them off to Mass, I finished my internship at the Seattle Aquarium and have been seeing my friends as much as possible before I leave. My internship was probably the best experience of my life to date, and I feel so lucky to have experienced it.

Last Saturday my friends planned and actually pulled off a surprise farewell party for me – I was TOTALLY unaware, and it was so sweet! Stacey made this adorable (and delish) cake for me:

I also finished The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down. As I kept reading (and reading, and reading), it became a little monotonous. The parts about Lia (the patient) were really interesting, but what began as a case study turned into the entire history of the Hmong people. It was still engaging, since it’s a topic I’ve never studied before, but at the same time a little tedious and seemingly unending. I understood the medical/cultural dichotomy in the first 100 pages, and then read 300 more reiterating the same thing over and over. Overall, the issues presented in the book were fascinating, but became boring.

For the next few days I’ll just be getting a few last-minute things wrapped up, hanging with friends, and doing what I can to support the teachers of my former district while they’re on strike. Hopefully my next post will be from Massachusetts! :)

I will be living with Jess (as I mentioned before), in Porter Hall! We have a nice spacious basement room. Something interesting about the hall is that it is home to the Center for Global Initiatives (aka study abroad programs), and the first floor is all offices. Although it wasn’t my first choice, overall I’m happy with Porter. Here’s a list of pros and cons I’ve made:

Pros
- Quiet
- Big room
- Near to bathroom, computer room, and laundry room
- Literally in the most convenient location on campus!
- We have a big bay window
- The basement isn’t actually below ground
- Porter is supposed to have really good temperatures (not too hot or cold) and lighting
- I’m already acquainted with our closest neighbors, two other firsties!

Cons
- Porter isn’t known as a very social dorm
- Basement is separated from the living room/kitchen on floor two
- It doesn’t have a dining hall
- The basement has linoleum floors instead of nice hardwood like the rest of the building

Despite those drawbacks, I couldn’t be happier with its location! It’s so close to all my classes, the campus center, and the library. I won’t have to trudge through ten feet of snow to get to class, yay!

In non-dorm related news, I finally started dorm shopping. I have all the important things, and now just need a few final items and clothes. I bought a MacBook Pro laptop with my own money, and it is such a nice computer! I love it. I also started reading our “common read” assignment, The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. It’s a really interesting book about the clash of Hmong culture and American medicine – I can’t wait to hear the author speak when she comes to campus!

It’s finally starting to hit me that I’m leaving Washington in just a few weeks… It hurts to think of how much I’ll miss this place and it’s amazing people, natural environment, and culture.

In MHC news, I have (again) changed my schedule – this time for good! At the beginning of the month I finally got the “permission” to register online for Spanish 200, yay! This is especially good since I found out that I am required to take four semesters of Spanish if I want to study abroad in a country that speaks the language. I most definitely do – MHC has an awesome program in Monteverde, Costa Rica, with a focus on sustainability that I am dying to participate in!

I also was able to get into Politics 116 (World Politics), the main pre-req for International Relations majors. Since it’s such a popular major the class filled up really quickly, but luckily they added more capacity so I was able to get in! I’ll be taking it instead of American Politics. My (final until September) schedule:

Click to enlarge

I’m really excited! Also in less than three weeks I’ll be finding out my housing assignment. I already know that I’ll be rooming with Jess, a really nice girl who is from Mass. But on August 7th, we’ll find out which hall we’ll be living in! On the form we put Wilder, Mead, and Porter as our first choices. Mount Holyoke is pretty unique in that every residence hall has an equal mix of the classes – 25% first years, 25% sophomores, etc. We could be put in any residence hall, but we have as good a chance as anyone of getting into one of our top three choices.

I am so excited about everything. I’m leaving in less than 7 weeks, and Orientation sounds amazing! I can’t wait. :)