First couple days of school

Well classes for me have officially begun. Going to school here is very different. I have all my classes squished into 3 days (tues-thurs) so each day is fairly long. I am used to 50 minute classes and now i don't have any classes shorter than an hour and a half so I'm still working on being able to pay attention for that long. I have two classes taught by the lafayette professor we brought with us. He has never taught either of the classes but i feel like he will do a really good job with the one engineering class that is very important for us, so that's a good thing. He was supposed to be returning to the U.S. to get some visa paperwork stamped and so I wasn't going to have two of my classes for an entire week. We were all very excited. But when I got home from school today he sent us all an e-mail saying the Belgian embassy pulled through last minute and he won't have to leave tomorrow. In some ways its a good thing but now I have to get up eearly for class tomorrow and on top of that do an extremely long homework assignment. Oh well...

My differential equations class (which is a tough math course) is the one course everyone is kind of upset about. It is a course we all need but the school here does not normally teach it. Our teacher is about 4 ft tall and walks around with a backpack...I think she may be a student at the VUB. She doesnt speak very good english and she doesn't understand our questions very well. It is obvious she hasn't had a lot of teaching experience because she is not very interactive. It should be interesting. The class was also only schedualed for an hour and a half every week which is obviously not enough time to learn the entire course content so we requested another meeting time and they gave us a second class but it is on the same day! We have a 2 hour break between the two classes and then we have an hour and a half more of class. Going to the same class twice in a day is not very fun.

My statistics class is 3 hours which is really long but I like the teacher and it seems like it will be a cake walk. Also matt is in the class with me.

Yesterday two of the girls that I live with got food poisoning and were throwing up all day. We're pretty sure it was from the leftover green endive soup that they both scarfed down. Fortunately I did not eat any because it had chicken stock in it. Neither of our host parents got sick though...perhaps only Belgians can handle that much endive.

Also my phone is activated and ready so if you guys in the U.S. get an international calling card it is free for me to recieve calls.

Hope all is well!