![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Well, it took rather longer than I had hoped, but I finally have hot water in my flat! I also have more furniture, and getting the second delivery up the stairs was considerably less epic than the first (although still quite a good workout!) I now have beds and bedside tables and curtains in both bedrooms, and a wardrobe in the spare room, and a TV cabinet in the sitting room. I still need to build the wardrobe for my room, as well as a desk, but I'm nearly there.
One way in which Brussels is more civilised than London is that there are no limits on how much you can recycle, so unlike when we moved into the Woodlands Park Road house, I don't have to fill the shed with empty cardboard boxes and gradually decant them into the recycling bin each week. This is especially helpful because I don't have a shed here.
The other major thing still missing before I can really feel at home is broadband, which slightly annoyingly I won't get until next Thursday, and may have to miss a lecture for, depending on where in the timeslot they arrive, but in the meantime I am surviving on mobile data at home, and obviously making good use of the wifi on campus, where I am now.
This week is basically freshers' week, so I've been to a handful of talks with lots of information that I already knew because I've actually read every single link that they sent me in advance, and a guided tour of Leuven, which was mostly stuff I already knew because I've done a bit of reading about the history of the town, and visited the museums when we were in Belgium on holiday last year, but at least a few things that were new, and also the chance to meet some other international students. I'm not doing brilliantly at getting to know people, but more because it feels like awfully hard work and I don't wanna than because I’m trying and failing. Tonight there's a social organised by the Theology Faculty student society, which I'm hoping might be a slightly easier environment to meet people, as there won't be quite so many and we'll have at least something in common.
One thing which took a little while to filter into my consciousness is that not only is it not necessary to choose exactly which modules I'm taking until a couple of weeks after lectures have started, but it's probably a good idea not to, because that means I can try out the various options before I make my choices. It also means that I can put the ones that I don't end up officially taking in my diary and carry on going to the classes even if I don't actually get examined on them. This does mean that next week I have 34 hours of teaching, which is a bit silly, given that an approximate rule of thumb seems to be that you do about equal amounts of teaching and private study, but obviously I'm not going to try and keep them all up through the whole semester. Probably.
One way in which Brussels is more civilised than London is that there are no limits on how much you can recycle, so unlike when we moved into the Woodlands Park Road house, I don't have to fill the shed with empty cardboard boxes and gradually decant them into the recycling bin each week. This is especially helpful because I don't have a shed here.
The other major thing still missing before I can really feel at home is broadband, which slightly annoyingly I won't get until next Thursday, and may have to miss a lecture for, depending on where in the timeslot they arrive, but in the meantime I am surviving on mobile data at home, and obviously making good use of the wifi on campus, where I am now.
This week is basically freshers' week, so I've been to a handful of talks with lots of information that I already knew because I've actually read every single link that they sent me in advance, and a guided tour of Leuven, which was mostly stuff I already knew because I've done a bit of reading about the history of the town, and visited the museums when we were in Belgium on holiday last year, but at least a few things that were new, and also the chance to meet some other international students. I'm not doing brilliantly at getting to know people, but more because it feels like awfully hard work and I don't wanna than because I’m trying and failing. Tonight there's a social organised by the Theology Faculty student society, which I'm hoping might be a slightly easier environment to meet people, as there won't be quite so many and we'll have at least something in common.
One thing which took a little while to filter into my consciousness is that not only is it not necessary to choose exactly which modules I'm taking until a couple of weeks after lectures have started, but it's probably a good idea not to, because that means I can try out the various options before I make my choices. It also means that I can put the ones that I don't end up officially taking in my diary and carry on going to the classes even if I don't actually get examined on them. This does mean that next week I have 34 hours of teaching, which is a bit silly, given that an approximate rule of thumb seems to be that you do about equal amounts of teaching and private study, but obviously I'm not going to try and keep them all up through the whole semester. Probably.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-19 05:18 am (UTC)From: