First things first, what does the second apple mean?
Well, it is an inside joke from my study abroad program. During our orientation they had some guy come in and talk to us about culture shock. He was hilarious and for some reason decided to use apples as an analogy for the different stages people normal go through during a cultural transition. The first apple was supposed to represent excitement, awe and happiness. The second: frustration, being uncomfortable and homesickness. The third: acceptance.
For my entire stay so far I have been wavering between the first and third apples. Today, however, I was stuck in the second apple because alas, it is the first day of classes. No more adventure trips and long weeks of tourism. I have to buckle down and get to the reason I am here... education.
This past week I have been off the grid on a giant road trip along the Garden Route (which I will post about in the next few days) so coming back to Cape Town was a mixture of excitement at being back home and worry about classes.
My worry was not ill directed, in fact with the amount that went wrong I probably should have been twice as stressed. I woke up a 7:30am determined to get to class on time and figure everything out. I had to go online to find where my classes would be. This ended up taking me over an hour so that I didn’t leave my flat until 8:50am for a 9:00am class. Needless to say I was late, well I would have been if I had made it to the class at all. I spent an hour looking for the room that this class was meant to be held in and also scouting for another class that met at the same time that I want to take instead of the one I am currently signed up for.
I went to campus with the intention of finding and going to some part of two different classes and ended up not finding or going to either.
This started my first day of classes off horribly and not much got better as the day went on. Thankfully that was the end of my scheduled classes, so I headed to the Interstudy office to use the computer and see what else I needed to do. That went fine and I got a bit of a chance to regroup, except discovering some schedule conflicts.
It turns out one of my classes is on Hiddingh Campus which is a 10-15min bus ride away in the actual city of Cape Town. The issue with this is that I have a class on Upper Campus that ends at 10:45am and according to every bit of info I have (accept the syllabus my professor sent out) this class off campus starts at 11:00am. That doesn’t give me much time to get there. If it does turn out this class is actually at 12:00am (like my prof. posted) than my back up plan will need to severely change. So either way there will be a conflict.
What is my backup plan? And why do I need one, you ask? Well as I said before there are two different classes at the same time that I am planning to take. One (the religion course) is everyday from 9:00-9:45am the other (history) is Mon, Tues, Wed from 9:00-9:45am. However, The second one I am technically not allowed to take because Semester Study Abroad kids are not supposed to. But if I am not allowed to take the history course I will need to sign up for a different one some other time. I would than take a history class that is on Wed, Thur, Fri 12:00-12:45am, the same time in which (according to my prof. said) the class off campus is at. It turns out even studying abroad I will always have some issues with my class schedule. Such a dilemma.
In order to keep myself productive for the rest of today and not slip into a complete failure of productivity,
I decided to try and sign up for clubs/societies. When I went to go do that I realized I had no idea what half of the societies listed even were. So that didn’t happen… Later I got lunch and surfed the Internet some more to try and figure out my class schedule, which ended up being very much a waste of time as nothing more bore much fruit. I finally gave up and just went back to my flat feeling drained from a day where I did absolutely nothing of importance.
As I said before, a swing and a miss…
Hopefully something changes over the weekend and I can figure everything out before Monday rolls around.
P.S. I mentioned the Garden Route (look it up), which was awesome and will be a whole other blog post that is coming up, probably sometime this weekend.
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