Week One: Class

What a week! This week was my first week of classes here at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). I am taking three semester long classes and one half semester class. On Monday I had my IES Dutch Language and Culture class. Unlike most classes here, this class meets twice a week for half of the semester (Monday and Thursday). It is a class offered by our affiliate program (IES) designed to give us a crash course in Dutch. The professor, or lecturer as they call them here, seems very energetic and enthusiastic. The course is mostly in Dutch, with English used where needed. My German has been quite useful in figuring out basic Dutch as the two are much more similar than I had anticipated. Dutch really is a bizarre combination of German and English. 

On Tuesdays I have the other IES course I am taking; Exploring Dutch Society and Culture. I am very excited for this class. The lecturer is very friendly and interesting. Basically we get to pick a research topic and conduct 45 hours of volunteering, interviews and additional research while we are here. She is apparently very connected to lots of organisations. I am most likely going to be researching Dutch public information campaigns. 

On Wednesdays I have Dutch Identity: Images of Dutch Society Through Time. Essentially this is a Dutch history course. The lecturer seems to know his stuff and is friendly, but this also is probably my toughest course in terms of the content and work load. I will most likely take this class pass/fail. 

On Fridays I have Social Trends, Social Problems, and Social Policies in the Netherlands. I think this course will also be very interesting. It is a sociological look at the Amsterdam and the Netherlands as a whole. In this class we will also be able to pick a research topic of our choice to write our final paper on. The lecturer is very energetic and engaging. He has taught this particular course 20 times, so he should really know his stuff. 

Classes here are different from my college experience in the States in a number of ways. For starters they only meet once a week. While this can be nice, it also means the classes are 3-4 hours long. Another major difference is that for most classes your entire grade is determined by 2-4 papers. Participation is barely taken into account, and tests and quizzes are nonexistent. Due to meeting only once a week, there is also a much greater emphasis on independent reading. For all of my classes (except the language class) I have at least 80-100 pages of reading to do over the course of the week. 

While I spent most of the week figuring out my class schedule, and how to get to my classes I also spent a fair amount of time getting lost in downtown Amsterdam on my bike. Central Amsterdam is crazy. Streets change names every other block, and there is no rhyme or reason to where a street might take you. Even with a map it can be quite disorienting. I think I have gotten lost enough that I kind of know my way around downtown now. The nice thing is, even if you get lost everything is within a 20 minute bike ride so it is not that big a deal. The scariest thing about biking in Amsterdam is the fact that motorbikes and mopeds are allowed to drive in the bike lanes. 

The weather has warmed up a bit, but it has been very cloudy. Hopefully we will get some sun soon.