First Day of Class

...about damn time.

I'm not gonna lie: since I arrived in January, I've spent most of my time dicking around. I took off for a month and even when I was here for "class," let's be honest... I didn't do that much learning although to be fair, I was technically learning everywhere I was - at the bar, at the club, at the bakery, at Aldi, at the Späti. Little things matter too, like how to order a G&T in German.

So imagine what it felt like to wake up this morning knowing that I would have to sit through hours and hours of economics lecture today. (Classes here meet once a week for a longass session.)

Actually, it felt pretty good, like my life in Berlin finally has direction.

I boarded the AM struggle-train to the university which was remarkably entertaining. When the students are on holiday, the train is almost empty. Now that classes have begun, it is more packed with young people than the U1 on Friday and Saturday nights. 

It helped that my first lecture was in English. It's a course on the history of economics and while, yes, that does sound rather dull, I thoroughly enjoyed hearing the familiar names of famous economists and their contributions to the field. It actually brought me a decent amount of excitement to learn that Cournot is not only known for his work in game theory but also in being one of the first to propose a downward sloping demand curve. #nerd

My second lecture was environmental economics, and it passed by in a complete blur... something about fisheries, something about the prisoner's dilemma, some graphs about marginal cost and marginal willingness to pay. Fortunately, it covered mainly logistics and microeconomic principles that I more or less already know, but there were times when my brain gave out completely. The amount of thinking you have to do just to study a subject itself can already be overwhelming, but to do it in a foreign language at least doubles the difficulty of the task. I respect the foreign students in my micro class from last semester who were somehow able to keep up with the pace and rigor of the professor.

Tomorrow, I'm headed to another university to try and get into a psychology course there. I don't need it, but it sounds interesting enough to try out. And if anything, I need to get out of the house.

Academically, I think the dust is finally starting to settle.

Everything else? Sheer chaos. A neverending rollercoaster. The best of times and the worst of times. But nothing short of an adventure, always.