Well, I popped out of bed at 7 a.m. sharp this morning, no hesitation, no cuddling. Really, I sort of hurled my self out from under the nice warm blankets and collected all my things to bring downstairs while I cleared the sleep fog out of my brain. Fired up the Nestor Martin, hopped in the shower and tried to shave as best I could; not an easy task for a zaftig(and as I use this more complimentary word for the current state of my figure, I am struck by the fact that zaftig sounds an awful lot like safganiot, the Hebrew word for donuts. Coincidence? *raise eyebrow enigmatically*) woman in a smallish shower with nowhere to really put a foot and no solid thing to hold on to - in this shower you are surrounded by a relatively fragile, though disturbingly orange shower curtain; a slip or fall could means utter destruction of bathing facillities as we know it…or at least the rod/curtain part. But with the cold I tend to get sandpaper legs, so I was diligently shaving (as opposed to when I was single and sometimes just opted not to shave my legs all winter). CB came downstairs and sort of puttered around the kitchen while I dressed, made breakfast and threw all my stuff together.

I’m sure he was hovering out of concern, and I was probably pretty distant this morning seeing as I counted 50 people on the mailing list for my language course and was trying to picture the total zoo that I anticipated in my classroom. I am not a nice person when I’m nervous/stressed and the middle of this week will mark the longest I’ve ever spent away from my family and/or the state of Pennsylvania (at one time, that is). Everything is completely unfamiliar and that’s novel for a week or two. That’s all part of a vacation. Now it’s coming down to “this is how I am going to be living life for quite some time,” and frankly, it’s not making me a very easy person to be around. Mostly I get aggravated quickly, and I’ve been crying a lot about my cat the past few days.

But anyway, I caught the bus around 8:00 and got to Rozier around 8:30, so I think I can leave a little later in the morning. There were a few people already waiting outside of class, although in the end 50 people did not show up. It was maybe 35 or 40 and we’re split into two classes, so it is certainly manageable. This split was done after several people had registered, however, so it took a good 20 minutes just to figure out who should be in what class. The girl to my right spoke almost no English and the woman to my left spoke plenty of it but with a heavy African (sorry dunno the dialect) accent. Fortunately, the instructor spoke mostly in English. Unfortunately she was a substitute instructor that was only there for the first day of class. Tomorrow we meet the actual instructor. Oh, and y’know how I said they ought to provide a map for us? They did! In the lesson book that we got when we registered in the main building. If you were like me and registered online, you were totally unaware of this and arrived without a lesson book. So after the roster reorganization 4 of us had to leave class and walk down to the main UCT building to get lesson books. Yay.

After all of that we got to learning vowel pronunciations (English speakers, in my opinion this is one of the harder things about Dutch…some of the vowel combinations are sounds that we just don’t have and that makes it very hard to hear/reproduce them)and some trickier consonants (I have trouble with R, I can do G I just tend to forget to make the switch and the other differences I have no probem with). I think most of the English and French speakers were ok, although some others were struggling a bit. So 2 hours a day will be spent in class and one hour will be spent in the language lab. CB is going to help me practice my vowels tonight…and he’s making dinner.