Surfin’ USA

First pics from campus

Well, it’s nothing special so far, but due to popular demand I’ll post some first pics here.

As I might have mentioned to some of you, I’ve found a place in one of the on-campus graduate housing communities, which you can probably best think of as a little village. It has different kinds of houses with varying sizes of appartments, even some families live here. I personally live in a 2-room appartment with a greek graduate student. We share a kitchen, living area and the bathroom while each of us has a small room for sleeping and studying. My flatmate has some furniture in the living room, but my room is still unfurnished. Hence I’m looking to acquire some used furniture at the moment, but it seems there are a lot of opportunities for this on campus, so I’m not worried.

Close to our housing community is a supermarket, a bank, restaurants and even a hairdresser’s shop — all still on campus. So I guess you can really say the university is like a city of its own (did I mention we have our own campus police?).

Currently I’m spending most of my time walking around campus, taking care of the initial paperwork. Among other things I need to apply for a Social Security Number and then submit a couple of tax related forms, so I can start getting paid by the university. Next week will then bring all the official introduction and welcome events, so I’m looking forward to that as well. At the moment it’s still rather quiet with not many students around.

Update: Several of you have asked for my street address. I won’t post it here where anyone can grab and abuse it, but I’ll happily provide it after you email me or leave a comment to this post (with your email address).