First Day of Classes

We were woken up at 8am by the fire alarm. They test out the fire alarm every Thursday in our house and they decided to wake us all up nice and early. Well, some people have 9am classes so it wasn't bad for them. But my classes didn't start until 11am!! The alarm kept going off after that so more sleep was impossible. I went to the bathroom and Joe, my neighbor was about to brush his teeth.
Joe: A bit scary, wasn't it?
Lucy: (mumbles agreement)
Joe: It's the sort of thing they do in this country.
Lucy: Hm? Really? Man, I just want to go back to sleep.

Anyhow, the first day of classes was uneventful. I found all my classes without getting lost. That in itself is an amazing achievement. I sat with Stella and Mahalia (the other 2 course 1 people) for my first two classes. They both already had an earlier class. The first one is an extension of mechanics which was okay. The second class was Geotechnical Engineering and the professor droned on about soils. It took a lot of effort to concentrate.

After that, we all went to Queen's College for lunch. The food and price weren't too bad. Queen's has a nice dining hall. It's nearly twice the size of Caius' dining hall. I was too busy eating to remember to take pictures. I will next time. We're planning on visiting Downing and Caius for lunch in the near future. We (all the CME people) have plans to visit each other's formal halls. Formal halls are usually special dinners where you have to wear your gown and they serve nicer foods. Well, except for Caius where there's a formal hall everyday and the only difference is that you have to wear a gown to the 2nd one. The food's exactly the same. I think it's this way because the dining hall is way too small to fit everyone.

After lunch, Stella and I wandered around a bit. I went to another class at 4pm and met up with Cindy there. This is my only 2 hour class and it's on probability and statistics. Well, it's called Modeling Risk and the professor said that we're eventually going to go into analyzing profolios and such. We're going to use a lot of Excel. But today was a review of probability, none of which I have formally learned before. The Cambridge students took Probability in their 2nd year. I think I will keep this class though because I've heard that 1.010 (the MIT class that I'm replacing Modeling Risk with) is not very good. So I think I'm going to spend this weekend going over probability and mechanics. That is, after I learn to bike again and find Tesco (a grocery store that sells things for cheaper than Sainsburys).