Well, I slept until mid-morning in and out after my bout of not being able to get to sleep again last night, then got up and went in to UW. First port of call was the housing guys to check in with where I’m going, sign my lease and pay my deposit and so on. Reading over the lease certainly took a lot longer than I was expecting. So much for simple documents, huh? I’m starting to like Dad’s “one page or less” policy.

Anyway, after that was all said and done, I headed off to graphics. Another good lecture, I think I’m really going to enjoy this class. So far it’s certainly a lot more maths-intensive than I’m used to, some of which is a little above my head but I’m keeping up. There seems to be a real practical bent to this course, which I rather like. I also asked the lecturer about possible research options in computer graphics, and he said that he’d wait and see how I did in this course (which is fair enough) to see if I had the aptitude and the enthusiasm for it.

Next I went into the CSE office and met up with Lindsay again about my general lack of a login for the CSE department, especially in light of the readings that I needed to do for my Ubiquitous Computing class tomorrow! That turned out to be a mini-drama, as Lindsay couldn’t print the files properly from her computer and ended up getting the lecturer to print them off for me a few floors up. In the end, I got a promise that I would get my CSE login details soon, and the readings I needed for the week.

Next it was off to the Terry Hall desk to pick up my keys so I could go check out my new place. Not one, not two, but four keys – the community centre, the mailbox, the apartment and my room. Yeesh. Anyway, I went up and checked it out – the bed is a single, which I would later be totally confused to discover is called a ‘Twin’ here in the US. About the best explanation someone could come up with was that it the size of a ‘twin set of bunks’… even then, that’s screwed up. The sizes are: Twin (single), Full (double), Queen and King. I don’t know if I want to know what they call a king-single here. All in all the place seemed very sparsely populated with both people and furniture. I didn’t actually see anyone at all on this visit, which was a little odd.

After that I bussed back to Greg’s place, we loaded up all of my stuff into his car and then head out. First up we had dinner at Baja Fresh, where I had some very average nachos (yes, with a fork) that had way too much cheese and very little sauce. Ah well. I also got a large drink that’s actually a sports-sipper-thing. The pseudo-straw kind, not the nozzle kind. Anyway, the reason this is cool is that I can take it back in there and refill it for 99 cents whenever I want, as many times as I want. Sweet!

Next we headed to the apartment. Naturally the rain started to get a little heavier, but we ran everything up the stairs (fourth floor, no elevator) to the apartment. After that Greg left and I got to know a couple of my flatmates (room-mates here apparently, even if you don’t share a room… silly Americans). Aidan (end of the hall) is from Taiwan and is here studying an MBA, very personable and from what I can tell, a pretty cool guy. KyungNam (next to Aidan) is from Korea originally and is in his third year studying Electrical Engineering. He’s one of the few undergrad students who got into Stevens Court Addition (the apartment complex we’re in), which has a priority for grad students. KyungNam is a bit quieter than Aidan, but still chatty and good natured. I’m looking forward to flatting with them, actually. I’ve yet to meet the other flatmate, whose room is between mine and KyungNam’s, but according to the other two he’s fairly anti-social. I guess I’ll run into him at some point. After that I unpacked most of my stuff, set up the bed, all that jazz. I’m pretty well set up now, only a few things left to unpack/shelve, which I’m sure I’ll get around to doing as I need them.

Big news: I got a cool scholarship! I got a New Zealand Undergraduate Study Abroad Award, which is worth NZ$5000! Wohoo! This was a scholarship that I applied to ages ago, but didn’t really think that I would get because it has ‘target countries’ (of which the USA was not one this year) that 75% of the money in the fund goes towards, so I was immediately on the back foot. Who cares, I got it anyway! That will certainly help with my fees for this year, although I’m still going to apply for a bunch of other ones to help me out with the cost of going to the US and all that jazz… ‘tis expensive here.

After that momentous news, I stayed up for a little while doing readings, then crashed.