School

We had a trial-by-fire introduction to the way business at Trinity is done right from the beginning when we had to register as students at the university and register for classes all on the first official day of lectures. They sent us back and forth across the city just getting our documents approved to be real students. In order to sign up for classes, you have to walk to each department, look at their bulletin board, find a class that looks cool, and then manually scribble down the timetable for it with a quill-pen and inkpot. Once you've done this for every department you're interested in (in my case, English, Irish, History, and Linguistics), you can start going to each department secretary and asking them what to do. They then refer you to the department visiting students coordinator, who usually gives you more papers to sign, tells you you can't take some courses, and then sends you back to the secretary. You have one master document that your courses must go on, and you leave it with that department over night so they can track down the department head so he or she can sign it. That means that for four departments you need at minimum four days for your forms. Also, they only do business between 10am and noon, and between 2pm and 4pm. If you come during lunch, they will tell you to piss off. After all that is signed, you have to take it to the international office and have them approve it. As you can see this is all a big circus of malarkey and nonsense. The guy in the Linguistics department in particular was an ass to me. I didn't have the heart to tell him that where I come from, a computer does his job.

I've been to at least a lecture for all the classes I'm taking so far. My linguistics class is an M.Phil (masters) class on semantics taught by a British Middle-Eastern guy who seems really cool. All the people are older, but I've played that game before. My Old English class is bigger, but the teachers are cool. Ian McKellen is in the class. He must have decided to go back to school. Some poor soul in my tutorial for Old English had to ask for an explanation about direct objects and subjects and predicates. I turned her over to the police after class was over. My Irish language and literature course is basically taught by a couple of bards who weave tapestries out of legend and myth for an hour and then let us go. It doesn't suck. Finally, I have a history class with a really interesting professor on the historiography of the English in medieval Ireland. He's blatantly vitriolic about the British which is great. Our first class was us reading an article by another historian and him going through it line by line, making jokes about the scholarship and ridiculing the author.

Trinity is great as ever, it's like going to school at Hogwarts. The dining hall is lined with 20 feet tall paintings of famous college deans and various nobles. At our orientation, we were served wine. The priests from the chaplaincy recited all these Irish proverbs to welcome us and told us when we could join them for Eucharist and a complimentary glass of sherry. We haven't been back to the school pub yet but its a cool place.