Holy Shit, Vancouver has Mountains!

I woke up at 7:15 am yesterday morning (in preparation for my first Tuesday with classes from 9:30am to 9:30 pm) and two wonderful things happened. First, I could breathe through my nose again! After a week of the flu and a couple days of intense sinus pain, this was a really big deal (as I tried to convince my somewhat startled roommate when I started enthusiastically wheezing at her -- "Nasal passages clearing. Acne...remains... But nasal passages clearing!")
Secondly, it was neither raining nor looking like it was going to rain, so after a week and a half here I finally got to see blue skies and the tops of the mountains. And they are glorious. I spent my whole bus ride staring at the mountains (dodging in and around confused commuters, bobbing and weaving as the mountains played hide-and-seek among the buildings) like some kind of lovestruck teenager. It was great.

The rest of the day was a blur of new courses (wow, graduate courses really do have more reading than undergraduate courses...), new people (I was overjoyed when, every so often, I would meet someone else who had forgotten my name just as I had forgotten theirs), and new ideas. I got home at 10:30 or so, and basically collapsed in bed. Now, in the morning of my first no-classes Wednesday I'm reconsidering my idealistic notion of being able to work part time while I study, doing laundry (I'm currently wearing pyjamas over my clothes because they were so deliciously warm when they came out of the dryer), and trying to organize all the masses of information I got yesterday.

Some highlights: My history professor is a woman from Oxford who wants us to study 'gobbets' of text and quite ably managed to have a discussion with her 100 students all at once; my Christian Thought and Culture course devoted a good 20 minutes to an explanation of the deliberate ambiguity in the title of the course (Christian thought and Christian culture, or Christian thought completing with/in opposition to culture?); the weekly chapel was led by a woman who laughed and said "you'll fit right in" when I confessed that I'm not terribly pious; and my evening 'Soul of Ministry' class taught by a hilariously sardonic full-time clinical psychologist who thinks it terribly important that before all us MDiv students go off to be ordained, we should spend a little while being assessed to figure out if we're actually psychologically fit to do such a difficult, ambiguous, and stressful job. And I tend to agree with him.

Finally, on a non-school not, if you haven't yet seen the movie Once and you like indie music of the emo-folk-guy variety, then you should definately see it.