これは日本語のクラスのブログ・エントリではなくて、普通のエントリである。
Music: Haiducii - Dragostea Din Tei
Book: Lao-zi - Tao Te Ching
So for those who may be reading this with limited Japanese capabilities, everything's going fine at Columbia. I've been living in campus housing for about a month now (where does the time go?) and I've got an amazing-sized room. Like amazing. It's huge. I have a mock-fireplace in my room! That and it's only about seven blocks from campus, so for the time being, I can walk back and forth fairly easily.
Classes are good. I'm taking more Japanese (which the non-English parts of this blog are a partial requirement of), and three other culture courses: "Japanese Religious Traditions," "The Cultural History of Japanese Cartography," and "The Major Works of Chinese Philosophy, Religion, and Literature." They're all pretty interesting and I've gotten to meet a variety of students and teachers because of them.
Work is also interesting. I landed a pretty good job in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which is working out very well. It's hectic and a lot of on-my-feet work, but it's nice. It's a lot of packing and unpacking manuscripts (that come in from or get sent to offsite storage), shelving, unshelving, and reshelving books and manuscripts, and also filling photocopy orders of manuscripts for patrons. It's not quite as interesting as people think from the title, but there's possible mobility in the future, so we'll see where that takes me, especially if I end up here over the summer.
Sadly, I haven't really been exploring the city much. I know the area around school pretty well. I've been venturing around Riverside Park with my Czech friend, Petr, so we've figured that area out pretty well. I'm trying not to explore too much right now since it could easily become a distraction from academics, but I aim to see Saw IV the weekend after Halloween, so we're going to have to find a movie theatre somewhere.
So, if you're reading this with limited or no command to Japanese, just comment to let me know you're still with me. Have a good one, and let me know what you want to hear about next.
