New Digs

Well, I managed to take some pictures of our swanky pad. Take a step inside Whitcomb 422...



As you can see, half my luggage weight was made of books. Books I have not yet read, books I read all the time, and lots of books that I frequently refer to for projects and English stuff.



This is my desk, and it is kind of messy right now, I'm still in the middle of organizing everything. My sister gave me that really jazzy desk lamp. You can see my laptop, and it's a very nice one. You DO NOT have to spend a ton of money to get a good one! Shop around and you can find some great deals. College expenses pile up fast and you don't want to have to dish out all of your money before you even get to campus. This one is brand new and I paid almost $500 less than the retail price. Have faith in eBay.



Our dressers are next to the closets. Mine is the messy one on the right.



We bunked the beds to make plenty of room. It's a really nice setup, but Wenhao really hates bunk beds, so we are going to try a non-bunk approach this weekend, and if it works we'll keep it that way. If not, bunks it is. Oh, mine is the sloppily-made top bunk (are you noticing a pattern here?)



This is our very swanky rug. Nice change from linoleum.



A view from the door. We have a nice big window. That's Wenhao's much tidier desk on the left. Note the fan! These really come in handy during the muggy Ohio summers....




This is the fantastic view of campus from our window!

Keeping to my One

Today was my first official day of classes at Hiram, and I must say that it was packed. I really should not be writing this blog with all of the stuff I have to do tonight, but I want to write it all down before it all ebbs away from me.

The day began, after a quick breakfast in Miller, with an 8:00 a.m. Intro to Literary Studies class. I was excited to see Brian, one of my high school friends, there with me. Lit was in Hinsdale today, but from now on classes will be in Bonney Castle, headquarters of the English Department. That is cool because it is just like a home and has a kitchen, and the professors stock it with warm drinks to help us early students wake up. Class was a hodge-podge of discussing our roles in the class and analyzing literature. Then we participated in a group activity where we drew objects from a bag (my group's was a framed cross-stitch of a small alley in Shambles York) and critically analyzed them before discussing our conclusions. Our homework for the class was to read a section of the text and take notes, and from those notes we will work together to construct our class syllabus.

Immediately after Lit I hopped on over to Frohring for my colloquium, Music in a Changing World. We received a syllabus, which very conveniently lists all of our assignments and tests for us. We were told that a mandatory part of the class is to participate in 2 meetings of the African Ensemble, the first of which was tonight. Extra credit is offered to those who participate in at least 9 of the 11 meetings throughout the semester. Then we were assigned quite a bit of homework: a reading from the textbook (both the introduction and the first chapter, roughly 68 pages), a chapter to read from a book that Prof. Dreisbach xeroxed for us, and the first draft of a 3-5 page essay!

Before classes started I viewed my Monday afternoons as a great break from classes, but after the flux of assignments I decided it would be best to spend some of that time working. So after lunch I decided to check out the library. This was the first time I've visited the library properly, exploring it a bit before picking a seat to work. The library is simply amazing. It is a beautiful building, and is much more spacious than I first predicted, judging by the outside. There are four floors, and each of them are packed with books, and the media collection is in the basement. The architecture of the building is simply wonderful and it can sometimes be hard to read in there without letting my mind wander, tracing the curves of the beams and ceiling. One of my favorite rooms is a large, round reading room with a few tables in the middle, computer stations lining the circumference, and international flags hanging from above. The ceiling opens to the second floor. If you visit the second floor, you will see a large, round bench that looks like a circular bar with plenty of room for books and materials, but in the center is the hole that looks into the reading room below.

Also, there are so many books there that I didn't think would have a spot in the library of a out-of-the-way village like Hiram. I found a very useful book that dissects and explains all of the radicals in Chinese characters, which will help me a bit with my Chinese. (I am not registered for a class, but Wenhao is teaching me Mandarin himself, and I'm teaching him German in return. Very quid pro quo.) I also found dozens of books in German, several of which are by an author that I have been interested in reading for over a year, Stefan Zweig. There were even a good handful of books about the Baconian Theory, one of my favorite conspiracy theories!

After the tour I worked at a table on my readings for a couple hours, but I did not finish. I took a break and hung out with some friends before eating dinner and running off to Frohring to catch the African Ensemble meeting for the evening. I was expecting the experience to be a bit awkward, but it was really one of the most enjoyable experiences I've had yet. Our instructor, Olu, was very funny and engaging. He really pumped some energy into our colloquium class! First we learned a few different types of ways to strike the drums. These drums are all hand played, which means that there are several ways to manipulate the sound with one's hand. After we learned the hits we practiced drumming in sync with each other, which we accomplished pretty quickly. Next we learned a very catchy rhythm and Olu was pleased with how quickly we caught on. We did a lot to mix up the music with different breaks, tempos, and patterns, and by the end we sounded really good. Olu had told us that the drumming could be very hypnotic, and he is right! I found that it is best to play without really thinking about what we are playing, but to feel it, to let the hands strike the rhythm that they knew. After a while, my hands, as well as many others' hands, began to get very sore. My palms were, and nearly still are, raw red, and the base of my right ring finger has that puffy sort of swollen feeling one gets after being stung by a bee. My hands ached with pain but my brain did not want to stop just yet. Then Olu had us stop and rest with our eyes closed as he tapped a quiet rhythm on his drum and spoke to us soothingly and had us repeat him, mantra-style. He likened college life to the drumming we just learned, that our hands keep looking for that first strong beat that will lead them into the rest of the patter before finding the One first beat again, repeating. He called this keeping to the One, and that we should keep to the One in life: to concentrate, and give our studies here at college our best effort. If we lag behind, keep to the One and speed back into the rhythm. As the pace of life changes, keep to the One and change tempo with it.

By the time we left we learned that we had accidentally been playing over half an hour longer than we were supposed to! We were doing so well that we just kept going and progressing to more difficult breaks. I left excited, and I cannot wait until the next meeting two weeks from now. My hands will have healed by then, but will they have healed for tomorrow morning's piano lesson?

Moving Day

Yesterday I finally moved into my dorm at Hiram! Dozens of cars lined the streets as students and parents unloaded luggage onto the lawns. Then began the actual moving. I happen to be on the fourth floor of Whitcomb, so that was some extra climbing for my dad and I. Because Wenhao could only bring so much stuff with him (2 suitcases' worth of luggage for the entire year!) it was up to me to bring some of the larger appliances that most roommates divide between each other. That was fun carrying up the stairs. It was quite a workout, and in typical Ohio humidity at that. Thankfully, my wonderful friend Mike, a classmate from high school who is also going to Hiram this year, offered to help carry the boxes, and it was all accomplished faster than I had expected.

Next came the truly fun part: unpacking and setting up the room. I had been looking forward to setting up my dorm for some time. We had got many neat and useful items at Bed Bath and Beyond (between our coupons and the coupons that our neighbors saved for us, we managed to cut down a lot of the dorm room expenses!). Upon first entering the room, my first thought was that it was too small. But really, it was just set up in a way that did not offer as much space. The beds were arranged in a way that made it difficult to move around, especially when we began putting all of the boxes in there. My dad and I studied the room for a minute to try to figure out the best way to lay it out. We decided it was best to bunk the beds. Our room is slightly different from other dorm rooms because it is in the corner of Whitcomb, and so the holes in our bedposts were a different size than the pegs that the RA gave us. My dad drove off to Garretsville to get some metal piping from the hardware store while I continued to unpack and move things around. The metal pegs worked nicely and the beds were very easy to bunk after that! I thought that Wenhao (who was not there at the time) would be very surprised to come back to the room and see it changed around so much. But there is so much more space now that he liked it.

Wenhao gave me a gift of a neat orangish-red bracelet and two scarlet hanging sort of charm decorations, traditional in China. I knew that gift-giving is a large part of Chinese culture, and researched it a great deal before coming to Hiram, learning of all sorts of gifts to avoid. Some of the customs are very interesting while others I thought were kind of odd. But I finally decided upon a book called The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck. It is very appropriate as it is written by an American woman who grew up in China. I wrapped the book in red paper, as that is supposed to be a very fortunate color to the Chinese, and wrote "friendship" in Chinese characters on the top (or, as best as I could, that is).

Soon after the welcoming ceremony (where one of the Deans made a much-appreciated joke about the required reading book) I met up with Wenhao for the first time. I had to say a quick goodbye to my parents before running off to my first Freshman Colloquium meeting, Music in a Changing World. I was surprised to find five students in my Colloquium that are from my area, three of them from Concord!

So moving in was pretty exciting, and I am sure that I will enjoy my years here at Hiram. Now, on to finish setting up the dorm...