1st week of school

So I had my first week of classes. So far everything is going good. The funny part is that each class is divided into 45 minute lectures. Then a bell rings, yes like a high school bell, and you get a 5 minute break. If your class is 2 ects, their system of credit hours, then you stay for 2- 45 minute lectures, 3 ects you stay for 3- 45 minute lectures and so on. All classes are only once a week. First class I show up to is an 8 am class. We sit around for half an hour and the teacher never shows up. Awesome so I woke up early for no reason. Also most of the classes do not have exams, instead you write a paper at the end. This one guy wants the paper to be 10+ pages, okay cool no problem however he wants you to have 5 books refernenced twice, along with 12 other references from periodicals as and a couple of more from peer reviewed articles. I had 2 classes with this guy so I dropped one. Mind you this class is worth 1 credit hour back home. If you do have an exam, be prepared. There are no tests during the year, just one final. It feels like law school. Also they give you only 1 hour to take it. This should be fun.
I also want to punch the IT guys here in the face. Printing is an absolute nightmare. Normally in america they have a computer room with one of two printers. You hit print on your screen and it sends the work to the printer and then you go and pick it up. Not here. There is a computer room, okay so far so good, it has two printers, okay even better. However when you press print you have to select which room you want the document to print in, thats if you make it that far because all the directions are in German. Or swiss german which is a mashup of French, Italian and German. Seriously more people say Merci for thank you here than the german Danke. Anyway you select the room and then which printer. Now if I am in the computer room wouldn`t it make sense that if I hit print I would want the document to print in the same fucking room as the computer from which I have sent it from? Why would I send it to the upstairs printer or another printer all the way across the building. How about if I hit print you just print the fucking document like any other computer on earth. As you can see this really pisses me off. I tried to print twice but to no avail. Also you have to pay for your paper. Not much but if you want to put money on your student card to pay for it you cannot put anything less than 10 francs on it because the machine only accepts paper bills. 10 cents for black and white, 1 franc for color. You can probably guess which option I am going to use. Compounding this problem is the fact my laptop will not connect to the internet. So I will have to go and drop it off at the IT department which is open 1 hour a day.

All in all not bad, as you can see I am just getting adjusted to the new way of doing things. In about a month I will know how to do all this stuff in my sleep. All my teachers are nice and the workload is manageable. I am taking a course to learn how to speak German. Its 4 hours long however the teacher is good. He only speaks in German and is really helpful. My intercultural mangment class is fun and the others are not that bad either. Most of the international students are taking the same classes so it`s nice to see people you know in the classes. Off to play soccer with the guys from the dorm, I opted to play goalie. If there are a lot of spelling errors I am sorry but I am typing on a german keyboard and they are really weird. For instance the z and y keys are switched. Later