Classes – Wednesday – Day 48
September 10, 2012
Class began today at 10AM and after grabbing today’s issue of the Daily Pennsylvanian (the student run newspaper) I ambled off to the engineering building.
My first class was CIS-121, basic algorithms and data structures using the Sedgewick textbook. Most of the hour was spent on administrative affairs with the lecturer going briefly into a history of algorithms for finding ‘highest common divisors’, from the simple and slow methods all the way to the recursive algorithm found by the Greek mathematician Euclid.
That finished all my officially enrolled classes for the day but, after checking out what was available, I found another two to keep me occupied in the afternoon. After a quick lunch at the Hillel (where I met plenty more people again), it was off to ‘Ruby on Rails’, a class worth half credit, covering the design and implementation of web applications. The class had a maximum allowed size of twenty people, however more than thirty packed into the room. The course got down to business straight away with a ‘Hello Lolcat’ exercise being posted for homework.
My final surprise class for the afternoon was Elementary Russian with a lovely old Russian lady by the name of Ludmilla. The class was incredibly unstructured and my classmates weren’t exactly thrilling however, I quite enjoyed it and got started learning the Russian alphabet and pronouncing all the new sounds.
That evening was our first TRAC (The Rodin Arts Collective) Music Floor Meeting. Anil and I met with all the residents from our floor and our RA (Residential Advisor) Will, to discuss the upcoming year in music and, to get to know each other a little. Following that it was up to the glorious Rodin rooftop lounge wherein an unmatched view of the Philly skyline could be seen (photos to come later). There we met the members of the other residential programs and socialized for a time. For those of you who may be a little confused, a residential program is a floor of the dormitory buildings dedicated to helping students engage with an area of interest and fostering community learning about a specific area through house funded events. In my case I’m on the musical engagement floor which features a resident musician, composer and music historian living on our floor, alongside visits to various musical events and institutions. The rooftop meeting was replete with delicious desserts sponsored by Rodin, provided by Penn Hillel and, was mainly an event to introduce us to each other and to the schedule for the next year.
Following the meeting it was back to the room with Anil to watch an episode of Breaking Bad and then to a short nights sleep.
Sunday/Monday – Day 25/26
August 15, 2012
Today was spent again with friends. In the morning I walked again in the Jerusalem sun with Yumi, an Israeli girl who had been volunteering in education in Australia for the past year. Though she herself is a Jerusalemite, I still managed to surprise her with an ice-cream shop I knew for it’s authentic italian style and delicious flavours (Noya).
In the afternoon it was already back to Tel Aviv to spend the afternoon with my brother Adi. As a goodbye we decided to go out for dinner and a movie. Dinner was at ‘La Lasagne’ a kosher Italian place on Dizengof street that came highly recommended, followed by ‘Brave’ at the Rav Chen cinemas.
Prior to the commencement of the movie, there was a traditional Pixar short, this time in 3D! It was titled ‘La Luna’ and was one of the most wonderful and sweet pieces of film that I have seen in a long time. It was almost worth seeing the movie just for that.
Brave itself was a traditional Disney/Pixar film, and though there was nothing particularly special about it, there were enough moments to make you smile in delight. All but stiff curmudgeons and those of hard heart would be sure to enjoy it.
After the movie, we talked late into the night before finally, sleep took us.