Where is that sweep?

I'm about to meet my first chimney sweep (maybe: he/she has 27 minutes to make an appearance)! The tiny (think of two shoe boxes) open hearth is clean and waiting. I've made one fire so far, the other night. The fireplace is nearly too small for a fire. However, the chill rain keeps coming down, and the fire was lovely. Having never seen a fire, the cats were intrigued, but wisely kept their distance. I tried burning anything that would burn. The pruned tree bits must be too green and wouldn't catch fire. Normal-sized logs are nearly too big.

School: This term, we B-groupers are tossed in with the more advanced "in-streamers" and the MUCH more advanced second- and third-year students. I was dreading this, but it's helping a lot, hearing more advanced Dutch. The classes are very eclectic. Our "Culture & Society" Friday class had its first "excursion" last Friday and spent the day marching around very interesting historical things in Amsterdam, none of which I'd seen. I madly took notes, knowing I'd remember very little otherwise. We started with a low-key boat ride, but moved at a near sprint the rest of the day (at least it didn't rain). Subsequent trips will be to Utrecht (church center of the country), two trips to The Hague (governmental center), Leiden and Haarlem.

Historical Linguistics is fascinating, but hard. It's one thing to understand the course material in one's own language, but filtering the material through one's very limited vocabulary is hard.

Literature in Context is an odd course, and not at all what I expected. So far, it's reading the texts of lots of old (17th century) songs and hearing history lectures of the same time. There's no real literature.

Each course exists in a few different media, which keeps us running, too. Assignments come from the electronic "Blackboard", verbally and occasionally in our books, so we scramble to keep aware of everything that's expected of us. I doubt I'm alone in finding this too much energy expended on routine work. It does enable the faculty to put a lot of material in digital form, saving time and money all around. There also are quizzes on the Blackboard. Coincidentally, "Blackboard's" global headquarters is nearly across the street from my former office, in Washington, D.C.

My "Methods & Techniques" class is a preparation for writing our first small papers, and then in the third year, a thesis. Dutch citation rules (footnotes and bibliography) are a little different from those in the U.S. Also part of this course is training in the vast digital library, both of Leiden University, and also national libraries, all over Holland. Maybe all university libraries are as digital now, but it's dizzying to search for things here. It seems that all periodicals are published digitally as well as in paper. Leiden U's holdings are enormous and constantly growing. The library building itself is not huge, but must have additional storage.

Above nearly all (not counting the goodness of the people and all of the myriad amenities), what continues to impress me about this country is the superb organization of nearly everything. Money, time and intelligent thought have been applied to all aspects of life, and it makes things SO much easier. Superficially, it seems a country of overwhelming rules and regulations, but things WORK here. Things broken are fixed, crimes are solved, and the trains mostly run on time. I just wish they'd sort out the weather!