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This school does not know how to handle exchange students.  Today I had my first practical for zoology. When I registered for this class, I explained to the professor that I am an exchange student just here for 5 months. He said I should be fine and would not have to do the big year-long project since I would only be here half a year. He failed to tell me that there were required materials for the weekly practicals. We had a zoo lecture earlier today, and he reminded the class to bring their lab coats and dissection kits to the lab. “I don’t have a lab coat nor a dissection kit” I thought to myself. After class Sarah and I went to ask him what we were supposed to do about our lack of materials. He said we would get it sorted out at the practical.  When asked if we needed anything else, he responded with “a writing utensil and some paper.” Seemed simple enough, both of those were in my bag already. Welp, I was wrong.  We show up to practical and were able to buy the dissection kits and borrow lab coats. We picked up the procedure and started dissecting our frogs. (The rest of the class had already done this in zoology 1 and zoology 2. I hadn’t done this since sophomore year of high school, so I was a little rusty as were Sarah and Boone.) The TA gets to us and looks at Boone’s drawing and says “You aren’t planning on turning that in are you?” No one told us that it needed to be done in pencil, on unlined paper, and that we needed to use a ruler to underline everything. It was very frustrating as it seemed every 5 minutes some new rule popped up that we weren’t aware of.  The TAs thought we were dumb or something and asked if we had ever dissected a frog before. We kindly told them that it had been about 5 years since our high school dissection classes and that in our labs at our home universities we isolate DNA and transform strains of yeast so that they are no longer mutants. That kinda shut them up.  The practical is definitely gonna be the most difficult/stressful thing I will do class-wise when I’m here, but it should get easier once I get into the routine.

Well that was it for my mini rant, but stop reading now if you get easily queasy.

So anyway the physical dissection itself was fine. I am a nerd in that I love dissecting things and looking at how everything is so interconnected. What was different about today’s frog dissection? THE HEART WAS STILL BEATING. The ENTIRE time I was dissecting it.  That actually made me feel very uncomfortable because I felt like I was actively causing this poor frog pain as I cut out its ovary and moved its stomach around.  I have to say though, it was fascinating watching the heart beat. Nerdy? Totally. Creepy? Probably. Ashamed? Not at all. 

On a completely unrelated note, I realized I never told ya'll about how I get into my dorm and get my food. DIGITAL FINGERPRINT TECHNOLOGY. I place my right finger on this little glass pad, it lights up red to scan, then flashes green once it's verified and bam, the door unlocks.  Ya, it's pretty badass.