Two days and the University

Well, I've been to work two official days now, and I have an ID card, a parking sticker, will soon have an IRD number (like SSN), and great tea privileges. Everyone has been very friendly and helpful, actually to such an extent that it was quite hard to get any work done the first day for the people coming by and chatting, and taking me down to the staff tea room. The tea room is an excellent convention--it is for the whole building, which is large and contains all of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences--in other words, all sorts of departments. It is a medium-sized room with tables for eating lunch, as well as chairs in a couple of circles where several gather at about 10:30 and 3:30 for tea. There is free tea, coffee, hot chocolate, etc, for faculty, staff, and Ph.D. students. There are snacks for purchase. I was introduced to people from sociology, Japanese, religion, "societies and cultures" (which actually includes sociology, anthropology, and some other stuff), and philosophy.

I have not yet have the entry card I need to get into the building early (before 7:30)--they've "organized" it for me, but also seemed quite surprised that I might want to come after (or before) hours. I take this as a good sign. I've been working on the syllabus (here known as outline) for my course (here known as paper) and trying to decide what kind of papers (here known as essays) to assign (god knows what that's known as here). As you can see, I am discovering a few more language issues. I spent quite a bit of time on the first day going through e-mails, since they gave me an e-mail address back in December, and have been sending me all the regular department announcements, including things like minutes from meetings. I was interested to look at the minutes from the department meetings, at least for the last few months, to see what issues came up. However, when I mentioned this to a couple of people during chat, I got some very quizzical looks. I realized later that I used the term "faculty meetings," and "faculty" refers to the whole school; apparently hardly anyone really goes to faculty meetings, and it would be quite odd to be interested in their minutes...the department faculty is the staff, and those are staff meetings.

It was a beautiful day between rain showers yesterday, and I walked up to the building where HR is, starting to get my bearings a bit. There is a small stand of redwoods just in front of my building, just to make my California heart at home. I will now see if any of the pictures I took do justice to it...