19 September 2010

Attack of the killer commute (a.k.a. my life so far)

Well, I'm about to start week five of graduate school. I'm enjoying it so far. Unfortunately, the commute is killing me. Each day I go to school, it takes me about three and a half hours all together. Needless to say, I'm hoping to find an apartment soon. The biggest problem I'm having is that most days I'm either too busy or too tired to apartment hunt.

I'm finding it much easier to meet people than during the beginning of my undergrad. There was a welcome event for my program on Friday. Afterward, a huge group of students and some faculty and staff went to a place called Guapo's. I had never been there before, but apparently that's the place that IPCR people hang out. Anyway, I had a good time talking with classmates.

Afterwards, I had a horrible drive to Arlington to go to a friend's birthday party. It's hardly a new criticism, but Washington is poorly designed. What should have taken me 15 minutes took about an hour because I kept missing turns and taking wrong turns. The signs in DC in particular should be done differently because they are so hard to see at night. They should be bigger, or there should be signs before the intersections, like in Baltimore.

Well, that's more or less my life so far. I'll probably have something more interesting to post later.