Saturday
Everything went as planned on Saturday. I slept in until 2 and didn't go outside at all. I did however spend most of the afternoon looking at my class syllabi and materials. Some of them are pretty intimidating. Randomness in Computer Science is a class I decided to take last minute after I discovered that Data Mining was in conflict with another class I was taking. Like most of my other classes, it is master's level, so that is a challenge in and of itself. The teacher stated on the course page that "we will not repeat basic probability in class." So I've been spending a lot of time reveiwing the undergraduate course on Mathematics for Computer Science at MIT and reading the book for the class. I'm a bit worried, and I wish I had my notes from the Statistics class I took at CofC. But, we'll se how it goes. All of my other classes look pretty intensive, but contain a lot of material that I've been wanting to learn about. I'm pretty excited. For those that are interested I'll post links to my course pages. The only one that doesn't have a course page is Cryptology I, so I'm not sure what to expect for that class.The rest of Saturday I worked on some javascript and just relaxed. I was bored for a while but it was nice to not have to walk around in the snow.
Sunday
It was positively warm out today, it was the high 30s and the sun was out. This resulted in most of the snow around town melting, which is quite a sight for me. I was starting to forget that grass existed. Of course, this also caused a lot of the snow to melt off of the sidewalks and roads, but the ice remained. So walking around town was slightly treacherous.
This morning I met up with the Head of the Computer Science Department, Dr. Starr. It was nice to see a familiar face from Charleston. We chatted for a few minutes until his colleague from another school and an alumni from this colleague's school showed up. The alumni, Jesse, was living and teaching in Tartu. One of the girls from CofC was also with us, as she knew both Jesse and myself. We all went to a French cafe for brunch. Everyone ordered crepes but I just got coffee, as I wasn't that hungry. After this Jesse took us all on a small tour of Tartu. It was nice to discover smaller tidbits about the city, as opposed to a general overview like I got from the orientation tour. We walked around for roughly an hour and 15 minutes, but conversation was interesting and I had a great time.
After the tour they went to a restraunt called Werner Cafe and got cake. I left them at this point to meet up with Ariail and Sarah, two of the girls from CofC. We all went to the Kaubamaja mall to get school supplies and photos for IDs. It was slightly frustrating, as notebooks here seem to favor graph paper over lined paper. But obviously something I'll have to adapt to. I managed to get 5 notebooks, pencils, a highlighter and sticky notes for under 16 euros. Quite a deal if you ask me. We also stopped in a store to purchase some more towels; while the selection here was more expensive the towels were of vastly superior quality, so I may have splurged a bit to get a nice large, fluffy towel.
Once we finished our shopping we were all a bit hungry, so we ended up stopping at Werner Cafe and ordering cake. It was quite delicious and we all enjoyed our food.
At this point I am in my dorm anticipating the start of classes tomorrow. I'm not sure how different the teaching styles will be to what I'm used to (I'm thinking the difference will be huge, but who knows) but I'm sure I'll adapt well enough. Mostly I'm excited to start learning again, school is easily one of my favorite things and I'm generally bored if I'm not in class or learning on my own. So I'll be glad to get back into the swing of things. Unfortunately, (or perhaps fortunately) my class on monday does not start until 4pm, so I suppose I'll be sleeping in a bit!
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