Unidiversity

The EL-CID week, or introduction week, of university has started last Monday, a 2300 first year students queueing to get their wristband to be able to enjoy the week. Put into groups of about 15 first years, led by older years students, some who love to have fun, others who take their job a bit too serious and plan out the whole week and call you when you don't show up for a workshop flirting.

You would say, how did you find time to sit down and write this little story of your new found student life. Truth is, that walking around and trying to make every bit of information sink into your brain is exhausting. Around dinner everybody stops being able to move and the after dinner dip is a quite depressing one. There is just so much to see and do and to experience. For example, yesterday we were all about getting to know each other a little bit, as it is nice to know who you hand around with for the rest of the week. Visiting the church to listen to the the rector magnificus, then back on the street to visit sororities, who all believe they are the best, dinner at one of the sorotities, back to the church for the praeses debate. I decided to go home after that, didn't sleep all to much the night before (about 2).

Today it was breakfast at the NLS sorority, a christian one, had a little tour around the building too. After that the opening of Wet & Wild, where all water sport sorotities and clubs presented themselves, where afterwards was time to get to know them by sailing with the sailing club or canoeing with another club. Surprisingly enough, it has been sunny for the last two days and it is expected to be sunny until next week. Lunch was at a Thai restaurant where we just got a simple Italian sandwich, a very good one though and diner was at one of the student bars that have a terrace on the water. After that we decided to go to the most left oriented sorority that Leiden knows, Catena.

Catena is a sorority without a structure within in the club. There are no associations you can join that have certain rules and certain dresscodes, no initiation and nothing that makes it a typical sorority, except for the good parties. So we hung out with the guys from there, had a tour around the building, talked some more while chilling out on their 'grass'boat before we went to the Tarzan&Jane party. It is probably the most diverse, friendly and open sorority you can find in Leiden. It is one of the five biggest, but it is not about being part of a clique and not being allowed to hang around with others from outside your association. It is just about having fun and being openminded and drinking. They got some good choice of beers there, more so than the sorority that is praised for their beer. I might actually join them, even though I am about non-conformism, joining a sorority just helps you to get to know people, find friends with the same interests and having somewhere to go to when being alone or at home is just not the place you want to be. That and they offer lots of diverse activities to join throughout the year, they even have a dark room for when you want to learn photograph development, they also give LAN-parties and have a movie-night.

Today was also the day you got to meet up with other EL-CID'ers that are in your faculty and study. Apparently, Film & Literature is a very small and new one and this year only has 37 first year students. A small study, but I am completely fine with that, it is definitely a change from doing a study where there are about 600 other first year students. Tomorrow is sports day, I am not looking forward to that. They advice you to wear sport clothes, don't want to, makes me look fat, I keep those clothes to lazy home parties.

Talking about home parties, I will not be celebrating my birthday next week. I am awesomely lame like that, I just don't like to celebrate my birthday, it gets me depressed every time. I am not even kidding on that one, I do get depressed and cut myself because somehow I feel so angry and lost when it comes to ageing and not achieving anything. So yay for 364/5 unbirthdays a year