Eugene- bicycles, hippies, friendly people!

I officially moved to Eugene on Sunday, into a house that's about a 20 minute bike ride from campus. I bought an old cruiser style bike from a hippy so I'm all set to join the Eugene bike culture. There's tons of people riding around, and lots of bike lanes and bike paths, so the drivers are used to watching out for you.

My roommates are Margie, the lady who owns the house, and 2 other women who are also grad students. Haven't spent much time with them yet but they seem like nice people so I'm sure living together will work out fine.

I'm nearly mentally prepared to start school, this afternoon I went to the general orientation for all graduate students and to the bookstore to pick up the rest of my textbooks. It feels weird to be on a campus again and I keep saying UW instead of U of O but I'm sure I'll get used to it soon enough. Friday I have the first Folklore departmental meeting followed by a potluck at the park where the picture above was taken, so I'm looking forward to meeting everyone. Due to the magic of Facebook, I already found a new folklore grad student, and we went to orientation together today, so it's nice to already know someone. I'm hoping it won't be too hard to meet some cool people, I only have class twice a week but I'll check out some other stuff around campus.

Eugene is pretty small- while doing errands the past few days I've found that everywhere in Eugene is no more than a 10 minute drive away. If you go more than 15 you're lost. They have several beltline loopdy-loop highways which seems a bit overkill in such a small area, but at least its easy to navigate.

I rode my bike to orientation today and took a bit of a convoluted way to get there but it wasn't back. On my ride home I was debating which way to turn at an intersection when some other bikers came up behind me so I asked for directions, and one was going my way so I got to follow him, so friendly! And nice that bikes are so popular, this will probably help me from getting too twisted as I find my way around the bike paths.

I'm sitting on my back deck right now, gotta take advantage of it while the weather is still nice. Tucker, the younger of the 2 cats here is sitting beside me. I'll write more once school starts- I still have this idea that school isn't going to take up too much of my time, we'll see.