Diamond in the rough. The town is beautiful. They call Jersey the garden state but I’ve never seen a town as green as Ann Arbor; “more trees than people” a cabbie told me. This may be a reason for the inordinately large squirrels on campus. I was looking out of a window on the second floor and saw one hopping along the ground and the thing was so big even from a distance that it totally skewed my perspective.
Bold little buggers too. I was walking down a sidewalk and saw a squirrel going to town on an acorn or something right in the middle of the path. As I walked up to him he looked up at me but the cheeky tyke didn’t budge. After a brief stare-off I just walked around the guy.
^actual picture taken during stare-off
(image from cybersalt.org/cybersalt communications)
Getting back to Ann Arbor though: the town is compact and very easy to get around without car (further validating my decision of trading my car for food money before moving here). U-M students can ride the local buses, which have a great coverage footprint, for free. And though the campus is vast, it is easily traversable via frequently running U-M shuttles.
From what I’ve seen and heard so far there are lots of good restaurants and bars in and around downtown and central campus. Nightlife has been great even though it’s the low-gear summer season in a university-centric town.
And the atmosphere in graduate student housing (north campus) is serene and very conducive to studying, which is what I’m here to do.
The summer course began July 11. We have classes Monday thru Saturday until late August. All topics from accounting to probability to C++ are covered in modular format. The intent of the mandatory summer course is to bring the entire class to about the same level as far as certain fundamentals go, as well as to clean out the cobwebs and refresh particular topics. Will expatiate upon the summer course after I get through it a little more. Arrivederci.
