Having arrived safely in Manchester, I found my lodgings with little trouble. It’s in the Fallowfield area south of the university and the city centre. It’s a dirty old neighbourhood, a so-called “student ghetto”. The house I am to live in is also a dirty old place, but the people here are nice. Thomas, the german student whose room I’ll be living in from the first of february, has been really helpful and friendly, and even though I’ve only just met some of my other flatmates – Doug, Seth and Diane – they all seem like really easy-going people.
I spent most of yesterday registering for my courses. It was a bit tricky at first, since the University of Manchester recently merged with UMIST – the engineering and technology university of Manchester – and thus a lot of departments have been moving about and around, some being expanded, others ceasing to exist. A lot of people have been really confused by this. Especially since you have to register the courses both at the home department (in my case, Anthropology) and at the department of the course (which in my case were three different departments: Social Anthropology, Graduate School of Social Sciences and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. My quest to locate these departments weren’t helped by the fact that the university has two web pages, one old, and one new – and that some departments still update the old one, instead of the new one.
*sigh* – but in the end I heroically prevailed. I’ll go into more detail about the actual courses some other time.
