We headed off to school at around 7:15 where I was introduced to the head of exchanges at MBA along with a few other administration staff who were very encouraging a welcome to Lachlan and I. We then proceeded to get the grand tour of the school, which left my neck sore after a solid 2 hours of gazing up at the vast buildings and structures that were scattered throughout the school grounds. I cannot even begin to describe with few words what the school looked like in person, mainly because you can't write about something that cannot be described with words.
In total there were 8 different buildings on site, along with 2 large artificial turf playing fields, that contains a football pitch surrounded by an athletics track, and a soccer field with an underground gymnasium and parking garage. The scale of the school was absolutely crazy and it never ended!
The five classes that I was scheduled to attend for the four weeks I'm attending MBA are:
- American History
- English
- Geometry
- Modern European History
- Studio Art
First class of the day was actually an assembly in an auditorium about three times the size of the one at school, during this time me and Lachlan were introduced to the whole school which wasn't in any way scary at all. I then recalled from the tour previously where my first class was American History. The class was only made up of 14 people, as I found out later the maximum class sizes at MBA were 16, which was reasonably good considering there were 750 boys in attendance. After a brief study period of 20 minutes I had my next class, Modern European History, which to be honest, covered the same things that American History did. Oh well, at least I was getting a good understanding of the topic.
Lunch finally arrived and I can't even begin to tell you how hungry and excited I was to dig into my first american college meal. There were so many things that were available to be eaten! First of all I decided to try out the hot selection for the day, wraps with chicken and a vast selection of salads. Now to the pizza bar, which had hot pizzas freshly made in a pizza oven on the school campus! I tried the classic cheese and tomato pizza which was amazing and waited it down with an iced tea, which was very, very sweet.
It's interesting the timetable that is used at MBA and I'm unsure as to if the schedule is used all over America but its split up into eight periods. These eight periods also include, lunch and two studs periods per day. So altogether five lessons (same as in NZ) were attended per day, but for some odd reason it felt like you were sitting through hours and hours of class per day. This was only my first day and I already struggling to deal with the first half of the school day. Maybe it was because of the jet lag because I'm pretty sure in last period (Studio Art) I fell asleep.
I was taken home by Joseph (my billet) as he had just got his license earlier in the day and stopped by at one of his "girlfriends" houses where we all talked for a bit about the similarities and differences in America and New Zealand. We later went home where we had a lovely gnocchi dish with some Italian sausages. I handed out a few gifts to Tonya and Joseph and just watched TV for some time (there are 2,100 channels on TV).
Later that night Tonya, Turner and I drove down to this Nike outlet mall where really cheap (well relatively cheap) Nike items were sold. After purchasing a $30 pair of shorts (they were like made of "fat pants" material) we headed home after a long first day being an exchange student at MBA. (Some photos of the school grounds)
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