Meetings, The Frozen Section & A Manly Name

So the school week has begun! Students have arrived in droves, dressed to the nines for their first day of school on Monday. Guys came in full suits even! I wore a dress as part of my deal to dress up if Chad would dress up, so we represented Amerika in style. I have been attending meeting after meeting and doing loads of work. See picture of my 'office' workplace at your convenience. The "welcome" sign was my idea. It was so boring the first few weeks and now I'm swamped. Already students are asking me for volunteer opportunities and I haven't even met with my "student team leaders" yet (that meeting is tomorrow). I also attended my first Lithuanian language class for staff & faculty and took part in repeating things like "Mano vardas Chelsea" (my name is...) with about half a dozen older staff members, who were struggling with the š & č characters, but we all pulled through just fine. I do have a small foundation in the language, so it has been review for me so far, but I know that I will be learning proper grammar and pronunciation, which will help in conversations. Our homework is to figure out our name in Lithuanian, and mine is: Čelsė Liuis - which technically makes me a man thanks to the 's' ending of my last name. If I were an unmarried Lithuanian girl and my father's name was Liuis, my last name would be Liuisūtė and my mother's name would be Liuisienė. Complicated, right? I totally love it though and hope to be able to hold a conversation longer than 2 minutes upon completion of this class.

Also exciting in my life - I've discovered the frozen section of the grocery store. I did not have a working freezer in my fridge last year as a study abroad, so I never bought frozen stuff unless I was going to eat it right away. Well, upon shopping this evening for dinner, my companions suggested frozen crab cakes to compliment our frozen veggies...and with those two items and a rice a roni Mom sent me, our dinner was surprisingly delicious. I stupidly refused the offer of someone doing the dishes in exchange for dinner, and so now I have a sink full of dishes 'soaking' that will ultimately need doing quite quickly as I only have two plates and two bowls total. I will probably put those on my list of things to get for my little apartment - along with my badly needed vacuum. We didn't have carpet in the dorm last year, and so now these rugs are filling up with colorful bits of whatever...

It's late...so I'll finish this with a promise to update more often and that I'll be posting more pictures soon. I plan on taking my camera with me to school and snapping some photos of random goodness, so look for those soon!