The clock reads 8.30 AM, and the room is filled with the jarring noise of the alarm. In the following few minutes, I am supposed to wake up, hit the snooze, steal a few more minutes of sleep, and then finally surrender to my daily schedule. IF I was asleep in the first place, that is.
I flick off the alarm, while hastily typing, trying to piece together something that makes sense, atleast grammatically if nothing more. I had been awake for the last 40 hrs, and still my status with the RFIC assignment read - "Almost Done", as it did a couple of hours ago. Everything in the room, including yours truly, was in a total disarray, and a brief look at my table would possibly reveal almost all my belongings, from utensils, clothes to even spent batteries, and apple peals. Talk about sustainability.
For starters, a typical morning at Roland Holstlaan 235.
While the rest of the day went past like a blur, with the "glorious" submission, 2 hours of glazed expression, while words about monolithic transformers whizzed past, the noteworthy moment of the day arrived when I entered the Advanced Device Physics class, and was handed a questionnaire with hundreds of boxes to be tick-marked, and carrying the ever-alluring text "win 5 ipods" in bold. Well, who can say no to that!
While the questions were mostly pertaining to the university, like the ones we ask our friends during times of self-consiousness, some of them managed to stir up quite a few emotions. Where on one hand, the academics-related queries were belted away confidently, the ones concerning the opposite sex, to a mild embarassment, were all marked No.
But the question that remained at the back of my mind, the one I took the most time to answer, was after six months in this rain-infested country, if I'd rather be back home.
The train of thought was brought to an immediate halt before it could leave by the professor, who pressed us to finish the 104-question formality, and get on with the exercises. But when faced with doping concentrations and space-charge regions, human mind begs to differ.
Six months, since the agents of change swooped down, and everything became different. Here I was, as I had wished, like a free bird. A bird bogged down with assignment deadlines, dirty dishes, questionnaires with false promises of ipods and rain. cluck cluck cluck
By this time, I'm on my cycle, moving at a sluggish pace towards my room. Around me, people are returning from work, heading back home to be with their families and companions, while a littered yet empty room waited for me. A sobering thought.
Those about to shed a tear for me, don't.
Normally I have something up my sleeve to give every post a happy ending, but this time I don't. But this doesn't mean I am packing my bags and looking for flight deals on the internet. I have had my highs and lows here. I guess there are days when everything looks so grey that its difficult to spot the silver lining (a common complaint in the Netherlands). All you can do is let the agents of change do their work, and hope you get a fair deal in the end.
By the way, I marked the option No.
