Things are getting busy—I turned into a social butterfly over the weekend, although I must say by the end of the whirl I wished I’d stayed in the cocoon. It was lovely to see everyone, but it was overwhelming—and everyone I know here is so new, that I don’t have the reassuring silences with them yet that I have with people from home.

First of all: the parties. Friday night was a Kennedy Orphans housewarming, for Fergus, Alex and Dave. This has since become known as the FAD event. They’re all in the government studies/international studies/security studies end of the spectrum, so I expect life gets a little acronym-heavy for them. The highlight was talking to a second year student in security studies for about half an hour about the illegal breakaway state Transnistria, a wedge of land between Moldova and the Ukraine with a population of half a million people. He didn’t believe Inga and I—didn’t even believe that it existed. I told him he should look it up, especially if he’s in the security business, as it’s believed to be a big black market for former Soviet weaponry and nuclear matter. Eventually he got out his laptop to look it up. We all sat and looked at the Transnistrian website.

Saturday was English department grad students meeting for drinks—I was there from 7 til close to midnight. I heard that some went on to 3 or 4 in the morning. Meeting more of the people I’ll be studying with, getting to know them a little bit more.

Sunday night Inga had her housewarming party—another Kennedy Orphans affair. It was also a belated celebration of Moldovan independence day, which was the previous Monday, August 27. There was much hilarity surrounding Onur’s assertion that he needed to buy waterproof candles.

Yesterday was the English Department barbeque, for grad students and staff. This is apparently now an annual event at the head of department’s house in Virginia. There must have been at least fifty people there, and it was probably the one gathering at which it seemed completely normal that my trapeze lessons would lead me to a desire to write about the circuses in Dickens’s novels.

In between all of these events it’s basically been sleep and study—other than an excursion to Ikea to pick up my last piece of furniture: a chest of drawers. As with all the Malm range, it was on the complicated side to construct, so Aga, who thinks that other than her love of wearing dresses should have been born a boy, came to assist with her many handyman skills. She was good at the logistics of it, but doesn’t much like using a hammer, so I still got to have the fun of putting the 29 nails into the back of the thing. (Sadly, I bent the 30th nail.) Now that that’s done, I’m keen to settle into a routine of work. Once each class has met a few times I’ll really be able to gauge the workload, and from there I’ll be able to plan to do other things—get out of DC, see more sights, appreciate this whole living-in-the-States lark. At least I’m settled, which has taken less than a month. I’m happy with that.