Yes, I have a long list. But no, I'm not going to expose all of them to you here. That would be too much for you.Well, today is already my third day in this beautiful campus. I did not settle down quite well when I just arrived on the past weekend. The place I am staying is pretty run down. Usually I am quite an easy-going when it comes to living style and stuff, but this one is really bad. The house, the bedroom and the common bathroom do not have any locks. This really freaks me out because I really dislike the thought when I am sleeping or doing any business and all of a sudden someone opens the door. I need my privacy. Plus the bathroom is really dirty since it is shared by many people in the house. But given that it is tough to find a place to stay for just a month or so, I was only given two options, take this room or move to stay with my coworker, who would kindly let me slumber his bedroom while he would move to the living room. I decided to just adapt to the environment and stayed in the rented room.
Next big fear of mine is I have no sense of direction. Yes, this is not news to you anymore. One would really ask how did I survive for the past 10 years after leaving my home country and floating around different continents. Lucky is the only thing I can really think of. Those places that I had stayed or have been staying apparently have really good public transportation system. Hence I just needed to work out which bus or subway or even train to take to get to my destination. However almost everyone drives or bikes here. The campus is really huge and it would be pretty exhausting to walk from one end to the other. And I am staying off campus thus it makes my travel to work more tricky.
I got dropped off to work and got picked up on the first day of my work. But I had to be on my own since yesterday. One of my coworkers kindly lent me her bike. But that is not going to help much since I have not been on a bike for close to 15 years. It takes some time for me to fiddle around. So here comes my other fear. How am I going to work each day? I took out the map that I was given. Studied at it. And I told myself. All right, tomorrow I am just going to walk from here to the lab located in the North end of the campus where the university hospital is. It may take longer time but it is good chance for me to explore the campus a bit. Even if I am lost, I can just ask the people and better still I will discover more new things when I am lost. With that courage, I leisurely checked out the new walking route. It took me 45 minutes to get to the lab. When I walked to the lab, I heard coworker A (the one who was offering his apartment to me) talking on the phone to coworker B (who is working off campus), "Oh here she is. She did not get lost."
Today, I left the house an hour earlier to get here before 9am. And I made it. This time it took me 5 minutes less. My next target is trying to conquer my fear on biking on the road. I was told the biking lane next to the car lane is rather safe. But I still have this fear psychologically that I really need to conquer. If not I may also want to try to find other short cuts to walk to work or check out the campus shuttle bus.
When I was walking and enjoying the view of the campus this morning, I began to really appreciate the opportunity given to gain some new experience here. It is not about experience of being productive at work. It is more of an experience for me to look at my fears, deal with them and learn from them. I would always try to get away from those fears because there was no such opportunity for me to look and face them. But this time it is different. On top of that, it is more of a challenge for me during this stay here since I do need to adapt to the environment within a short time while juggling with a heavy workload of my schedule here. This is something different from my past stopovers at other places since my stays were generally longer and I could just focus and tackle one thing at a time.
As much as I do not like to expose myself to all these fears, I am beginning to enjoy acknowledging them and deal with them. They aren't that bad after all. I just need some time and confidence.
PS: more interesting observations and thoughts from my stay here later.
♥ every page of my imagination
