Manhattan LSAT Student Dispatch: Carnaval!
Carnaval!
So the past few weeks have already made for an incredible experience!
The first day here in Maastricht was awful, trekking around the city on foot with two
heavy bags. If I had kept on top of my email earlier, then perhaps I would have signed up
for the service that gets a student with a car to pick you up from the train station… but
alas, I didn’t see that e-mail until after the deadline! So Day One was a bit of a disaster,
as I tried to find where I needed to be, and my arms grew at least two inches longer! I suppose there are worse deadlines to miss, though – like the LSAT registration or withdrawal dates (hey, this is an LSAT blog, right?).
I’ve discovered this lovely phenomenon known as Carnaval. For those of you who don’t know, Carnaval is essentially an enormous party before Lent. In the south of Netherlands, Carnaval is a HUGE deal.
Classes were cancelled for a whole week, all of the shops were closed (except the pubs,
grocers, and liquor stores of course), and most interestingly, everyone dresses up and
wears costumes all week! The costumes were (almost all) ingenious, beautiful, intricate,
or witty, and in many cases all of the above! I didn’t know this ahead of time, but should you ever be over here for Carnaval, DO NOT wear nice clothes. You will be sloshing through beer in the streets! The suit I wore is STILL in the dry cleaners!
I’ve found the locals to be quite accommodating thus far. By the time you stumble through “Ik spreek geen Nederlands”
(I don’t speak Dutch), they’re already responding, “it’s fine, I speak English.”
I have to cycle about twenty minutes or so to get to the city center for school and friends,
I’m the farthest distance of my friends, but it isn’t so bad. The real problem is Missy.
Missy is my bicycle…and Missy…is something special. She looks fine at first, but everything is
mirrored to a regular bike and I think that the gear mechanism was beaten off with a
hammer at one point. Regardless, she gets from point A to point B, albeit an awful lot slower
than my bike at home, but she gets there!
I’ve made a few day trips to some of the nearby sites in Belgium and Germany (I’m very
near the tri-border – it’s a thing! //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-border_area). On the
train home from Belgium one afternoon I talked to a woman who graduated with a law
degree from a university in her home country of Romania. It’s fascinating to see the
similarities and differences in the education. The most obvious is that Law is a bachelor’s
degree in most of the world. Not having studied law yet (obviously) I couldn’t speak to
exactly what law school in the states is like, but it seems that in Romania at least, law
students must learn Latin and Greek, it’s much more focused on the classics and the
origin of laws, and on specific legal codes than on “thinking like a lawyer.”
It’s going to be bloody hard to buckle down and work on my LSAT preparation now that
I’m settled in, but again, I’m quite looking forward to it. I’m going to have to get better at
budgeting my time, so if any of you have any tips or tools for a chaotically minded
Spontaneousaur who’s trying to become more of a planner, let me know!
St. John is an American student studying abroad in Maastricht, Netherlands. He will be preparing for (and taking) the LSAT abroad.