My first day

As you probably saw from Grace's post, today was my first day of school. We did not have an official class today (this will happen on Monday) but we had the chance to meet most of our teachers and see the school and the room we will be working in for the year. Everything was very exciting.

There are ten of us in total: 1 American, 2 Swiss, 3 Italian, 1 Columbian, 1 Brazilian, 1 Austrian, and myself, the only Canadian.

We got a first draft of our schedule today as well. For the first semester we will have an assortment of regular weekly classes, sporadic lectures by guests, and a selection of classes that run for only a portion of the semester, or else bleed into the second.

On Mondays we will take a programming class with Just Van Rossum, one half of Letterror. For those of you that know this studio, you can imagine how excited I am. Thursday's will be an entire day of calligraphy, with Erik Van Blokland (the other half of Letterror) teaching calligraphy with the pointed pen in the morning and Peter Verhuel teaching calligraphy with the broad nib pen in the afternoon. I won't say too much as to the distinction between these two except that the former produces letters much like Bodoni or Didot and the latter produces letters like Garamond. I am confident that after a few 8 hour sessions I will not be so enthusiastic. There is also more calligraphy on Friday if we want to join the undergrads.

A big surprise was how much we will be traveling to attend classes, which are often outside of the school and sometimes outside of the city. We will have a weekly class with Gerard Unger which will take place at Leiden University every second week and the library in the Hague on the weeks in between. We also have a sporadic class that will take place in Delft at one of our teachers' studios. Other places we visit for our regular classes are Rotterdam and Amsterdam.

This is one aspect of going to school in such a small and densely populated place that is very different than what I am used to. In Canada, you would have to travel hours to get to the next city/town. In Holland, it takes a mere 2.5 hours by car to travel from one end of the country to the next.

There will also be excursions to the Plantin-Moretus museum in Antwerp (Belgium) where we will have a guided tour through the museums archives that aren't usually available for public viewing. Part of their collection houses the original Garamond punches that form the basis of a good amount of the digital type we have today. Lastly, we will be spending a week in Berlin in the Spring to travel to studios and attend the yearly TypoBerlin conference.

You know it'll be a good year when, after a casual orientation, the program director brings out a case of 24 beers and the next two hours is spent drinking with your new professors.

That being said, it looks like the year will be a lot of hard work, and I am both eager and excited.