So here's the update on the actual reason I'm here - school (although some may think differently!)

I finally got all of my marks back from my January exams. I passed all my courses, which is all that shows up on my transcript at home, but I got above average marks, which was some comfort after finding out that those "above average" marks were between 56 and 68! I think my Dad's voice is still ringing in my ears from when I told them the marks and he was like "FIFTY-SIX?!!! FIFTY-SIX?!!!"...haha. But the class average for the 56 class was 52 so it's all good - and you don't fail over here unless you have less than 40. And a 70 is a 1st (like an A) and is really hard to get, so I'm happy. Like I said, all I had to do was pass, but it's not in me to not try to do well.

I had some problems at the beginning of term, because I had to find an extra class to pick up to fill up my timetable, and then I ended up dropping 2 classes because the first one conflicted too much, and the second one probably wouldn't have gotten me any credit back home. So, by the second week of classes I finally had it all sorted. So, I am now taking Biochemistry: Macromolecular Structure and Function, Chemotherapy, Applied Biology and Agriculture, Cancer Biology and Human Genome Project. Applied Biology and Agriculture was the final course that I signed up for. I was so happy about it because the timetable online said it was only one hour a week - Wednesdays at 12 - so I was like, SWEETNESS! So I started going to the classes, and then the week before I left for Italy - that would be the second class I'd been to - our professor said "In yesterday's class, yadda yadda yadda....". Now, at Mac it was common for a prof to refer to "yesterday's class" as being the previous class, even if it wasn't from the day before, so at first I thought nothing of it...but then the prof was talking about something that I didn't remember him mentioning before. So, I went home and checked the module handbook...to find that the handbook said we not only had class on Wednesday, but on Monday and Tuesday as well. So the online timetable kind of screwed me over because I had missed 10 classes before even realizing it. I thought I'd only missed 2 classes from the first two weeks before I registered for the course. And then to make things even more fun, we were reminded that class of the midterm we had in class the following week - the week I was in Italy. So basically I went to my module manager's office right after the class and explained how I had this huge problem and that I wouldn't be able to write the midterm next week cuz I was at the Olympics and stuff. But yeah, he was really nice about it...told me the alternate writing date and then talked to me about Canada and the Olympics and stuff. And with my Biochem prof, I also mentioned to him that I wouldn't be in my lab that week cuz I was going away and he was all excited for me and he said I didn't even have to bother filling out the usual paperwork! I wish missing assessments were that easy at Mac!
I ended up writing my Agriculture midterm last week. It was multiple choice, but different from ours. We still had to fill in the pencil-computer sheet thingies, but where at home we just fill in a, b, or c, etc., they have a row for every question, but then within that row there are columns for a to e, and then every column has a spot for "true", "false", or "don't know". So essentially, every "multiple choice" question is made up of 5 true/false questions. But the catch is that if you get it wrong, you get minus one mark instead of just not getting the mark. If you choose "don't know" then you just don't get the mark. They're sneaky here.