Orientation and Blue Coat Ceremony

As the title suggests, our orientation and coating ceremony were yesterday. Being the always-early person that I am, I was still the first one to arrive despite being on time. I chatted with the security guard, whose shift finished at 8am. Apparently they always have a guard wakling around the building to watch over the students who have 24hr access to study and what-not. People started to trickle in around 8am, and I made my way over to the welcome table to find that I was not on the list - yikes! It got sorted out, though, and I filled out my forms, ate breakfast and met a few classmates. We were then summoned to the lecture hall ("B", which I think will be our permanent classroom while in school) where we heard a few brief speeches from Important People. After that we were split into groups for ice-breakers and I was pleasantly surprised how un-cheesy it was. After that we went on a tour of campus (saw the library, got our ID pictures taken) and the teaching hospital and then met up with our guests (my parents and Danny came) for lunch.

After lunch we had a couple more icebreakers and were released around 2:45pm. Danny picked me up and we came home where I decided a little too late that I wanted a nap, haha. I got a quick power-nap in, though, and then got up to dress myself for the coating ceremony that started at 6:30pm. We met up with my parents outside and went to our table that we shared with another incoming student, their guests, a faculty mentor and a staff mentor. We had some kind of garden salad followed by chicken with vegetables. The chicken had some sort of coating on it that I heard was spinach and feta or something - so good! We had a little piece of brownie with whipped cream and fruit topping for dessert.

During dessert, the coating actually started. We went up to the stage in groups of ten with our "presenter" (mine was Danny) and they said your name, your presenter's name and relation to you. Your presenter actually put your coat on, then you left the stage and had your picture taken right afterwards. The actual ceremony wasn't too long or speech-y, which was nice. Danny and I came home, sat on the deck for a while talking and then went to bed early.

He had to be up at 5:30am to meet my parents, who are taking him home. I did cry, of course, but I'm not panicked. He'll be back again in October for Canadian Thanksgiving, which seems like a long time but really isn't, especially when classes start up and I'm flooded with information!