Day 7: Orientation day

Orientation daaaaay!

Today was the day of the big orientation and welcome speeches to all of us new students. We were supposed to meet up with Isabella and had bought travel-kimbap and flavored milk - also one for Isabella! - but we missed the meeting time and ended up having to look for her in the queue and inside the hall once we got in. But nope, Isabella was nowhere to be found.

All of us got a folder with various guide books and also our student ID cards! We were maybe 800-900 foreign students this year.

We discussed whether they had retouched our photos seeing as some of the girls behind us complained that their pictures looked different than the ones they submitted and mine had been brightened a bit.

The orientation was pretty useful. They actually told us more about life in Sinchon than studying at Yonsei, I feel.

One of my favorite slides was this one with a safety notice about where to stay away from if possible. A wild boar had been spotted some time ago near campus but not caught yet and also some wild dogs. Below the picture of the place with the dogs it said:

"Please do not try to molest them"

So please. Don't touch the wild dogs.

This red tube kept appearing in the pictures about where to go in Sinchon and by the end of the orientation, it had become a thing for the guy to point out in almost every picture.

Several different people held smaller presentations.

These two students from Yonsei Global wore hanboks for theirs. They looked wonderful.

They told us about good places to eat, bars that you could find other foreigners in, events in Sinchon, food we could find on campus, the most important buildings on campus, etc.

One of the last things mentioned was the Mentors Club that Iohan, our classmate, had sort of warned us about.

He told us he'd heard that some of the mentors were there for other reasons than mentoring - more like dating purposes.

Well, we decided to give it a chance and sign up for it. If things turn weird we can always just stop showing up.

There was a 1-hour break before another, additional Mentors Club orientation. We decided to stand outside and hope for Isabella to come out. Soon almost everyone had gotten out and Isabella was nowhere to be seen. We later got a message from her that she'd gone home because she was feeling unwell. She'd pretty much been sick since coming to Korea a few days before us.

Right after the second orientation, we split into groups and went to different restaurants to have dinner together. We shared table with a Dutch girl, two Americans, and two Chinese girls.

Once we'd all finished eating, we went straight to a bar called Bar Fly. While waiting outside for the rest of the group, we'd chit-chatted with one of the Korean mentors, Wonjun, before heading to the bar. At the bar we sat down at a table and continued our talk with him until he went home.

After that, we spent the night dancing as ugly as we could (okay we could probably do worse but it was still ugly).

We also made friends with another Yonsei student, 'Oscar,' who invited us to see his music performance later this month.

At one point a guy from Hong Kong started dancing a bit too close to me but both Celine and Oscar were ready to help. Celine pulled me aside, like friends do, and Oscar asked him to move along.

Thanks Oscar, that was nice of you!

(Also thank you, Celine)

It was a fun night. The 'cells' with mentors and exchange students have still not been made yet but I hope we get to group up with the kind of people we met that night.