- Welcome -: Ewha Exchange D2 - Welcoming ceremony | Housing orientation

Welcome back to another post about yet another busy day.
For our second day here at Ewha, we had the big welcoming ceremony!

I was dressed cute and comfortably for what was going to be an active day. And I'd spent time in the morning fixing my hair so it'd look nice and all but that was ruined by the rain.

You see, until today, the weather had been HOT HOT HOT with around 35°C every day. But today the weather gods decided that no, one can only have so much sunshine before it becomes unhealthy. And thus the weather gods blessed us with a month's worth of rain or so.

Of course most of us hadn't foreseen the weather gods' decision to soak us all so a lot of us were pretty wet when we arrived at the ECC hall where the orientation was to be held.
Look at the dude's shirt!

I used my green bag, as pictured above, to try to stay as dry as possible and while doing so, I discovered that it's rainproof. Neat!
The ECC building is super cool, by the way. It's built into the ground so we could see all the water piling up outside.

In the big hall outside, we lined up to turn in the paper that Joo helped me print yesterday. Afterwards we were handed Ewha bags with handbooks, folders, and other important papers.

The papers and orientation supplied us with information about campus, course registration, and alien registration. The paper with the bear in the upper left corner was a guide on how to open a bank account.

When the orientation began, we were greeted by Bongjin Kim (김봉진), the Vice President of International Affairs at Ewha Woman's University.

While he told us that we - of course - should study, we were also here to have fun! And it was important that we made sure to have fun!

As shown in the orientation schedule above, we also watched a video on sexual harassment; what qualifies as harassment and how to deal with it. This was the first time I had had to watch something like that.

Afterwards some of the PEACE buddies were introduced and they did little sketches (in English, Chinese, Japanese, French) while telling us about different events that would be arranged for us during our stay such as the upcoming movie night, ordering baseball jackets together, renting a club in Hongdae (홍대) etc.

They also talked shortly about part-time jobs. While I'd hoped to find a job during the semester, I might not be able to..

When it was time for lunch, we could all pick a sandwich and a juice before leaving the room. People just sat down on the floor randomly and I decided to follow the girls who had been behind and in front of me in the food queue.

The lunch break was pretty long so we had plenty of time to learn about each other, our countries, and our majors.

The girl in the middle here is Abbie from America. The boy is someone I waved over because he didn't seem to know anyone yet. He ended up being in my buddy group, which I'll talk about later.

The girl with the beautiful lavender hair is Marie from England and her Korean BUDDY to the right.

To my right is Tiia from Findland. These were the girls I got closest to that day.

We had a bit more of orientation and then it was off to see campus!

I was honestly still a bit confused after the tour but I'm sure I'll figure out what all the buildings are soon.
My buddy group returned to ECC and since we had a while before the next orientation (yes, that's right, another orientation), we sat down to get to know each other a little bit.

Here's our buddy group!

The girl in pink is our PEACE buddy 서윤 (Seoyoon), the girl in a beige shirt in front of me is actually my neighbor in the dorm, and the guy in white was the guy I waved over when we had lunch. I wonder if we'll get to do a lot of cool things together.

The second orientation, the Housing Orientation, was only for residents of the dorms. There are several dorms here so they decided to split us according to which building we are staying in.
Everything they said was in the Resident's Handbook, which we'd been given upon checking in yesterday.

At the end of the OT, we had to turn in these little cards to confirm that we really were there.

If you fail to show up to this, you get 3 demerit points. At 10 demerit points they evict you. Attendance is no joke at Ewha. Luckily it was over quickly.

Our building was the last to have the orientation (among our little friend group) so when we were done, my roommate Banu and I gathered with the other girls that I had lunch with + a few more to go out for dinner.

We ate at a nearby chicken place that Marie had been to a couple of days prior.

I was the only of us who could speak Korean but that didn't stop Marie, the girl with lavender hair, from trying. We all had a good laugh at her cute attempt to order food.