orientation day 1.

I realize I'm still in the country and probably nothing exciting is going to happen in the middle of rural Indiana, but I figured I would get as many blog posts in before I get bored of this and give up completely.

So, we drove into Purdue yesterday from St. Louis and they gave me a room key and nothing else. My room is really nice, but feels kinda like a jail cell. It's in their super new towers and we all have single rooms with private bathrooms. They also provided us with towels and bedding, so it's really nice. The only thing is that everything is completely white, the floors are linoleum tiles or something, and I don't really have anything you would normally have in a college dorm. Otherwise, it is super nice. So I got some really not very good chinese food for dinner and then went for a run around campus. There's literally like no one here; it's a little bit creepy. The campus isn't as pretty and compact and cohesive as wash u, but purdue is a much bigger school and it's still a pretty nice campus. Then I came back and watched TV and talked with some people in the program. None of us really knew what was going on. Oh, and they didn't give us accounts to use the internet, so I didn't have internet for most of the night until michael helped out; which was very depressing since I felt pretty much cut off from the world and I didn't know anyone here. I'm easily intimidated if you didn't know that already.

So we had our first day of orientation today: 8am-5pm. It's held in the super nice BME building. Met some interesting people. pretty boring day, did fun ice breaker activities, very very briefly learned about ancient chinese history, put on a skit about ancient chinese thought; of course i was the pushover daoist, what else is new. oh, and most of the other kids are grad students and probably doing important research type things.

ha. sad story. so we did this activity where you draw china on a map and label some cities and name some important chinese people, and then we watched this video where some people did the same activity on wall street, but people were often horribly wrong and couldn't name like any people. but then i thought about it and i really don't think i would be able to name important people in like korea or japan, not to mention vietnam and like mongolia, probably not even in like france or spain. so, it was sorta funny and sad when the people in the video couldn't name anyone, but i think i would probably be in the exact same state if approached randomly on the street. sad life.

so it doesn't seem like there's much to do in purdue/west lafayette, but we're gonna look around later and find some food. hopefully.

tomorrow morning, bright and early, basic chinese lesson. i hope she lets me just bring my laptop and not pay attention in class. i really need to start working on my personal statement and a couple of other things, so hopefully tomorrow won't be a complete waste of time.


I apologize for leading a boring life.