Moved-In

Hello my fellow freshmen! I just finished unpacking all my stuff yesterday and I stand by what I said my previous post: moving in is hard. But anyways, I am happy that I am finally settled in. Now I am just waiting for my classes to start so that I can get into a routine rather than just sitting around all day doing either nothing at all or anything i want. Here are some pictures of my room that I said I would post: http://drop.io/ucimelvin I dont know if I mentioned this already, but my room faces a road. This road is called the Middle Earth Service Road. Emphasis on SERVICE ROAD. Every morning, there are trash trucks, dump trucks, service trucks, cleaning trucks, toy trucks, and fire trucks. Name a type of truck and it will pass through that street. And it doesnt just quietly pass through. Oh no, heaven forbid passing through a road where people are sleeping in the building beside would be a very serious sin. No, these truck go up the road. Then they back up. And when trucks back up, there is always that annoying beeping. But these trucks are special. I cannot ever see the trucks going up or down the road but I hear them. I hear the sound of the engines going up the road for 10 minutes and the beeping of them going backwards for 10 minutes. Did I mention that this happens every morning?

Anyways, so I moved in on September 19th and 20th and my family is all gone now. On the first day of Welcome Week, I had to attend the mandatory New Student Convocation which was held in the Bren Events Center. I am guessing that there were about 2500 undergrads that were in that room. We found out that this year sets a record for the most applicants to UCI and the most applicants that were rejected from UCI. The entering class' average GPA is a 4.0 and the average SAT score was 1790. And UCI is the 10th top public university in america.  So yea. The convocation felt like a backwards graduation ceremony. The deans and chancellor and everyone else was all dressed up fancy and there was fancy music and fancy everything.

After that was the Dean's Welcome. I am in The Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science, and our Dean gave a very interesting welcome. Apparently it is her last year as dean here, which is too bad for me cause she is really nice and funny.

Following the welcome was the Anteater Club Fair which was held at Aldrich Park. Aldrich Park is a park if you cant tell by the name, and basically, the UCI campus surrounds that park. So I totally missed out on this event, cause I had to go to the International Center to sign in. Otherwise, I would have been kicked out of UCI. I felt like that was more important than looking at the clubs.

Oh as a side note, my friend here told me that the City of Irvine is named after the University of California, Irvine, which is in turn named after a company called The Irvine Company. So thats my fun fact of the whenever I want!

By the end of that day, I was extremely tired and had to miss out on my second event, the Late Night at the Anteater Recreation Center (ARC). I have a few pictures of the ARC but I took them at night and they turned out to be really blurry. And, you arent allowed to take photos once you are inside. But anyways, its just this gigantic building with 282 cardio and weight machines, 3 basketball courts, an elevated running track, 3 racquetball courts, a rock climbing wall, a pool, and other rooms. Oh and it also has a kitchen for kenny. and a classroom for...im not too sure why it has a classroom. So instead of visiting that place, I went to sleep.

The very next day, I was awoken by a blazingly loud fire alarm. If you thought that the HTS fire alarms were loud, well think again. The HTS alarms are like whispers compared to the ones here. I plugged my ears and still thought that I was going to go deaf. But to be fair, they did work very effectively as an alarm clock. At night, the student gov. put on Star Trek for us. I saw that already so I spent that time going to the ARC which I just mentioned. Boy is the ARC far from where I live. Walking there is an exercise routine in itself. I walked there, waited for my friend to get his rock climbing skills diagnosed, and then walked back, and went straight to bed.

Now that leads to today. Today was my sleep in day. There was nothing planned. No activities, no events, no fire alarms, no nothing. My goodness was it boring. Or at least, it was boring until I forgot that I had to take a chinese oral test. It was 1:20 at the time and today was the last day to do the test and the East Asian Center closes at 2:00. So I took a nice slow walk to the building and spoke with the teachers for my interview. Most of it consisted of them confusing each other about when I came to US. For some reason, they were surprised that I entered the US at an age of 18 and they discussed this amongst each other for quite the while. I had to interrupt them to tell them that I came from Canada and only came to the US for UCI on my move in day. They discussed this new data more and then asked me when I came to Canada. At this point, I was extremely confused. Why? Well because on my application form, it says that I was born in Torono, Ontario, Canada. I also mentioned this to them in my prior explanation. It was just a whole kajumble of confucius. That is all for now. Rachel is being too annoying on ichat. Sayonara