Orientation and Enrolement

This week has been a busy one as things finally start to feel like I’m at a university again. We started off the week with an orientation for international students on the 15th and 16th. It had been so long since I got here that I had almost forgotten that I was supposed to go somewhere! We went over the usual things, being safe, looking right not left before crossing the street, how to get medical exemptions from exams/assignments and what to expect during enrolemnt. We were also sent around campus on a sort of orienteering exercise where we had to get stamps from our department offices, the health center and the (archaic ;) procedure of looking up physical books in the library.

Today was enrolement for me, it was a fairly straightforward process that involved bringing my passport up to one desk, where they checked my visa and then gave me more paper. From then on I accumulated paper until the second last booth where I was able to divest myself of most of it and then pay for my international insurance. The whole process took only half an hour when I was expecting massive lineups and hours of waiting.

Then I had to get my student card and that took a while. It seems like every bank and IT store in the country had booths lining the queue so I came home with hectares of forest in a bag handed out at the start.

I’ve also been chewing through bandwidth (I pay by the byte) at a prodigious pace watching parts of the Vancouver Olympics. I have to tunnel through the UBC VPN to watch on CTV because they, like all networks I’ve tried, don’t let people outside of the country stream videos. I’ve seen the opening ceremonies up to the march of athletes, I liked the delegation from Bermuda in their shorts!