Orientation finally started!
Haha spent the whole morning plus half an afternoon checking email, chatting on MSN, reading newspapers, cooked my second meal, and settling video conferencing problems with my dad. The connection was there but the sound quality was bad, basically not a single sentence from them was complete without stutters. However, they seemed to hear me fine so, since when I called them via Skype it was alright, clearly the limiting factor was their connection. Dad refused to fix it (or rather upgrade it) when I told him about my screwed up MSN and now, haha, Mum will somehow force him to do it :)At 4pm I went for convocation, and because I live away from all other freshmen I arrived later than most of them did and I had to sit by myself. Basically it was the opening ceremony for us, completed with National Anthem, 4 speeches and the Johns Hopkins Ode. President Brody's and the rest of the speeches were quite standard, welcoming us, telling us that we are privileged, telling us the importance of ethics, telling us to make the most out of our Hopkins experience, blah blah blah. However he did make use of our programme sheets to quite innovatively tell us how privileged we are. I guess he got the students to tailor-make them.
After that was the student advisor's meeting. It was quite alright, our group went to a sandwich place below my block to have dinner and talked over dinner. Basically the people there were mostly Biology majors or some sort of Engineering majors. Well, when they knew that I am from Singapore they were quite interested in where we were (haha the China question did not pop up), how we were like, and about army (I was quite surprised that some of them actually know about that). So I told them as simply as I could (so that I won't confuse them)...
Well there was this girl with parents from HK and guy with parents from Taiwan, though they were ABCs and did not know much about Asia. And this American guy was asking me for my opinion about America's involvement in Iraq and I was like telling him, nope I don't support the idea of war in the first place...
There was a short film screening after that, and it turned out to be quite an insightful discussion about maintaining (or losing) your cultural identity in America. People participating were sharing their view quite openly, and well, I could not say anything as I could not relate to the situation. However, that does exposed me to an aspect of American society: the social pressure to conform to the 'norm' and American values, in the expense of losing one's cultural or individual identity, seemed quite strong. Well, so far for everyone that I have interacted with, it doesn't matter what race they are they all behave in the same way as long as they are Americans. Maybe that's my very superficial observation but if that's true (and with an increasingly conservative government), isn't America moving towards a state resembling 'Matrix'? If conformity is what it takes to maintain harmony (this seemed subconcious though), then it is scary: it just showed an inherent inability to accept, tolerate, and understand, which is what we were taught since primary school? Well, I won't risk saying all these in public to piss everyone off, so probably wait till I am more familiar with the whole thing first...
Haha it was Playfair after that, an annual event for all Freshmen. Basically it was just an Orientation thing which got everyone together to run around, get into groups, introduce yourselves to one another, do silly things, etc etc. It was just simply rewinding my wire 4.5 years back to my Hwa Chong orientation, but I think the Hwa Chong one was even more wild than this (no flour, ketchup, and fire)... and guess I am too old to be RUNNING around with a bunch of, well, my sister's friends?!! (I bet some might even be younger than her! Hanging out is fine, but RUNNING around?) -_-"
Then later went with Yiran to the Upper Quad to watch Wedding Crashers outside Gilman Hall. It was a really funny show :) recommended if you had not watched it.
And also go check this out:
Hossen Leong's Singapore History Song Listen/watch for yourself and comment :D
and
Pluto is not a planet anymore! Army related, quite amusing too :)
