Fresher's Week

Hey,

So I know it's almost been a week and a half since my last post .. so i'm going to try and catch up a bit ...

The last week of September was the 2nd and final week of Freshers (Orientation) week. Unlike the week before which was just international students, this week was for all first year students. It seemed was a fairly boring week as it was just the same onld same old orientation week stuff. Aside from the Monday when we learned about about how our program is going to be structured, which was fun, but then the rest of the week was just waiting for classes to begin. I hung out with a few friends that I had made during the week before, and also made friends with some other Optometry classmates. On the Tuesday all we had to do was got our retinal pictures taken, so afterwards we just wandered around the city (actually that's basically all we did all week). On one of our adventures we walked past the main city center (the bull ring) and went into this mall called the Mailbox.

This mall was similar to most that we have been too, where it is a nice mix of the outdoors and indoors, but we noticed that this mall seemed to have a bunch of different stores and it also has 3 or four art galleries/stores. We browsed a few of the galleries which all had lots of really nice artwork, but the pieces ranged from about 350 - 10,000 pounds! We then went into one clothing store had lots of stuff on sale like graphic t-shirts that were marked 70% off, but they were 20-30 pounds for just one t-shirt! After that store i looked around a bit more and realized that we were in a very ritzy/expensive mall.  We then kept walking through the mall and up to the top floor which was the food court and at the end of the food court you were outside on like a board walk that follows beside the Birmingham canal system (around Brindley Place). We walked on the canals for a bit and it was really quite beautiful ... although it definately isn't anything like the lakes and rivers at home ... but they at least have ducks and Canadian Geese :-)

One day on campus they had a fair where you can find out and join the different societies, clubs and sports teams. So I ended up joining the Optics society and the spanish society. The optics society meets basically every tuesday night and they have presenters talking about there equiptment, frames, lenses, etc. and then after the presentation we get pizza for dinner. Then the spanish society is on random nights throughout the week, and we'll be able to learn a bit of basic spanish, go to some spanish restaurants and also learn how to salsa, so it looks like it will be fun. I also was planning to join the lacrosse team, but i found out that this year there isn't one becuase there was "a lack of interest" so instead i'm going to try to find enough people so that next year we will be able to start the team back up. Also basically all week last week we made a point of all having dinner together and so far we're carrying on the tradition, since it's way cheeper that way, plus we all like to cook (or at least help chop stuff :P). With all our back grounds we've been trying some different types of food too ... we've done the typical Canadian dinners (throw everything you got all together and server with pasta and some KD), and we also done a bit authentic Italian pasta some Indian food too (although they're nice and make it "relatively" mild for me).

During Freshers week there were some evening events which were basically going to a pub and/or club each night, but myself I definately didn't want to go to too many of them, so we ended up just going to a school daze one at the guild (the student union building on campus) which was fun since everyone dressed in their school uniform (so I wear an orange dress shirt to stand out in the crowd of white), and they played some of the classic songs that I grew up listening too. Then the next night we went to a comedy night. The first comic I didn't really like since it was all humour about british people (like the british equivelent to newfie jokes, since he was from northern england) so I didn't really get too many of those jokes but then the other act was great and since he talked about some more genereal stuff.

So that was basically my last "relaxing" week before classes.