Orientation Week (fondly referred to as "O Week")

O Week was filled with me wandering around campus attempting to find buildings and orient myself and, honestly, a bit a parties. O week is all about finding friends to hang out with and figuring out what classes you actually need to take.
One of the first things we did during Oweek was to go barefoot bowling. No, this is not the type of bowling that happens in a bowling alley. In barefoot bowling, you are literally on grass and your rolling these balls across the lawn towards a stationary small yellow ball. The whole aim of the game is to get the balls as close to the yellow ball as possible. Of course I, with my superb ability to aim, was awesome at this. (If you didn't catch it, that was sarcasm.) Basically, I failed massivly at lawn bowling. Unless you count getting it close to OTHER people's little yellow ball. If that's the case, the I was AWESOME :] haha.. But barefoot bowling was pretty fun. I got to know my roommates more, and I got to meet some people that I didn't actually live with. Which was good. They were pretty fun to hang out with :] To get to this barefoot bowling, we got to walk there. It wasn't that far of a walk. But it ended with a hill that basically rivalved the back side of Mountain Lake. In steepness, not in length. It was pretty steep. Basically. Is the point I'm trying to get at. The above picture is what the lawn looks like after a couple of Americans attempt to play. As you can see, it's not quite like normal bowling..
So the establishment that the bowling was at was basically on old man bar with a lawn for bowling. A couple of the locals were there actually, and they didn't seem too pleased to see the hoard of uni students decend on their bar.
<-- These are the balls that we played with. They are heavier on one side, so they actually went in an arc when you rolled them. It's actually difficult to roll them right. You have to aim at just the right thing, and then give the ball just the right amount of speed. I attempted to bowl normally.. twice.. the first time the ball went in a straight line, just like i planned.. only it didn't stop by the little yellow ball. It went straight into the gutter. The second time I didn't roll it quite so much. So it curved and ended up at the yellow ball. It just wasn't the correct yellow ball.. But I ended up being able to get within a 7 meter radius of the right small yellow ball. Not bad for an American eh? :]

The next night was our mystery dinner. It was a mystery simply because we didn't know where we were going to be eating dinner until we actually got there. And then there turned out to be a jail. But wasn't too bad over all. We divided into three groups simply by sitting down at one of three different tables. Dinner was pretty good. The chicken was a bit dry though. And difficult to swallow.. due in large part to its dryness.
After we ate, each table was assigned a guide to give a tour of the jail. Our lucky table was assigned a former inmate. He was pretty interesting. And creepy. And quite odd. However, he did show us multiple ways to kill people, and how to not get caught for killing them and where to hide the body. So. I was able to add those to the file "Things I Know and Hopefully Will Never Use." So far, they're the only things in there. He did make the tour a lot more interesting than the other tour guides. The other two tables had former guards. We were the "lucky" ones haha. There was nothing bad about having him as our guide, he just basically creeped most of us out. And showed us at least 3 different ways to kill someone, get rid of the evidence and hide the body. The jail was pretty cool though. Kinda. I'm glad I've never been to jail. And, since my life plan doesn't involve going to jail, I'm also pretty glad about that.

After we were done with the tour and we boarded back on the buses, we all, and by we all, I mainly mean my unit, decided to celebrate surviving jail by going out on the town. As I am legally allowed to go to bars and buy drinks and such, I decided what better way to celebrate both surviving jail and being legally allowed to buy alcohol then by going to a bar and buying a drink? The first bar we went to (yes we did a bit of bar hopping that night) had a pool table. Which was very exciting for me :] Me and my friend Josh teamed up against Emma and her friend Anthony (I think that was his name, I haven't really seen him since that night). Basically, Josh is amazing at pool and made me and Emma look completely awful. He almost single-handedly won both the pool games. I would like to point out at this time that I was able to shoot a few of the balls into the pockets. It wasn't like I was a total dead weight. To the right here is a pretty awful picture of both me and Josh. However, since we were pool champs, I feel like I have to include it. Just because we're that awesome. While we were being awesome at pool, our other roommates were having fun dancing to music and taking random pictures of themselves.
After we were done here, we decided to go across the street to the other bar. It wasn't as cool as the first one. The first one had a pool table. This one didn't. But it did have a porch. Which is where we all sat because there were creepers on the dance floor if I remember correctly.. Anyway.. after I had gotten bored from not dancing, I decided to go home. No, I did not go by myself.. I convinced a few other people (Josh, Emma, etc.) to go back with me. Because I'm a smart girl and I know not to travel at night alone in a strange country.

The next night was our college's commencement dinner. By college I'm talking about International House. We had a nice little dinner/entertainment thing at the dining hall. For the record, the food here is nothing compared to Tech. But it's not half bad as far as cafeteria food goes. There were also a few speeches that I didn't listen to. But I don't think I missed anything. I'm pretty sure no one listened to those speeches. After our dinner, we went to another bar thing. But this time, there was karaoke. No I didn't actually get up and sing, but I did get on the dance floor and dance to the bad singing. It was pretty fun.. actually. Bad singing and bad dancing is actually a lot of fun :] These are a few of my favorite photos from that night: