Finally Moving In

We moved out of Omni hotel today, which was sad, but we left it for a place that I may like even more—the UChicago Campus North Residential Commons. Before we moved into the dorms, however, we were busy buying clothes and touring the UChicago campus, among other things.

The first thing we did was eat breakfast. We had initially agreed to meet downstairs with our bags, but I had really bad reception in my room, so I didn’t receive the follow-up text that said we wouldn’t need our bags. Because of this, I was slightly late to our meeting spot, and I had to go back up to put my bags in the room. As it stands, the score between me and the girls for being on time is all tied up at one.

After we managed to get situated, we headed down to a bakery called Lavazza Kafenio to eat. Jahnvi had a repeat of her experience at East Bay Coffee Co. where she ordered whatever she thought sounded right, except that this time instead of her drink being too small and weird-tasting it was too big and a little less weird-tasting. After that, we headed back to the hotel, grabbed our stuff, and took a Lyft to the school.

Cecilia's, Lindsay's, and my breakfast, from left to right.

I was asleep for most of the Lyft ride, so I’m not exactly sure what happened, but when we arrived to the school everyone got out of the car without telling me, and I was in the back, so I couldn’t get out by myself. They only realized that I was still in the car after the trunk opened and I looked back at them. After I finally got out of the car and everyone had their stuff, we headed over to our future dorms to check in with some of the RAs. Sam and I think David checked our bags.

After check-in, we all received name tags with a number and color on them. These name tags were a topic of scrutiny all the way until the orientation started; we were trying to figure out what they meant. We came up with many possibilities; I was the only one of us four who had blue (everyone else had red), so we speculated at first that maybe the colors were assigned by gender until we saw people walking around with yellow and green stickers. It turns out that the color/number combination was just how they organized the groups, and that there was no deeper meaning behind them. Even so, my group did happen to be fully male.

The cohort, wearing our new stuff.

All of this figuring happened while we were walking to the bookstore to buy UChicago merch. When we got to the bookstore, we all had kind of a hard time trying to figure out what to buy, because all of the clothes looked really similar (burgundy is a color that has a pretty small range). However, when we finally did pick out our stuff, we were all the more sure of our decision because we were forced to look at everything to see the differences. I ended up choosing a Champion hoodie, because Champion is a pretty reputable brand, and a navy hat, because I also wanted to get a hat and I still had room left in the $65 budget Don assigned us.

A chapel we saw on the tour.  A 
couple was taking pictures here.

When we were done with the bookstore, we headed back to where we checked in, at which point we were escorted to an auditorium where we were provided with useful information about what not to do during this program. Basically, it was a bunch of technical information interrupted by warnings of the dangers of drugs and alcohol and the consequences of having them on campus.

We split into our respective groups and were taken on a tour of campus after the presentation. On this tour, I kept switching between the front and the back of my group; I would be in the front whenever I asked a question, but I would drop back to the end when I wanted to take pictures. There were a couple of times where my group turned a corner and I lost them because I was too far back, but I would always catch up eventually. The tour wasn’t too long; we just walked around a couple of residential buildings and libraries and then returned to the auditorium.

Two of the libraries we saw on the tour. Apparently there are 5 on campus.

A residential building (top), and an academic building (bottom)

In the auditorium, we were given a speech by one of the important Summer Sessions people, complete with several more warnings against possession of drugs and alcohol. 

After this speech, it was finally time to move into the dorms. Getting our IDs and bags into the room was pretty easy. The rooms are very minimalistic and modern; all smooth white walls and dark grey accents. My room has a view of downtown Chicago, which was beautiful at sunset. I have a double room, meaning that I have one roommate. His name is George, and he lives in Shenzhen. We talked while we unpacked about school in China, our hobbies, the sports we play, and other stuff like that. After a while, however, he realized that he forgot his passport in a cab, and he had to figure things out on his computer. I didn’t want to disturb him, so I went down to eat with the rest of my group. 

The view from my dorm room.

Down at the dining commons, we had a new member join us, named Olivia. She’s from Columbus, Ohio, and somehow became friends with us. We spent most of the rest of the day with her, exploring the building and just hanging out. We ended the day at a cookie store called Insomnia Cookies right under our dorm building. I had this cookie ice cream sandwich with triple chocolate chunk cookies around moose tracks ice cream. I asked for moose tracks because my favorite character from the TV show Brooklyn Nine-nine, Rosa Diaz, said that it was her favorite flavor of ice cream, and also because I’ve never had it. Olivia said that she also likes Brooklyn Nine-nine when I explained my reasoning to her, so we bonded over that. I got George a cookie too, to help him feel better about his whole passport situation. 

Olivia and I at dinner.

My dessert at Insomnia Cookies.

Today was very, very eventful and there was so much to write about, so I had to be really thorough in deciding what events to include and what not to, which was hard because I had fun doing almost everything. Tomorrow we have our first group activities, which I’m excited about since we didn’t really have a chance to bond with our floor-mates because we had to write this blog. However, it’s not a bad thing to have so many things to write about; it’s the sign of a full day, which I aim to have many more of. Hopefully, tomorrow will be just as eventful as today.