The free coffee was pretty good in the hall the foreign students had to wait in before orientation started. Well, it wasn’t that good. It was free though. I did my best impression of mingling that I could, which in my case consisted of standing next to one of the coffee pots looking pensive, occasionally refilling my comically undersized cup. I had a little chat with an Australian student called Aaron, who I ended up spending most of the exchange hanging out with (I probably learnt more about Australia than I did about Canada during that semester), and then we were all ushered into a big hall.
Most of orientation was just a rehash of the talk I’d received from my home university before leaving: tips are fifteen percent, don’t use your teacher’s first names (call them Professor or Prof), never cut in line. They missed out the bit about being careful about smoking Canadian cannabis, since it’s stronger than the stuff in the UK, and they also left out the bit where every university talk I had to go to in Britain offered free alcohol. My home university was nothing but practical. It knew some of its students would want to try the local drugs (not me, of course), so it warned us, and it knew that none of us would bother turning up to our prep talks if they didn’t give us all free glasses of wine.
It was probably to do with the fact that the drinking age in British Columbia is 19, so many of the undergraduates would have been too young for alcohol, but coffee really wasn’t much of an incentive to attend. As an aside, in my experience the students who were too young to drink would just smoke copious amounts of pot, since it was easier for them to get without ID. In fact you weren’t even allowed to bring alcohol into the dorms (one of the few rules I broke during my time there), despite the fact that the whole building stunk of grass. I can’t say my experience in Canada gave me much respect for strict drinking age laws.
There was a decent mix of different nationalities at the talk. The biggest country represented was China, which was about half of the exchange students. America was probably the the second biggest group, and was mostly people from southern states and Hawaii. The rest was a mix of all the commonwealth countries that got a free pass to study in Canada: Britain, Australia, South Africa, and so on.
After our safety briefing the elders of the local First Nations people who owned the land the university was built on came out to talk to us, offering us a slightly depressing prayer about how distraught we must be to be so far from home, and how they hoped we wouldn’t all become so upset that we’d throw ourselves off the nearest dock and make a break for the mainland. We then had to form groups and go on a “treasure” hunt, finding all the fun buildings like the first aid centre and the complaints office on a map and getting a stamp from them. While part of me wasn’t fond of being asked to take part in primary school level activities, it was entertaining enough and a good opportunity to talk to some of the other students.
Afterwards some of the students went on a whale watching trip, but I’d been on enough of those in my life so I passed and retreated back to my quiet, comfortable dorm. At this point there were no students in the building other than a few tame exchangers, so I was unaware as to how uncomfortable my dorm would eventually be.
