Glee Club Never Stops
August 31, 2014
The next day was almost a sleep in, qualified by the fact that I was waking up at strange hours during the night. I was still in the fierce grasp of jet lag. I finally got up just before lunch and went to Hillel to shmooze with everyone. I wasn’t the only one who had woken up late as a good number of other people were still dragging themselves in. Lunch was fairly standard. I sat with some new freshman along with a few new people all of whom were friendly enough.
Sadly, I had to run off to rehearsal all too quickly. Rehearsal itself was fine but I struggled a little with the ‘production numbers’, dance numbers that the rest of the chorus had learnt over the past year and that I was scrambling to fit into. I tired myself out pretty quickly and it wasn’t long before I was ready to crawl into bed again.
The next day I was again up earlier than expected and used the time to talk to people at home and sort out my room. Once the sun came up, I got out of bed and went out to Hillel where they were setting up the activities fair to introduce freshmen to all the available opportunities. As I had nothing better to do early that day I helped set up and met a few new people in the process. I hung around for a few hours until yet again, it was time for rehearsal.
After a few more hours of singing, dancing and, singing again, I ditched the last few minutes of rehearsal to run off to a new graduate student event. A campus wide gnome-hunt. This was the highlight of my weekend. In a team of about fifteen new graduate students, we raced around campus following clues to pick up mini plastic gnomes scattered around the eastern side of campus. I became quite friendly with a number of my teammates and in the happy hour following the hunt met a few more. This included two other Australian/New Zealand nationals over which I was quite pleased. Afterwards, a few of the grad students and I headed over to “Tap House”, a local bar to continue hanging out for a while. After a few drinks and a pleasant breeze, the jet lag returned and so I headed back to my room and called it a night.
Back to Basics
August 28, 2014
Friday was hectic and exhausting. I woke up at 3AM from jetlagged and tossed and turned, unable to get back to sleep. First order was getting my ‘PennCard’, ID and access card that I needed to get in anywhere. There I ran into an old friend (what would soon be a common occurrence), Amanda Bell, who I had met in my first week as an exchange student. From there I walked out to West Philadelphia to the ‘Cricket Wireless’ store for a new phone a SIM card. Part way along my walk I began to realize that the neighborhood I was walking into perhaps wasn’t ideal in terms of safety, but I stayed cheery and was in and out of there in almost no time.
International Student check-in was a horribly boring repeat experience of what I had already gone through twice before on my prior visas. No new information there. Introduced myself to a few other international students but the only real value there was in the tea.
Rehearsal took a good chunk of the afternoon, and what it didn’t was consumed by a long afternoon nap.
Shabbat dinner at Hillel was lovely, lots of old faces and some new ones too. However, I didn’t manage to stay particularly long before I was tired out and walked slowly back to my room in Harrison.
Arriving in Philly
The next day, I returned to the airport, sans baggage (which unfortunately had been sent through directly) and relaxed in the terminal until my flight. I slept right through my final leg, and awoke in hot, sunny Philadelphia. Finding my baggage proved to be a more difficult task as expected, due to the fact that my larger bag wedged itself in the retrieval system, delaying everyone and bringing the entire system to a halt. About thirty minutes later, after considerable back and forth, I finally arrived on campus.
Shlepping my bags over to the check-in tent in the center of high rise field, I must have appeared quite a sight to the volunteer staff. The check-in itself was relatively painless and soon I and all my bags were in my room. However I didn’t have time to rest on my laurels as I still needed an ID card, some groceries and most importantly, some bedding. Unfortunately the ID center was closed, but I managed to find some bedding, albeit ill fitting and a pillow for myself.
Barely was I done with all that before I was summoned to rehearsal by the Penn Glee Club. New student orientation events were taking place and we were to be providing entertainment for the bulk of them. In rehearsal I realized I was not quite as confident in the music as I needed to be, even the regular repertoire. I resolved to catch up on it within the next few days.
Finally, returning at about 11PM to my room I let myself fall asleep. However it was not to last long.