Orientation week

Thompson Rivers University is obviously quite a big university. This week, international student orientation started (and is still in progress) and there are about 1400 students (Just international ones!! The Canadians follow next week). So what exactly is this student orientation thing?
Basically, it's a really well planned week of events like information sessions, get togethers and things like this. So, while we hear a lot about Kamloops and Canada and the risks and opportunities of studying abroad, we also have to organise stuff like getting our schedules ready, getting the student ID, and buying our books (I still have to do that, I'm hoping to find cheap ones on the internet as the two books I need cost 100 bucks each at the bookstore and I'm not super-rich). Besides that we got free lunch every day and we're meeting a lot of other students.

How do you peel a banana? - Experiment

There are a lot of exchange students from all different countries which is quite interesting. Something I didn't expect at all it the fact that there are so many Austrians. It is normal to meet Germans abroad but I hardly ever met Austrians and we've got a lot of us here. It is interesting to meet so many people from different cultures and experience differences between the behaviour and things like this.

Germany, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Austria, the Netherlands, France, ...

The university created an organisation called ISAP that organises a lot of events for international students. For example this week we went to the cinema once and yesterday we went to a concert at riverside park. There's a huge river going through Kamloops, called the Thompson River and next to it there is a park where they host free concerts every day in summer. It's open air so you just go there and sit down in the grass and listen to nice music. It was still warm in the evening so it was really nice to sit together and have some fun. Tomorrow we will go to Sun Peaks, which is the local skiing hill to see another concert up there. I've heard that the mountain is really nice so I'm really looking forward to going there. During the whole semester, there will be a lot more events by ISAP like a Halloween party, a wine-tasting tour and different excursions.

Thompson River

Paul Filek @ Riverside Park

Today we had an international gathering, which was kind of the final event of our students orientation week. A lot of people were wearing their national dresses and we had international food. We talked to each other and there were some speeches of the president of TRU and some other people. One girl from Easter Islands performed a traditional dance which was quite impressive and at the end we just danced around with our flags to international music.

"I am from Austria!!"