Drunk in a Church

The first day of Orientation Week in Leiden (OWL) began today. As with most social gatherings we stood around 95% of the time, and listened to someone speaks 4% of the time and the rest was good fun.

A posse of us left on bikes from our residency and headed down to the central meeting place. After meeting others in group 31 (masters students in natural sciences), we played some silly name games. There were five astronomy, four media technology, three statistics, two mathematics, and two life sciences.

	Top Left: Circles of people. Our group stood/mosied about. Top Right: Our group flag. Bottom Left: Silly name game.

A grand old church.

We walked to a church wherein we found chairs assembled. We heard some speeches from the principal, or some other head figure at Leiden University, who seemed to think China was the Cat's Ass. She also doesn't like how much students drink, and how Dutch students don't travel as much as others. She outright apologized in advance for two things: The Dutch discrimination and blunt directness, claiming it wasn't the Dutch's fault, they merely didn't know better.

We heard from the fire department, who dress fancier than most Generals in the Canadian Military, and who informed us that if we ever get stuck in a fire we will likely die. We watched a video of a room with a candle size flame on the floor turn into a huge fire ball in three minutes!

Lunch: Water, bread, cookie, banana.

We then heard from the police (the Polities - the Polite-ees) who had some more pleasant facts to impart. There are more bikes in the Netherlands than people (I intend to do a whole post on this topic later), and as such people need to STOP RIDING BIKES ON THE MARKET STREETS because it's annoying! Reefer and other soft drugs are only legal to be bought and consumed in coffee shops. Also, Leiden has a municipal by-law of no public drinking. I'm sure he said more stuff but too many people were laughing to hear him. He ran off the stage with his tail between his legs, poor guy.

Censored coffee shopper.

We heard from the ISN who said there are tons of cool things planned this year for University Leiden students, from trips to themed events, and clubs.

We were a little hungry so we headed on to the four hundred year old botanical gardens! We had bread, water and bananas for lunch (that's all our 60EUR OWL fee could afford).

Mayor and Japanese girl. The mayor was out of
line in his mock imitation of her accent.

The problem with these orientation things is that they don't leave any time for yourself so a few of us opted out of the city walk and did our own thing: cafe, coffee shop, and incense shopping.

We met back up at the church where this time drinks started flowing and the mayor talked about how happy he was. I later came upon him talking to a young Japanese girl. He spoke in a slow, completely obscene, imitation Japanese accent to make the girl feel comfortable. She seemed a little shaken by the experience.

From then on we headed to some place for a sloppy dinner-in-a-box and finally on to a pub where we did a groups' quiz challenge. Our group 31 called the "Malakus 31" came second after "Justice Mother Fuckers". The bike ride home was swift and my only time of solace today.