Welcome Dinner and Wellness
The BBA International Department threw us a big welcome dinner on the 20 somethingth floor of a 5 star hotel. There was unlimited buffet with thai foods, american foods, and dessert. It was a ton of fun. They made each "country" go up and do a presentation and then judged us on our presentation.
There are too many countries though so they did groupings, we were America and Canada. For Europe they started by just willy nilly putting countries together but then the European kids were like, hey Belgium and Hungary don't make any sense at all.. Why don't you put these certain groups together? That made a lot more sense in the end. I don't really know European alliances and disagreements well either but obviously like the Netherlands and Belgium wanted to be together as well as the like Scandinavian countries. And certain groups just didn't work because of histories or simply because they weren't anywhere near each other.
The presentations ended up being a lot of fun. The US and Canada did the ChaCha Slide, something we decided in a group chat literally during the opening words and then we were the first to go. Luckily everyone knows that dance though and the instructions are part of the song so it went pretty well. The other countries were fun to watch especially the Netherlands and Belgium because they did a funny dance from a tv show they all watched as kids. Some countries did trivia and that wasn't as fun... The winning team was the Asian countries as they made up their own choreographed dance to some Japanese song. It was very cute.
The food was amazing and I had some of the best pineapple I've ever had...
As for wellness... I have learned the hard way over the past two weeks how staying out late, my sleep pattern, eating, everything affects my quality of life and ability to do things. I also learned on a separate occasion how much I need to be drinking water.
I got sick in the first week (thankfully over that) probably from adjusting, the amount of people around me, and just not really taking care of myself. I am now committed to eating well, sleeping enough, and have bought some multivitamins for myself (thank you Matt for insisting I do so). I woke up the other day absolutely unable to stand, feeling awful, dizzy, and my head hurt so bad. I had forgotten pretty much to drink water the day before and was completely dehydrated. I tried to drink water too quickly and ended up puking. This was all at 4am when I was supposed to be leaving on a bus for Koh Chang. Needless to say that the large consequence of my careless water neglect was that I missed the entire Koh Chang trip and I am pretty upset with myself for that one. From here on out, proper water drinking is also on my list of must-do activities in the day.
Its about time that I started treating this as my life and not a vacation and that means taking care of myself!
Riding on the way there!
Really yummy desserts, the one in a cup was like a pina colada!
Some of the BEST pineapple I have EVER had
The big group photo
The "thank you" group picture they wanted us to take