Thursday, August 9th
I woke up at 7 am for enrollment, which turned out to be completely unnecessary. I spent like 15 minutes adding classes to a wishlist and then realized I had nothing to do until 10 am. At that point it seemed kind of pointless to go to sleep though, although next time I will definitely only get up a half hour before enrollment. Anyway, by the time enrollment almost opened the number of slots per class versus the number of people who had that class on their wish lists was way out of proportion. The worst example was Modern Korean Society, which had at least 40 people competing for 3 class slots. Luckily, I ended up getting all the classes I wanted, including that one. I'm enrolled in Korea and the US in the 20th Century, Modern Korean Society, Comparative Study of the Far Eastern Cinemas, and a Korean language class. Then I chilled in my bedroom till about 2 pm when Rachel and I went out for lunch. (We had both traded our AM shifts that morning just for enrollment.) We went gift shopping for a bit too on our way back through Expo as we headed to our apartments. Then at 8 pm, we both headed down to the UN Pavilion for orientation since we had signed up to volunteer the following day at its national day (which obviously isn't a national day since it's the UN, but whatever). The UN Orientation was really confusing. None of us knew what was going on. We also all wanted to volunteer for the dinner reception and none of the other activities really, so they arbitrarily assigned us tasks. I luckily got to volunteer for the reception, but Rachel got stuck being an usher for an afternoon concert. The best part of it though is that we got UN Pavilion t-shirts.

Friday, August 10th

Ellen, Sara, and I, making the UN pavilion logo

Zeno (Swiss Pavilion), another woman from the Swiss Pavilion, Yvonne, and I all met up with the UN Pavilion coordinators at 10 am and then we headed over to the hotel where the dinner reception would be held. We didn't really do anything until 11 am because nobody was really sure of what was going on, but after that we were left with one manager and were in charge of decorating the venue. We just used ribbons to decorate the indoor and outdoor area, so the work wasn't hard. At around 3 pm, Vanessa (Swiss Pavilion), Sara (USA Pavilion), and Ellen (USA Pavilion) showed up as well to help us out, but by then we'd pretty much finished everything. So we sat around a lot and talked until the reception started at 7 pm. We greeted people for the first hour and then they actually let us eat during the reception, which surprised us. So we all sat down at a table outside and while some of the food was amazing, some of it was not so much. It was a free buffet though, so we got to try and eat plenty. Anyway, we chatted and ate until the end of the reception and then we helped clean up for only a half hour or so. They also let us take any of the leftover drinks we wanted, meaning our fridge got some free orange juices. I'm really glad I decided to volunteer, but I'm definitely lucky I got to work at the reception and not at the concert or any of the other events that day because I don't think they would have been as fun.

Saturday, August 11th
We celebrated Caleb's 8th birthday. Caleb is the son of our CEO and he is an honorary student ambassador. He loves working with us and rotating through all the positions. So there was a pizza party for lunch that all the student ambassadors were invited to attend in order to celebrate his birthday. The pizza slices were gigantic, so I only managed to eat one. After that there was cupcakes. I don't remember what I did after the party.