Orientation!

Wednesday after FOL I helped my roommate move in. It didn't take long at all, and it was actually kind of fun! After that I got to go with Hayley to a fancy dinner at her grandparent's house to celebrate her grandpa's retirement. Her grandmother is a really good cook :) After that we went back on campus to start our orientation activities. Everyone living in Helaman was invited to go to a carnival and dance at the Cannon center. There was games, prizes, popcorn, cotton candy, and a huge dance! The dance was super crowded and noisy so we mostly just hung out outside. I got to meet a lot of new people, and everyone is so nice here I feel like I already have tons of friends! I'm really glad I went to FOL because there were a lot of people who I had already met or at least recognized and that made it easier to meet even more people. Thursday morning was the official start to new student orientation. To be honest it was kind of boring. There were a few helpful things I took away from it (free BYU creamery ice cream was one of them) but we felt like we were being herded around like cattle all day. One cool thing was that out of 5,000 freshman who were split up into groups of about 30 Ariana ended up being in my group! It was so nice to have a friend to be with for most of the day. Our night time pep rally ended up being really fun. We took a class Y photo, the cheerleaders performed, we learned the BYU fight song, and got to meet some of the student athletes. They also gave us all free t-shirts, and at the end they put on a fireworks show. 

Our class taking the Y photo. They call us incoming freshman 2012 instead of the class of 2016 because more than half of our class won't be graduating together :)

One of my favorite parts of orientation was finding these girls! Ariana and I hadn't seen Chelsea since she moved to Utah four years ago.

Friday was another full day of orientation. We started out with a morning devotional from one of the religion professors. It was really great; I'm looking forward to the weekly devotionals here. After that Hayley, Grace, and I ditched our orientation groups to go find our classes. We each walked through our whole schedules so we wouldn't get lost on the first day. That night there were a whole bunch of free activities on campus for freshman, but there were long lines at all of them. So we went off campus to Hayley's favorite snow cone place and then walked around the park right next to them. I'm such an ice cream girl I usually don't like snow cones that much but these ones were delicious. After that we went back on campus for another part of orientation. Once again we skipped pretty much the whole thing except the free ice cream. The BYU creamery is going to make me so fat! My roommate tells me I eat way to much ice cream. After we got our free ice cream we went back to our lobby and played games with some of our new friends. 

Saturday there weren't any orientation activities until night time so my friend Grace and I went to the temple that morning. The Provo temple is beautiful and totally different from the Boston one. There was a line of people (mostly BYU students) all waiting to do baptisms. It was so great to see tons of other people excited about going to the temple! I love the temple, and I'm so grateful that there is one only a mile away now. I'm going to make it a goal to try and go every week. Saturday night there was another dance, and more free activities for freshman. Hayley and I went to the dance for a little while, and then took advantage of the free bowling. It was fun, but we were all terrible! I think they should have put the bumpers up for us. After that we all went back to Helaman and played capture the flag and mafia out on the quad. It was super fun, and I got to meet even more people.