Orientation Week at KGU

Now that we're good and settled in I figured it was about time for a blog post about stuff that has gone on since we've arrived here in Kumamoto. For this post, I’ll be talking about our first week at KGU, which was our orientation week. Our orientation ran from Wednesday, September 11, 2013 to Wednesday, September 18, 2013, excluding the weekend of course. There was a different activity or two for us on each day, so it was quite a busy week for us. After the cut, you'll be able to read about each of our orientation days detail.

Starting out on the 11^th, we had our arrival orientation. This started with a fairly meeting/presentation at the residence where we live. It basically told us information about the residence where we live and our surroundings. After this was over, we all went to the KGU campus and had a much needed lunch with some KGU students. Following our lunch we then had a tour of the rest of the campus to conclude our first day.

Our second day of orientation we had to get up earlier than we had been used to getting up, so that was a bit hard. Once we were ready, we took a bus to downtown Kumamoto to a medical clinic for chest x-rays. This wasn't a full-blown medical check up  but rather a simple chest x-ray to screen for Tuberculosis, which is a regular thing to screen for upon moving to Japan apparently. We figured this would take a long time, but it actually went by fairly quickly. After this was finished, our next stop was the city office. This was the one that took the longest. Not only was it quite busy there, but we each (about 13 of us) had to go through several steps to notify the government that we were living in the city for the next year, and confirming our address with them. Finally, we had to fill out the forms to enroll in the NHI (National Health Insurance) plan that everyone in Japan is required to enroll in. By this time it was around supper time, so we all went back to the dorm to eat and relax for the day.

On the third day (Friday the 13^th) we had our placement test at the campus. The test was to determine what level of Japanese we would be taking during the school year. Luckily, this was our shortest day as this is all we had to do, and it was also the weekend, and a long one at that as Monday the 16^th was a national holiday in Japan.

On Tuesday the 17^th we had our academic orientation as well as the e-campus orientation. The academic orientation consisted of us meeting in a classroom on the campus to not only find out our placement from the previous test, but to also find out our class schedules for the year, and to choose our courses would take. There was also an overview of the school year and how to locate our classes once we started. The e-campus orientation was pretty much as the name suggests, an introduction to the electronic components of the campus, namely the computer systems there. We sat through a fairly short presentation and got our login details for the system as well.

Finally, the last of our orientation week arrived, the 18^th. This was the most fun day of the orientation for us. It was the emergency/disaster orientation day. Yeah, just hearing the name doesn't really sound fun, eh? Well it actually was really interesting and we learned some valuable information, while having a good time doing so.

To start off though, I'm going to provide a link to a YouTube video of our day. This was shot by our good friend Niall. He’s one of the exchange students here from England and he also has a blog he does, so check out his video of our emergency orientation day! 

Below you’ll find a bit more detailed of an explanation to our emergency orientation.

We all were taken by bus to an emergency information centre, which also happened to be the emergency response centre for all of Kumamoto. Here we were greeted by the staff and taken on a short tour of the building. Following the tour, we visited several training locations they have in the building, which was our main reason for coming there.

As I'm sure you're aware, Japan is prone to earthquakes, so we were taken to the centre’s earthquake simulator to experience one, and learn what to do and not do should we ever be caught in one. In Japan, they use the Shindo scale to measure earthquake intensity. The scale goes from 1 to 7, and we experienced a Shindo 3 earthquake to start off, and it grew to a 7 at the end; it was still pretty intense and more shaking than I expected it would be at 3, but it was nuts at 7 as you can see in the video.

After the earthquake simulator, we were taken to the Typhoon simulator, since this is another thing that Japan is prone to. Typhoons are large tropical storms with lots of wind and rain basically. The simulator we used just simulated the wind speeds. It went up to winds as strong as 50 meters/sec. We only experienced winds that were 20 meters/sec, however. Though I'm glad that’s all we experienced, as according to the staff there, the 50 meters/sec winds can blow down buildings, and cause all kinds of damage.

The last thing we did in the emergency centre was to go through a simulated fire drill. We started off in a dark room with a large display screen where we had to answer some questions about fire safety, though we didn't do too well since the questions had a lot of hard kanji in them! After this, the fire alarm drill started, and we had to make our way out of the question room, through a dimly lit and smoke-filled hallway/room, and out of the simulation area to safety.

And that is more or less how our orientation week went. It was a long one, and it was tiring, but it was well worth it as we all learned valuable information that will help us be prepared for now and the future at KGU.