Moving Day

Yesterday I finally moved into my dorm at Hiram! Dozens of cars lined the streets as students and parents unloaded luggage onto the lawns. Then began the actual moving. I happen to be on the fourth floor of Whitcomb, so that was some extra climbing for my dad and I. Because Wenhao could only bring so much stuff with him (2 suitcases' worth of luggage for the entire year!) it was up to me to bring some of the larger appliances that most roommates divide between each other. That was fun carrying up the stairs. It was quite a workout, and in typical Ohio humidity at that. Thankfully, my wonderful friend Mike, a classmate from high school who is also going to Hiram this year, offered to help carry the boxes, and it was all accomplished faster than I had expected.

Next came the truly fun part: unpacking and setting up the room. I had been looking forward to setting up my dorm for some time. We had got many neat and useful items at Bed Bath and Beyond (between our coupons and the coupons that our neighbors saved for us, we managed to cut down a lot of the dorm room expenses!). Upon first entering the room, my first thought was that it was too small. But really, it was just set up in a way that did not offer as much space. The beds were arranged in a way that made it difficult to move around, especially when we began putting all of the boxes in there. My dad and I studied the room for a minute to try to figure out the best way to lay it out. We decided it was best to bunk the beds. Our room is slightly different from other dorm rooms because it is in the corner of Whitcomb, and so the holes in our bedposts were a different size than the pegs that the RA gave us. My dad drove off to Garretsville to get some metal piping from the hardware store while I continued to unpack and move things around. The metal pegs worked nicely and the beds were very easy to bunk after that! I thought that Wenhao (who was not there at the time) would be very surprised to come back to the room and see it changed around so much. But there is so much more space now that he liked it.

Wenhao gave me a gift of a neat orangish-red bracelet and two scarlet hanging sort of charm decorations, traditional in China. I knew that gift-giving is a large part of Chinese culture, and researched it a great deal before coming to Hiram, learning of all sorts of gifts to avoid. Some of the customs are very interesting while others I thought were kind of odd. But I finally decided upon a book called The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck. It is very appropriate as it is written by an American woman who grew up in China. I wrapped the book in red paper, as that is supposed to be a very fortunate color to the Chinese, and wrote "friendship" in Chinese characters on the top (or, as best as I could, that is).

Soon after the welcoming ceremony (where one of the Deans made a much-appreciated joke about the required reading book) I met up with Wenhao for the first time. I had to say a quick goodbye to my parents before running off to my first Freshman Colloquium meeting, Music in a Changing World. I was surprised to find five students in my Colloquium that are from my area, three of them from Concord!

So moving in was pretty exciting, and I am sure that I will enjoy my years here at Hiram. Now, on to finish setting up the dorm...