Ohio

This past weekend was orientation for all outbounds in my Ohio-Erie district.  There were about 90 kids total leaving the United States to go someplace else.  9 of which, including me, will be going to Brazil.  It was hosted by Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio.  It was really nice, we stayed in the dorms with no air condition but we were always waling somewhere, eating, or in an air-conditioned room together.  We get to see many presentations.  One was solely on Culture Shock and we learned about the 4 stages of culture shock pertaining to exchange students.  We also learned about Reverse Culture Shock, what will happen when we come back to the United States.  Another presentation was on safety.  This presentation was about how the rules that we have are put there to keep up safe.  In both of these presentations there were video clips from Ace Ventura and Outsourced.  Both of them were really funny.  I watched Outsourced when I got home, and it was great.  We also played this awesome game.  I can’t really talk about the rules and because someone who wants to be an exchange student could see it.  But this game was really great and lots of fun.  That Friday morning, district 7680 got our blazers (Erin, Hailey, Natalie, and I).  And we also got the pins that we will be passing out in our host clubs and to other exchange students that we meet.  The drive up to Ohio was not bad, we had two Rotarians that were willing to answer all of our questions, Dale and Vinny, and they were pretty good drivers too.  The drive back to North Carolina was good too.  We also got the option to ask the rebounds, people who had gone on exchanges before, questions and hear about their exchanges.  It was really interesting to hear how different everyone’s story was, even if they went to the same place.