IO Welcome Event: Vietnam 2017

The annual Welcome Event organised by the IO took place yesterday - 12/10/2017 - for students from Vietnam. That was my third time to be part of the event but the excitement was relatively intact. I guess this time I even looked forward to it more than others. It was truly lovely to have a chance to see fellow Vietnamese buddies at UEA.

So the event started around 6pm when people started to show up. This year I was not able to cook any Vietnamese food due to my limited culinary skills (the amazing cook had already gone to the Netherlands for his PhD study :( ). But it was all right -  "pizza is love - pizza is live", wasn't it? We nearly had 39 when it was around 6:15 pm (!) and the number kept increasing towards 6:30 pm. The atmosphere was very nice because there were full of chit-chat, laughter, and new people!

The IO representative last night was Pete Ryan -  I would say, who was quite popular among Vietnamese students since he had worked with the region. In fact, I got to know about UEA 4 years thanks to a conversation with him at a university fair in Ho Chi Minh City. People were so engaged with his sense of humour. 

Food came! 1 2 3 and they raced to boxes of Domino's pizzas like in the Hunger games. Well, I could not really blame them because I was among the first ones to lay my fingers on those cheesy and indulgent slices (Pete was the first one if my memory doesn't fail me).

More chats and more friends to make!

And the most awaited activity (just right after pizzas) was games, which were kindly organised by the Vietnamese Society committee. For the last three year, it has been always them to manage this and truth to be told, I am truly grateful - being a gameshow host in front of many people is never my strong suit. The first game was Postman, where other teams try to tick post-it notes on the model of other teams as many as they can and afterwards those models will shake/dance/move etc to get rid of those notes - the winner would be the one who has the fewest notes in the end. It was indeed chaotic, yes hilarious! Nothing but noise can measure the success of a game - and I ensure you, it was like a fallen beehive!

The second game was The Commander. I was talking to a new student so my bad, I did not pay my full attention to this game. 

One of the amazing things about these entertaining activities was that all participants got presents!

The event came to the end. I hope those students enjoyed it as much as the IO staffs and I enjoyed having them over. See you again next year, but potentially as a participant :)

On my way home, a sense of nostalgia arose and lingered in my mind. I missed those faces who had been there last year and the year before.