IUES 2011 part 1

What is IUES 2011? It's International University Exchange Seminar 2011. It's held in ITB, last September. The topic was Towards A Safer and Sustainable Future: A Disaster Risk Reduction. Pretty long, huh.

My friends once asked me how could I participate on that kind of thing? I reckoned they're curious why I absented for a whole week classes. All right, it's somewhat a short story. One day, I saw several posters on Selasing (the terrace under Labtek 1 or Mektan in ITB). It's an open recruitment for the seminar  participant. What so interesting was the words: "Free lunch," etc. Also there would be attended by several Japanese students from Toyohashi University of Technology  for about a week. Here we go, it's a good chance to make some new friends from other faculties and also from Japan. Plus, it's free and I thought there would be lots of foods.

Then, I told my friends and we applied for the seminar. But then, I was the only one who got selected. I was a little bit hesitated. Moreover, I planned to take the TOEFL exam on one of the seminar days. In short, I decided to participate but I asked to absent for one day for the exam. It's the field trip day. But the thinking of a week full of holiday from the classes was able to make me happy and glad.

Several days later, I registered for the TOEFL exam. You know what, the date was actually not on the seminar day. It's on the next three days. Hurray! I'd be able to go to the field trip!

About a week before the seminar, there's a briefing for all the ITB participants. They told us to read several reading materials (the truth was there're a big pile of materials from the internet). So, when I looked around me, I saw there're too many unfamiliar faces. In fact, I didn't anybody at all. At that time, I wished I knew somebody to make me feel more comfortable. So, I started to greet the person next to me, and I thought I got to know with the petroleum engineering students, Satria and maybe Rio. Okay, a good start. Then there's also someone appointed as the head of ITB participants. I didn't even remember his face or name back then, but I remembered he's addressed as the oldest there. Since I had my TBI class, I needed to rush right after the briefing. Oh yeah, I also greeted another FSRD participant, he's Ceasar dkv 2010.

Two days before the seminar, we did some practices for the performance on the opening party. Soni was in charge to help us in choreography and others. It was the first time I met Sari (one of the committee of the seminar, I just knew on the end of the practice), Iid and Rifni (they had the same role with me for the performance). The rest of them became blurry faces and I didn't remember anyone after the practice. Sorry.

And suddenly, the first day of the seminar was started.

To be continued...