Ennovy.org

The photos are up, with descriptions! That’s pretty much all the photos I took; there were some blurry ones I deleted. It’s a pity it was a rainy day.

My parents and brother were accompanying me back to London for the ceremony. We were aiming to be out of the house by 5:30am, so we could get to London at around 7:30-8:00. I had to be in the TH gym by 8:45am, and the ceremony started at 10am.

The day started off at 4am in the morning, when my alarm went off. I turned it off and then went straight back to sleep. :yawn: Next time I was conscious, I realized it was already past 5am!! I ran and used the washroom, and brought my makeup etc. in to my room. Then I went to wake my brother up. We didn’t leave until a little after 6am.

The drive to London was uneventful, because we were all tired, I slept some more in the car. My mom missed the turn we normally take to get to campus and we got lost for a bit in a residential area. I saw all the names of the roads and they all sounded so familiar but I didn’t know how to get out of the residential area! Time was getting tight because it was 8:35am already. Eventually we turned into a road I knew would lead to another road and get onto campus.

I left my mom with instructions on where to park, and how to get to the ceremony, and told them to drop me off. Then I ran all the way to the community centre, where I was to rent my graduation gown and hood. Thankfully I wasn’t the only one who was running late. There were still long, long lineups. A line up to pay for the graduation regalia, a lineup to receive the stuff, and another lineup to get the hood. But I was supposed to have done all this and have arrived at the TH gym by 8:45am. I arrived there at 9:25am. You’d think that they’d tell you to try get there earlier if they anticipated such long lineups!

At the TH gym there was yet another lineup, where we had to get into alphabetical order. Here I ran into more of my classmates. It’s a little sad that I may never see some of them again. We stood there for another 25 minutes or so until we were told to walk over to Alumni Hall, where the ceremony was held.

What happened was there was a stage at the front, with the chancellors and guest speakers and whatnot. The seats right at the front were reserved for graduates, and the back for the guests. When our time came an usher would prompt us to get out of our seats and we would line up at the side of the stage. Then we would walk up one side of the stage, kneel down in front of a chancellor and receive some comments while another person put a hood on our backs, and then walk off the other side of the stage.

I was kind of in a panic because I was supposed to get up there not once but twice. Once to get a degree and another time to receive a diploma. I kept on asking every usher I saw what I should do after I got the first one, but no one knew anything. So I decided to go up the first time and watch when to go up again. I shouldn’t have panicked so much because it went fine.

Truthfully the entire ceremony was boring. I’d been to graduation ceremonies before for other friends and those didn’t seem nearly as long as this one. Maybe it was because this time I was the one who was graduating. I was really glad to see a lot of my profs involved in the ceremony though. They all smiled and said “Congratulations Yvonne” etc. They’re all nice men/women and I was glad to have been taught by them and then have them see me off into the future. Sounds cheesy but it’s true.

Having been to these ceremonies before I knew it would take me a while to hunt down my family amongst the crowds. So beforehand I told them exactly where to stand so I could find them easily, and I did. It still took a while to get to them though. It was pouring outside, and most people stood under the shelter waiting for the rain to stop, and the people at the back (like me) couldn’t understand why the crowd wasn’t moving. We ran across to the shelter of another building where it was less crowded and waited there.

After the rain had died down a bit, we went to get some free cake. The cake was delicious, I wish I had gotten a photo of it. It was a chocolate cake with cream, and it was not too sweet at all.

Next we went around taking lots, and lots of photos. They’re all in the link at the beginning of this post. I wanted to capture the beauty of the campus. (I’d taken lots of those kinds of photos before, but I lost them when my laptop was stolen). We continued taking photos until the battery on the camera ran out. And it was so weird! My dad’s digital camera has this lens that opens up when you turn on the camera and retracts when you turn it off. When the batteries ran out, the lens didn’t retract, leaving it completely exposed! We did have a camera case so we stuck the camera inside the case, but it was an extremely tight fit.

My dad was starving at this point (it was around 3:30pm or so) so we went for lunch. Then it was another long drive back home.

One last thing. My parents bought me flowers (I’m holding them in a lot of the photos) from the university. It cost a ridiculous amount of money - $45! I have to say that those prices are just way tooo much, but people were willing to buy them.