I'm here now

So here I am. On my new island (please feel obligated to watch Braveheart if you don't get that reference :-D). I made it safely to campus only to realize that I arrived together with what seems like several thousand Chinese and Indian exchange students.
Seriously, if you walk past the Student Activities Center, which houses a huge dining room with a big window front coming from the West, you might think you were in India. If you approach from the East, you probably would assume you just reached mainland China.
At least I know I am instinctively navigating the Adiminstration in the right sequence because I have happened upon rush hour several times. A lot of them have come with friends, or made friends very quickly because they always travel in packs (that and the fact that they are usually clutching their passport is how you tell them apart from "normal" Asian-Americans) and, for example, when I went to get my student ID there was about 20 Chinese getting theirs. This had an unwanted affect on my ID picture. Thanks to my mother I am in possession of some passport pictures that actually look like me (if you have had the priviledge to view my driver's license or passport lately you will realize that yes, there was a time when Shannon had long hair or even better yet, my train pass which features me not realizing a picture being taken and giving a classic "huh?!" expression).
BUT, because there was so much going on the ID-printer person was sitting there with his eyes glued to the screen giving instructions: "Have you passport ready", waving one hand in the air (you kind of had to time it correctly to hand you ID to him), " have a seat", waving the other hand towards a chair all this time his eyes did not leave his screen "look directly into the camera and smile if you feel like it" (really, he said that, apparently smiling is optional) and "Hold" - then the camera clicked.
UNFORTUNATELY, at this moment there was some prett funny stuff going on outside with the other ID-person (a real life New Yorker in her fifities) trying to handle all these foreign student who could only understand half of what she was saying (to their credit, I'm sure their English teacher didn't have a New York accent - to her credit, some of those Chinese names are difficult to pronounce, i.e. you never really know if you pronounce them the way they're spelled) resulting in general confusion which I found quite amusing. That added to the "smile if you feel like it" comment resulted in another picture to be put in the category "Shannon's odd ID pictures" featuring a half-amused, half "I'm not sure if I feel like smiling" with sort of raised eybrows and not sitting quite straight expression. Plus, I wasn't sitting all the way straight and the camera was zoomed out quite a bit so it almost looks like I was sliding off the chair while the picture was being taken.
So much for planning ahead.
This also reminds me of the story of how we took a "Mystery Drive to China" when I was a kid... a popular story, which shall possibly be recounted at another time.