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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Day 13: Orientating

Orientations are lame. I feel like I'm a freshman again, being told a lot of really useless information in really corny ways designed to try to make it sound interesting. On the bright side, though, getting lumped in with a bunch of other equally bored students is a great way to bond and make friends.

I got to campus around 11.15, which had me there in plenty of time for the 11.30 lunch. I spotted Emil entirely by accident across the field (his hair is hard to miss), so I joined him and some German girls hanging out on the lawn. This is when I discovered that there had actually been an earlier orientation session as well as the one we were about to go in to, which I had apparently totally missed the memo on. Scarlett (from Winnipeg, Canada) assured me that they hadn't said anything useful at all, and this turned out to be the theme for the day.

We went in to the session, which lasted an hour and a half. The most useful thing I learned there? If you bite off both ends of a TimTam chocolate bar and use it as a straw in your coffee, the chocolate inside will melt and then you can eat it all really fast and it's delicious and they call it a TimTam Orgasm (or, for the more PC crowd, a TimTam Slam). Although I did learn that they have a student blogging position specifically for international students that I may volunteer for (haven't decided yet), and I did meet a pretty cool dude named Gavin, from Toronto, Canada, with whom I traded phone numbers before heading off to the student welcome session for the English, Media Studies and Art History department.

I arrived at the session about five minutes early and struck up a conversation with a girl from Perth named Simone, and a guy from Edinburgh named Aran. Fifteen minutes later, the lecturer still hadn't shown up, so I went to the front office on behalf of everybody waiting patiently in that room and asked what the heck was going on. Turned out, they hadn't told anybody in the department that the welcome was happening. The lady at the desk made some frantic phone calls, and the vice-dean of the department came huffing into the room twenty minutes late and apologizing profusely. We got no useful information from her, either, but she was really cool and chill anyway.

Once she'd finished her hurried presentation, Aran mentioned that he was going to an information session for Arts students in general, so I tagged along because I had nothing better to do. It was also pretty useless, but the lady running it was nice and gave us chips (I'm sorry--she gave us crisps), and I met a dude named Richard from China.

I traded facebook information with Richard and Aran, then headed out to West End to wander about for a while in search of things to cover my blank walls. I had little success, though, because most of the shops were closed. I'll have to go back earlier tomorrow, which should be easy enough, especially if the library tour turns out to be as useless and dull as the rest of the orientating has been thus far.

Just as I arrived home, I got a call from Gavin inviting me over for a beer. He lives about a 1/2 hour walk away, so I went over and hung out with him and his roommate Nick for about three hours, during which time we talked about a million things and watched an episode of Top Gear. Gavin expressed great disappointment with the fact that I have a boyfriend (something I made very clear before agreeing to the beer), so I said better luck next time, and gave him a statistic I heard recently that says that Brisbane has one of the highest female-to-male ratios in the world. I have no idea if it's true or not, having heard it second hand, but either way it seemed to cheer him up.

The route to Gavin's house is creepy, by the way. Especially in the dark, like when I was walking home. It's creepy because the main landmark necessary for navigating it is a cemetery. A huge, dark, old cemetery. I found it delightfully inspiring. Perhaps I'll try my hand at supernatural horror fiction. It would be something new for me.

Just before I arrived home, a sudden movement in the bushes startled me. I turned to look, expecting a bird or maybe a squirrel (what it would have been if I were at UW), and instead I saw what looked like a bush baby. Having googled it, I now realize that it was actually a brush-tailed possum. It stared me down. The experience was rather unnerving (though I still snapped a picture), so I hurried away down the street to my house, where I discovered that my key didn't seem to like the lock on the front door much. Luckily, Troy, my basement-living Aussie roommate, was still up and he helped me get it open.


And now that it's midnight, I'm going to sleep. It's been a loooooong day. Hopefully tomorrow I'll find something to make my blank walls less bleak.

Much love,
Morgan

1 comment:

  1. The eye shine picture is cool. I wonder what Maui would look like hiding high in a tree at night?

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