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Published: February 19th 2008
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My home!
Rob-O, the best hall of residence! Well, we've wasted no time in getting things started with O-Week 2008! As I moved in one day earlier, Saturday seemed to be a much busier day for first year students, as parents, brothers, sisters, boyfriends, and girlfriends made their way in and out of each stairway moving their loved ones into their new homes for the year. Much like my experience as an RA, Steph (our stairway RA) went around helping out the students and their families to get settled in, followed by having a Stairway meeting at her room. It was pretty routine: each of the ressies introduced him/herself, we ate snacks, and talked about the exciting O-Week that lay ahead of us.
We had an opening BBQ out at the lawns surrounding Roberts Hall (or Rob-O as it's called here) and that was a really fun experience to picnic together and get to know one another. One of the most surprising and even humourous things about our introductions was in the name game and country/city affiliation. Just like a silly person that I am, I was mentally associating names with clothing/glasses/jewelry/hairstyles. I felt like I had done a pretty good job at getting to know many people....until
Cooking up some eats
The O-Staff students cooking for the BBQ welcome dinner the next day....when everyone had changed clothes/straightened or curled their hair/removed some of their jewelry, etc. Needless to say, I had to revisit the board of photos for the building and re-learn everyone's names! :P
Another interesting observation I took note of was in the Australian local students. Each time one Australian introduced himself to another, he/she always had to give more descriptive details as to where the city is located. It was my understanding that if you lived in the same country, you could easily know other locales...but not here in Australia. Many of the students live anywhere from 5 to 7 hours away from each other and have often never visited each other's cities or suburbs. So in a way, we're all internationals!
Following our opening BBQ, we held a very fun and very interesting Trivia Night. Organized by the O-Staff, we were split up into groups and answered a variety of questions in several categories (Sports, Literature, Movies, Music, History). My favorite categories, however, were the challenges that one student from each group had to participate in. These involved anything from bobbing for M&Ms in vats of chocolate to a very humourous dance off competition.
Picnic time
We packed onto picnic blankets and ate to our heart's content :P All in all, we met several ressies during these fun activities and we had a great introduction to the uni life.
Sunday morning, we awoke to the sounds of the O-Staff clanging against pots, pans, and even tooting their horns....literally. I have to admit, being serenaded with a trumpet at 7:00am was not the welcome I was expecting. We walked 30 minutes across town to get some brekkie at none other than Macca's. What's Macca's, you ask? McDONALDS!!!! Had I known that Macca's was short for this food chain, I might have thought twice about walking there so early in the morning, but in the end I met some great people on our trek to and from the restaurant.
We spent most of Sunday at St. Kilda Beach, which is just about 1 hour from the uni. The water was C.O.L.D. but eventually we ran in it and spent some time playing frisbee in the water, to warm ourselves up. One thing about laying out at the beach or even spending prolonged periods of time in the sun: the sun will absolutely kill your skin here. The Ozone layer is MUCH thinner here than back home. We
My picnic blanket
some students from my stairway had to apply sunscreen 3 or 4 times during our day at the beach, just so we could protect ourselves from the harsh rays of the sun.
We took our lunch break walking through the shops that line the shoreline of St. Kilda, and I even got to see these massive cake shops that Aussies swear by: if you can imagine walking by a Strossner's bakery and finding a piece of the most decadent chocolate mousse cake or red velvet cake.....very divine desserts!
Beginning today, we have been spending time at uni getting our registration and enrolment work out of the way. I spent the majority of today working on getting my ID card, visiting the Faculty of Arts and registering classes for my Masters degree. I'll spend more time describing the degree units and the setup of the Faculty in a later post!
Well, that does it for this entry--lots of things are happening here which makes for very busy but very fun times at uni! More details to come--stay tuned!
~Cindy
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Charlie
non-member comment
N'ma'am
Don't ever spell "humorous" like "humourous" again...you're not British.