Nothing substantial or exceptionally exciting happened throughout the middle of this week. I spent most of my time hanging out with the kids here at Unilodge, where I live.
On Tuesday a few of us decided to go down to the beach for the afternoon. Getting there was considerably easier than I'd thought--all it took was jumping on the proper tram right outside of my building and riding it down through the city for 20 to 30 minutes until you hit the water. The beach was called St. Kilda Beach, and apparently by Australian standards it's nothing to go on about. Every time I'd brought up going to the beach to Elisa last week she would tell me about how shit Melbourne beaches are, and that you had to go further up the coast to find anything worthwhile. She must be crazy, I thought it was a lovely beach. We hung out in the sun for a couple of hours, taking occasional dips into the water, walking along the shore, and hunting for cool seashells.
After a while we stopped in at a bar/restaurant on the beach and the others got beer while I sipped on some tasty pineapple juice. We wandered around about a little more and eventually found a nice plot of grass with some shade under a stretch of palm trees for an afternoon nap. We never really ended up napping, but it was nice sitting around and chatting. We caught the tram back home some time between five and six, so it got quite packed for a bit there, but we basically road the line from start to finish so by the end it was nice and empty again. I think I was supposed to be doing more things with everyone later that night, but the sun had zapped all of the energy out of me and I ended up falling asleep for an unanticipatedly long nap around 9pm or so.
Wednesday was rather overcast and eventually thunderstorms rolled in throughout the night. I spent most of the day inside, but at one point I did venture out to go down to the bank to pull out a bank cheque to finally pay off my bond. Unfortunately, when I gave it to the oh-so-helpful asian front desk girls they started asking if I'd already gotten my passport back. When I informed them that I had taken in out for perhaps 30 minutes last week to set up my bank account and then brought it promptly back to them, they began to look skeptical and quite lost. They haphazardly looked about for a little while before informing me that they couldn't find it. Throughout the process though, I was interrogated as to whether or not I actually brought it back, because they'd suddenly lost all recollection of the event. Dumb asians. I gave them the date that I had the passport out so that they could look through their security cameras for a better idea and left them to it.
Thursday was generally nice, other than the ongoing battle with the people at the front desk. I'd gone back down in the afternoon and got to speak with the manager/douche named Bradley. He swore he couldn't see anything on the tapes and continued to question me about whether or not I'd actually brought it back. I'm not entirely sure why they think that I'd lie about that, but they're all obnoxious. I even game him a window of about 1 and a half hours of when I would have been in the office, he's so useless. Luckily, a nice distraction from unilodge's ineptitude arrived in the form of a nice afternoon outing to one of the popular hang out spots nearby called South Lawn.
It's a really small little patch of grass in the center of the University of Melbourne campus where a lot of people like to hang out. We met up with a couple other unilodgers there and spent an hour or two out baking in the vicious, ozone-free sun. A fun game of both frisbee and a soft australian rules football being tossed about ensued. There were about 8 of us all spread out in a large circle hurling either of the two objects in any direction at any given time. The variation of ways to through the football was rather entertaining--there was the traditional american football overhand, british rugby underhand, and then the weird aussie rules punching and kicking. It was wicked hot out in the sun, but it was loads of fun.
We all went out for ice cream and then pizza afterwords. There's a little cafe called Intersection Cafe a couple of blocks from unilodge that has a half price pizza special on Thursday nights. I got a really tasty hawaiian pizza for 5 bucks. I love Intersection Thursdays. Everyone ate in the lounge and watched the end of Might Joe Young on tv. Later that night Kate, another junior animal science major from Penn State who I know from a few classes, arrived and we hung out for a little before I retired to my room to look over class information for the next day of orientation. Oooooh, orientation.
Friday morning I got a phone call around 9am from Katie, one of the Americans that lives here, saying that she realized that the asians downstairs had given her my passport. That was a huge relief, and a testament to just how dumb those girls are, passing out the wrong passport and then trying to make it look like I never brought mine back. Ugh, so stupid. Anyways, I quickly got ready, had some cold pizza for breakfast, and then left with some of the girls for orientation.
Our first meeting was a giant information session that everyone had to attend from 9:45 to 11. A really spastic lady that looked a lot like a gopher was giving the presentation. She was really annoying, the the entire thing was basically useless. Each slide was about something important that we should probably know about, but it never actually gave any information, just links or other sources where we should go to find out all of that information. For "fun" she threw in a few interactive slides where we had to answer some extremely hard trivia questions, and by extremely hard I mean not. The theme was "What do these mean?" with the first set being "Ta" for thank you, "Arvo" for afternoon, and "Hows it going" for--you guessed it, how's it going. At one point a traffic officer got up to talk to us about how much he doesn't like public speaking with some brief smatterings of general road safety like, don't drink and drive, wear a seatbelt, and if you're driving a car, be careful. Just in case anyone forgot.
After the meeting, chaos ensued. Essentially, everyone was supposed to split up based on their respective schools like, science, art, architecture, economics, etc. A paper had been passed around earlier detailing what "faculty" everyone was under so that you knew which of the 8 or so sessions you were supposed to go to. For some reason, I was put under vet science, along with maybe one other person out of the entire list, while Kate, who has the exact same major as me back home, was put into something about land management? Gopher woman started calling out different groups and instructing them to leave to their various locations around campus, and eventually I got up and asked which session I was supposed to go to, since vet science wasn't listed anywhere as an option. I was told that I was supposed to go to the vet science building, how hard could that be? Well, as I was about to find out, it was a lot harder than it should have been.
I left the building and consulted my map of campus that I'd been given. Apparently the vet science building wasn't even on campus, and was instead located in a very small little insert labeled "western precinct." On the map, then, there's an arrow pointing down Grattan St saying "this way to western precinct," but then once you look at the inlet, the building appears to be on the corner of Flemington St and Park Rd. And yeah, that was about all of the direction I had. I spent about 30 or so minutes wandering around, asking various people for directions, until I finally found the buiilding.
Once I got to the building, however, the woman at the reception desk looked at me like I was slightly retarded when I started to explain that I'd been sent there for my orientation. I was left to wait around in the little office while she made a few phone calls, I suppose, before coming back out to inform me that I'd been sent to the wrong place and that I needed to go right back to where I'd come from. Lovely. She tried to be nice and tell me about some short cut that would get me back to campus faster than the way I'd came, something about cut through a car park, down some stairs, take a right, then a left, and you should be home free. Oh, if only that was how things had worked.
I ended up spending the next 45 minutes or so wandering about lost in a lovely little residential areas. To give it some credit, the neighborhood was really cute and all of the houses were lovely, but I wasn't really in the appreciative mood at the time. There wasn't a single soul out on the streets either, so I just kept on a wandering until I acknowledged that I probably wasn't heading towards campus anymore. I finally found another main road and was informed by the first person I found that campus was way back the direction I'd just come. Cool.When I finally did find the damn science seminar, I was extremely hot and tired, my feet were sort, and I was definitely getting sunburnt--I hadn't planned on an hour and a half long excursion through Melbourne when I was getting ready that morning.
As I walked in, the presentation just finished. My friends told me that I didn't miss much, and that whatever information I had missed was in their little packets that they had been given, along with an appointment time for when they should go to schedule their classes later that afternoon. I went down to the front to collect my packet, the man checked my passport, rummaged around in the bin of packets for a while, and then regretfully informed me that mine wasn't there. Naturally. I was given instructions to go to a different building at 1:00. I had about a half hour before one, so I went off with the rest of my group to go find the where we were going to be given our free lunches.
Once we found the courtyard where lunch was going to be served, we realized that all we were going to be getting was a plain white box with a sandwich, piece of fruit, and juice box in it. You couldn't just get lunch though, because that'd be too easy, so we had to wait for the next 25 minutes or so while we watched some guy perform the most ridiculous box stacking, unstacking, and then restacking again. He'd spent the first 10 minutes we were in the courtyard taking all of the boxes, conveniently stacked in trays for easy transport, out of the trays and stacking them up on two picnic tables. Once he'd nearly finished that job, a group of other people showed up with big fold out tables and decided that the boxed needed to be put on there. So then we got to watch for another 15 minutes as they had to restack all of the boxes back into the carrying trays and then stack them back up on the other tables. It must have been a lot more fun than it looked.
By the time I was able to get my little box of shit free food, it was 12:55 so I had to leave and go find whatever building my packet and appointment time were in. Once I found the building, it turned out that no one there had any idea of what I was talking about. I spent the next half our or so being sent from one place to another, and talking to plenty of good-intentioned but also uninformed people. Eventually, I was finally put in contact with a woman who actually knew what I was referring to, but she regretfully informed me that whoever was meant to bring the packets to their building hand't arrived yet and that I should come back at 2.
At that point I was beyond frustrated and annoyed, so I just went back to my room to eat the rest of my cold pizza after tentatively tasting the sandwich thing I had waited so long to get earlier. A little after 2 I went back to the building, waited around for a while again because the woman I'd spoken to earlier had apparently gone to lunch, and was then directed to yet another building. Luckily it was the last building that I had to go to on this endless search. It turns out I didn't exist in the science system, due to the vet science folly, and didn't even have a packet after all. No one could figure out why I'd been registered under vet science, though, because that isn't even an undergraduate course.
Eventually, though, I was allowed to sit down with one of the guys there to finally go about enrolling in classes. Going off of the study plan that I had had to send in with the courses I had initially wanted to take, I was already enrolled in two of the classes that I wanted, Australia Now and Australian Wildlife Biology, and a third biology class that I didn't want. I was told that to get rid of the biology class and schedule my other two classes, one being a genetics class and whatever 4th class I chose, I would have to go to the department of each class and get permission from someone to enroll in the class, fill out some paper work, go back to that building, find that guy, and then have him schedule the classes for me. Next week is going to be so much fun.
After the huge headache of the entire morning and afternoon, I wasn't in the mood to socialize with everyone and spent some time up in my room until Kate came over. We decided that we wanted to go out to eat, so without much of a plan, we headed off to Lygon St, a big street a block or two away that is known for its endless array of restaurants. We wandered up and down a few blocks, bombarded with billions of choices of places to eat: italian, indian, chinese, japanese, thai, indonesian, malaysian, turkish etc. After a lot of indecision, I decieded to take her to this one cafe/pub place I had passed several times while going back and forth to the bank. It was only just around the corner off of Lygon, but it was exponentially quieter and less hectic, so I was a fan. It was also moderately priced, which was nice since a lot of the restaurants on Lygon are also really nice and expensive, and finding any meal under 20 dollars was quite a task.
I had a really tasty, "pick 3" kind of meal for dinner, so I had a some scalloped potatoes, really cheesy pasta, and then grilled chicken breast and vegetables, which ran me only 16 bucks with a drink. Not too shabby. After getting entirely stuffed, we headed back and hung out with everyone else in the courtyard for a few hours before going out to a place called Turf Club, which I had coincidentally found earlier that day on my tour around the city, for the MUSEX (Melbourne University Student Exchange Society) Orientation party for the night.
It's been exceptionally windy and its supposed to start raining and thunder storming at some point this afternoon, so it will probably be another chill, stay inside kind of day. I think I'm going to head back out to Elisa's for the day tomorrow, it's so nice to be able to get out and breathe some fresh country air and take a break from the city. Next week is O-week, which basically has a bunch of different seminars, talks, bbqs, and social gatherings planned at school to get to know people and such before classes start on the 28th. More on that later.
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