This is how real people live.

Hi again!

So the last time I wrote I was on my way to orientation. Lauren and I met up for breakfast (she continues to feed me, even now that I have my own food...but between us we are quickly exhausting the options on our list of "Easy, Cheap Meals We Know How To Cook That Actually Taste Good." Example: I'm making tortellini tonight, for the second time. If anyone has suggestions, we would both appreciate it greatly.

Orientation time. It took us a bit to actually find the building, but once we did we realized how nice this campus is. There's a sort of quad in the middle of this big square of student resource-type offices - health center, library, international office, etc., and when the sun is out, it's definitely a nice place to sit. However, when the sun is not out, it's about 55-60 degrees here...not too bad, but a cool change from what we left back in the States. Friday's orientation consisted of a million speakers talking to us about some pretty boring stuff...immigration laws, health care laws, what to do if we want to buy a car, consumer protection laws, actual law laws that protect you from getting mugged (don't worry Mom, it doesn't happen very often)...it would have been miserable except for a few things:
1. They gave us morning tea, lunch, and afternoon tea...now the tea itself is actually fairly disgusting, but the biscuits (cookies) they feed us are delicious, especially these Australian brand cookies called Tim Tams, which are chocolate cookies covered in more chocolate, but not so sweet that you wish you hadn't eaten them after eating three.
2. Most of the speakers were hilarious, or wonderfully delightful to watch. Somethings I noticed about them were that every speaker dressed very differently from the others, some were very formal and wore suits or black dresses, others wore jeans and casual shirts. It was really refreshing to see that not every person at this university is a clone...not to say that BC is full of robots, but I think in America there's generally a stricter dress code for professors and state officials. Also, every single person that spoke was POSITIVE about our experience in Australia and at Murdoch. This is a huge difference from the States, even from BC. They presented us with opportunities, not consequences. I don't think one person mentioned anything along the lines of "don't do this, you'll get into trouble" or "if you do this, this is the bad thing that will happen to you." It was lovely.
3. I met more Americans! Lauren and I met up with Danielle, another student from BC - she's been here a week already, and most of it has been pretty lonely, so she was happy to see us too. We also met Keith, from Miami, Blaine, from San Diego, and Justin and Joe, from Minnesota. We didn't actually meet many international students on Friday, and no Aussies yet, but meeting more Americans was comforting.
After orientation we had dinner at Danielle's flat - she lives in the newer part of the village, so her flat is very condo-on-the-beach-in-a-nice-part-of-Florida-esque. All white walls, nicer bathrooms (mine looks like a high school locker room bathroom, stalls and everything), heating and air conditioning, ceiling fans, all white furniture...even her bed and desk are bigger. I'm not complaining about my flat though, I think it's homier. Or it will be, once I get my pictures on the wall and FINALLY buy the right light bulb for my desk lamp (two failed attempts so far, I'm not sure why this is so hard). I'll take pictures of my room and put them online, but basically my flat consists of a kitchen/common room...the kitchen has a good number of appliances: toaster, oven, microwave, big refrigerator and freezer, stove (with gas burners that you have to light, I'm a little freaked out about those), water heater for tea and hot cocoa (if you manage to find any that's tolerable)...and it came with a small table and three chairs. The common room has two couches really similar to couches we have at BC, an end table, a coffee table, a white board (I wrote a kind little message about turning off lights and appliances before we leave, because a few times I've come home to find the television on and the lights on and nobody in the living room, I hope my roommates don't hate me already), and sliding glass door that goes out onto a little balcony that overlooks the courtyard between my flat and Lauren's flat. The bedrooms are a decent size, I think about the same size as a BC double, but more like a square instead of a narrow rectangle. I have plenty of space because I don't really have any possessions other than clothing and my computer. The walls are painted brick, and the lighting sucks, so it occasionally feels a bit like a cell, but pictures on the wall and a lit desk lamp will fix that. My only other issue is that these rooms are FREEZING. It doesn't help that I definitely did not bring enough warm clothing for the climate down here, but I feel like I need to wear gloves when I go to bed. We don't have central heating but we do have these space heaters that get pretty darn hot - I put mine right at my feet when I'm sitting at my desk and after five minutes I have to move it so I don't melt my sneakers.
Still jetlagged - I've been going to bed before nine every night this week and waking up before eight. No human being actually needs that much sleep, so it's a bit frustrating. Tonight we're going out to Freo (Fremantle, the hotspot of Western Australia) so hopefully I'll be active enough to stay awake a few hours later.
Yesterday was eventful. A bunch of us had signed up for a "tour" of Murdoch, so we showed up in front of the international office at 10am, assuming we'd be walking around campus with one of the orientation volunteers, hopefully stopping inside a lot of the buildings to warm up and down some disgusting tea...but we were in for so much more. There were about 25 students on the green...around 10:15 (Aussie time is a bit slower than US time) they announced that we would be broken into teams and sent on a self-guided, Amazing Race around campus, complete with clues and tasks and prizes. Okay, great, this sounds like fun. And it was, for the most part, except I ended up with Jared, the South African Sergeant on my team, who insisted that we run EVERYWHERE. Also on my team was Mark from Georgia, Lisa from Germany, and Daniel from an island off the coast of South Africa that I'm sure I can't spell. Daniel actually ended up dropping out pretty early because he's got smoker's lungs. Jared's great, lots of fun, but man did I hate him for awhile there. We dashed about, and I swear to God I'll be hearing "come on ladies!" and "come on American!" in my sleep for the next week and a half. We ended up coming in third, and got Murdoch t-shirts and bags as prizes, but honestly I'm not sure how much of the campus I even remember, it was such a blur. We had a barbecue afterwards...funny thing about getting free lunch from the Aussies - they never have more than one dish to eat. We had snags (sausages) and rolls for lunch, and they had cans of soda, but that was it. The day before at orientation we'd had sandwiches and sodas. They always encourage you to eat more of what they have ("you never know when you're gonna eat again!"), but they don't ever have any sides or other options. Just something else to get used to.
After lunch we headed back to Kardy's, first to get cellphones, then to do some serious grocery shopping. Hello, real world. It was kind of stressful, realizing that I had to buy food that would not only keep me from going hungry, but that I knew how to cook, that would be moderately healthy, and that wouldn't put me in debt. I think I got at least a week and a half's worth of groceries...we'll see how that works out...for fifty Australian dollars. I really know how to cook surprisingly little, so I bought a lot of pasta, peanutbutter (crunchy! that's the great thing about buying for yourself, you have nobody else's tastes to worry about), fruit and vegis (they're wicked expensive down here though, apples are $2.68 per kilo...not sure what that works out to in pounds, but it's more expensive than the US), rice, some chicken thighs, tortilla wraps, eggs...we'll see how this all goes. The cellphone shopping was successful, I got a month's worth of minutes and texts for $30, plus spent $50 on a phone. Yikes. The girl at the counter, as Keith from Miami pointed out, looked just like the girl who works at the counter in the abortion clinic in Juno, but she was way happier. I also made my first alcohol purchase yesterday - a six pack of beer called Barefoot Radler. This made my day. First of all, we walked into this liquor store called Cellarbrations and didn't even get carded; the two twenty-somethings working behind the counter were really friendly and helpful. Apparently they get paid $20 an hour, so I'm not surprised. I walked around, pretty clueless, for awhile, then found this bottled beer that had "barefoot" in the title, and it was $16 for a six pack, so I said YES, I will buy that. I was extremely excited about it, and asked the guy at the counter if it was a good choice, he said yes, apparently radlers are infused beers, and then he said "Oh yeah, and you get a free pair of socks with it." CAN THIS DAY GET BETTER? No way. I haven't tried it yet, but some of my roommates said it's good too. And the free socks are bright blue and green and have feet all over them. Don't worry, I'll take pictures.
To get all the groceries back to our flats we pushed the shopping carts down the street back to the village, and what an adventure that was. Australian grocery carts (they're actually called "trolleys") are just as wobbly and crooked as American carts, so we were constantly having to swerve the carts to avoid falling off the sidewalk. At least they have sidewalks here. It's difficult to avoid the cars too, because of the whole left-side-of-the-road-driving thing, so all in all it's quite a feat that we made it back to the village in one piece. While I was unloading my groceries (such a nice task too, and how wonder-full is it to look in the cabinet and refrigerator afterwards and see all that food?) I met my new neighbor Julie, she lives in the flat next to mine; she's from Ohio and goes to Tufts. We ended up talking for a long time, and realized that we will hopefully be in at least one class together. She's studying environmental science too. NICE.
Lauren made dinner last night - stir fry, delicious, we had some champagne to celebrate, and went to bed early AGAIN. I woke up at 7:30 today, a bit of an improvement, but I'm still hating this jetlag. Still awaiting my roommate...the three flatmates I've met are great, but when people are home they stay in their rooms. Lauren's roommates are always out and about, so her place is a bit more fun to be in. She has this French roommate named Octave (Ahk-tahve) who cooks really well, and leaves notes on the whiteboard telling people to eat the food he's made.
I'm off to hopefully master the Fremantle public transportation system, and possibly go to my first pub...peace and love (: