Shyzer.com

I need some help from my Shyzerlings. This is y’alls chance to have some direct input as to what goes up here on Shyzer, because I’m struggling. One of my main goals in coming over to Aussie was to write about all the difference, large and small, between The Outback and The States. Once I’d spent some time over here, however, I soon realized that order was a tad taller than I had expected. There are so many small, minute differences between the two that it’s not even funny and I don’t even know where to begin.

So what you see below is what I plan on doing. Instead of writing one drawn out post about a large difference, I’m going to start picking a category and listing all the small differences. And hence, this is where it’s your (yes, YOU!!) time to shine. Of course I can think about the normal categories. Classes, Women, Dorm Life, Women, Food, Ladies, Sports, um….Women. But if anybody else can think of anything I’m missing, then fire off a comment and/or e-mail and let me know! Heck, even if you have any specific questions, just ask away and I will answer. I have no idea what y’all want to know about this country, so if I get absolutely no responses to my request here, I better not hear any bitching from the peanut gallery!

Dorm Life

Initially, I was going to make the first category I did “classes,” but then I realized that A) I haven’t really been to enough to accurately explain them and B) I should probably wait until I receive a few grades back before commenting on how easy / hard they are. So I thought about where I spent the majority of my time here and realized that “Dorm Life” was by far the best way to go with this post. For, when you break it down, I probably spend a good 75% of my time here in the dorms, either sleeping or conversing with my fellow Cutler-ites.

Probably the easiest and most visible difference between the dorms here and back home is the fact that the dorms here are co-ed. And by co-ed, I’m not talking about males on the top floors and females on the lower ones. There are 20 people on my corridor, ten of which are male and ten of which are female. I’m not sure if every other corridor has such an even split, but I do know that if not, it’s only one or two off. Since both the showers and toilets are community, that means that we also get to share the three shower and toilet cubicles as well. Personally, I like this change much, much better than the way they do things back home. There’s just something about having females around that make things much more laid back. Back home on the all-guys floors, they tended to be wild, smelly, uncontrollable environments. And while I’m never one to turn down getting wild and smelly from time to time, it’s not too fun to have to live 24 / 7 in a place like that.

Another difference is the number of dorms they have on campus and their difference in size / commodities. The size of Newcastle Uni is relatively the same as USC’s (20k compared to 26k). Yet here, there are only 4 real dorms. TEDS, International House, Evatt, and…um…something else. I can think of 12 dorms right off the top of my head back at USC. So naturally, since there are fewer dorms here, they don’t rank them like they do back home. There aren’t Freshman, lower class, and upper class dorms, with the freshman dorms being just a notch above living on the street and the upper class dorms resembling a Suite at the Hilton. Here, they are all pretty much the same and they are actually quite nice. The size of my room is slightly bigger than the freshman rooms back home, yet this time I don’t have to share it with anybody, which is a HUGE plus in my book. Both my years back home I was forced to share a room with another person, but over here not only do I have my own room, but it’s fully carpeted, equipped with a heater, and comes with linen service among other things. Every Tuesday, for those of us using the sheets that came with the room, we get a fresh set. In fact, the rooms here come surprisingly stocked. A pillow, three blankets, 25 hangers, two glasses, two spoons, two tea cups with saucers, a desk lamp, a phone, etc. These dorms are definitely better than the crap I had to live through my two years back home.

As far as the actual dorm life itself, that too is pretty different than back home. At USC, pretty much every student has a TV and computer. Whenever you walk into somebody’s room, you could bet on the TV being turned on as well as the computer. But over here, I only know two people with TVs. Aiden has one, but he can’t get reception worth shit. The rooms here don’t come equipped with a cable slot for the TVs (which might be explained by the fact that they don’t really have cable over here, but that’s for another post.) Memma has the other, but that’s only because she’s in North Wing, which for a little extra comes with a TV, A/C, and a private bath. It’s kind of weird not seeing a TV every three seconds, but at the same time it’s nice. Besides the four or five shows I watch, I rarely used my TV back home. As far as the computers, pretty much everybody here has one, but people aren’t on them all the time. The only IM service used over here is MSN, which is a far cry from the AIM that everybody back home uses. But IM just doesn’t seem to be nearly as popular over here. Sure, there are a few people who get on to chat with their friends from time to time, but they only tend to talk to one or two people at a time. Whenever I sign onto AIM, I get about seven or eight IMs immediately and usually end up carrying on six conversations at once. Therefore, the lack of excessive IM on here equates to people not being on their computer as much which equates with more conversing out in the hallway and general hanging out, which again is a difference I greatly enjoy.

However, for all the variations that I appreciate between the dorms at Newcastle and USC, there is one that I absolutely hate; the way the food system is operated. Back home, you have the option of purchasing a meal plan to eat on campus since it’s basically the only way you can eat day in and day out if you live in a dorm without an oven and stove. Well it’s no real difference here at Newcastle. Since we live in TEDS, our room and board has 16 weekly meals built into the cost. Yet over here, there’s only one place we can eat and we have to go by their hours. Breakfast from 0745 until 0900 and dinner from 1730 until 1930 during the weekdays. On the weekends, breakfast / lunch is served from 0900 until 1300 and dinner goes from 1730 until 1830. That’s it. I mean, seriously, who the fuck gets up for breakfast before 0900??? And what about those of us who eat dinner at 2100?! Back home, you eat what and when you want to eat. If I get hungry around noon, I can go eat Pizza Hut, Burger King, Chick-Fil-A, Subway, or go to any of the 15 or so cafeterias across campus. Also, if I do chose a cafeteria, I can have my pick of what to eat. Burger, chicken, sushi, sandwiches, stir-fry, Mexican, etc. as well as being able to choose from 15 different side dishes, 10 different drinks, and 5 different deserts. Over here, we get two choices of a main course, two choices of drink, and one desert. Whoopdi-fucking-doo. It feels so much more like I’m staying at a camp or something since I’m eating when they tell me to eat.

But I guess you’ve got to take the good with the bad. Despite the horrible food options, I’d still pick the Newcastle dorms over the ones back home any day of the week. But for now, that’s it on the dorm life. I’m off to wander the corridor in search for people to hang out with. And remember, if there’s anything you can think of that I could write about, drop me a line and let me know.

There’s nothing quite like waking up to “I heart penis” being written on your scalp. What, you say you’ve never had that happen to you? Oh, you’re missing out. In one ever need a reminder that they are living in a dorm, there’s nothing better than writing obscenities on the bare skin of a sleeping man. Needless to say, I was that sleeping man and that’s exactly what I awoke to yesterday morning courtesy of Sez and Memma. Guess I was asking for it when I left my door unlocked Thursday night.

And speaking of Thursday night. It’s Easter break this weekend, which means that we got yesterday as well as next Monday and Tuesday off from school. Therefore, about half of the people here left on Thursday and the other half were leaving on Friday to go home and spend the weekend with their families. Those of us that were still here on Thursday figured the night would be calm and docile since most people were leaving early the next morning. Hannah, Simon, and I spent some time Wandering (a favorite pastime of people in Edwards Hall. If you find that you’re bored, you go Wander and walk up and down the corridors. When you find an open room, you walk in, introduce yourself, and talk to the inhabitants. But you spend no more than 5 minutes per room. That’s key.) As we were coming back into Cutler House, we decided to have a little fun with somebody who wasn’t here. I can’t really say what or who because they may be reading Shyzer while on their Easter Break (although I doubt it) but I don’t want to ruin the not-so-funny-for-them-but-hilarious-for-us “surprise” when they get back. By this time, Sez had come out and we all went back into her room to talk. Then before we knew it, Dutch Dave, Alex, Casey, and a whole cast of people I’d never met before were all in our corridor, drinking, socializing, and having a damn good time.

And that’s why I love where I live. Only two people out of the 26 from USC who came here received on-campus housing. There was no rhyme or reason as to who or why, that’s just the way it was. To say that I was lucky doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface, for not only did I get housing, but I was placed on easily the best corridor in Edwards Hall (knows as TEDS). TEDS has two dorms, Cutler and Burnett Houses. Each has three floors (Ground, First, Second) and three wings (East, West, North). That means that there were 18 possibly corridors I could have been placed on and I just happened to stumble onto Cutler Ground East Corridor. If I ever meet the person who selected me to receive housing and then placed me on this corridor, I might just plant a big, wet, sloppy one right across their face.

Sure, we’ve got a few people on this corridor who we never see (ie. the two other Americans who do nothing but hang out with other Americans) but that just means we have a better impression of our corridor. We’re only seeing the people that we like. Take my example from the night before last. Almost every other corridor was dark and quiet. Anybody who was awake and wanted to have some fun was down here on our hall, hanging out and doing their thing. Noise curfew be damned because we didn’t have anybody sleeping! Each and every person who was still here decided to come out, be social, and have some fun.

And that’s what makes this place so much different than my stays in the dorms back home. Maybe it was the fact that I generally loathed all the people who lived around me my first two years of Uni. In fact, I’m sure that had something to do with it. I lived next to some genuine assholes during Year 1 and I know that helped make me jaded about the whole process. It seemed like all they wanted to do was get drunk in their rooms, go out and get drunk, or smoke some weed and then get drunk. I didn’t drink back then and therefore, I was more into the “let’s try and have fun not drinking” mentality, but that didn’t really work for those guys. During Year 2, I lived on a corridor that seemed to act like socializing was an act of Satan. I literally can’t remember a single person leaving their door open while they were home. I’m not exaggerating either. You could offer me a million dollars to name a single person off that hallway (of my Year 1 hallway for that matter) and let’s just say that I wouldn’t be making any plans to retire soon.

So as I sat in Sez’s room, listening to Dave sing a hilarious drunken rendition of a Dutch children’s song, I began to think that being placed on this corridor was a bit of Karma balancing itself out. I think I earned it after my two year sentence in Larborde and Capstone.

But back to Thursday night. Like I said, Dave was again up to his antics and Hannah managed to record him using her camera. In fact, I managed to snag a copy of the videos and find a place for them on Shyzer’s new Media page, so if you want to hear a drunk Dutch guy sing, here’s your chance. Anyway, around midnight Sez, Alex, and I got the munchies. Somebody mentioned cereal as a possible remedy and so we ventured down to the Tea Room. There was only enough milk for two bowl, so I just started throwing the cereal up and catching it in my mouth. Soon I had Sez and Alex doing it in an effort to see who could catch the most in a row without missing. The competition soon grew into throwing cereal at each other’s mouths and before we knew it, we had constructed mini-catapults to launch cereal at Alex. It was around this point where I deemed grabbing my camcorder might pay off and my intuitions turned out to be correct. A Cereal War quickly ensued where all three of us did nothing short of shoving two boxes worth of cereal in each other’s hair and down our pants. An hour later we were all in the three showers laughing and talking of how much cereal was in places cereal wasn’t meant to go. I managed to grab 35 minutes worth of footage, which is sitting on Alex’s computer. Only problem is that it’s about 10 gigs, so compressing it is in order before I can get it up here on Shyzer.

I think the capper of the evening was when I climbed into bed. It was close to 0600 and I had just started to drift off to sleep when the phone rang. You know the feeling when your on the verge of that wonderful, intoxicating feeling of sleep as its warm grasp envelopes your body only to have a loud, piercing noise scare it away? Well imagine that, only twenty times worse when I heard that phone ring. I grabbed the receiver, picked it up, and started off with a pleasant “Okay, which one of you moth^*( f$*#ing bastards just work me up?! I’m going to kill you!”

Imagine my surprise when I heard my mom laughing her head off on the other end. I wish everybody had such a great sense of humor as my family does.

After reading my previous post again today, I must apologize for its sheer level of craptitude. That was just pure boringness to anybody who read it and I feel ashamed for it flowing from my own fingers. So in order to make up for it, I give you this. That’s right, I finally finished the Aussie bios for all the people here. I was being hounded by the people from my corridor to finish it and “not say anything bad about us and make it funny.” I must say, I was certainly feeling the pressure. I don’t think I’ve strongly conveyed the fact to these people that not everything on Shyzer can be gold!! I know I spoil you all with my witty insults and my clever penis jokes, but unfortunately, writing is ten times more difficult.

Not to spoil you all at once or anything, but my flash drive finally arrived in the mail yesterday, so you know what that means. You don’t? Oh, well then let me spell it out for you. I have many pictures here on my hard drive. Until yesterday, I had no means for transferring them over to the Shyzer Gallery. But now that I have my flash drive…So go have a gander if you have some free time and check it out from time to time, because between all the digital cameras here and my newfound 512mb of USB drive deliciousness, I have a feeling the amount of pictures I collect is going to increase ten fold. I haven’t put captions on all the pictures yet, but I put enough on some as to identify most of the main people so that you’re not staring at them and going “Uh…who the hell are these people?” Also, most of the current photos uploaded are from Hannah’s camera. I’ll get my photos up soon.

Also, the Radio Blog has been updated. I realized that I had the program on my laptop to make the files necessary for making the radio files, so I converted a few of the new songs I’ve found recently. The ones currently uploaded are Bush mashups that some guy did. They’re quite brilliant if you ask me and if your little heart desires to download them, they can all be found here.

But I am off to watch movies and eat cake. It’s Josh’s 24 birthday today (Hahaha, he’s old!) and even though he busted up his leg in a rugby game last night and then was subsequently forced to endure Luke’s unrelenting attempts to blind him in the hospital using a pen light and a magnifying glass, his spirits are high. So wish my fellow American a happy birthday and enjoy the pictures / bios / music.

I told y’all I hadn’t forgotten about Shyzer.

I’m not sure what exactly kept me from posting this week. I just blinked and wham, it was Saturday night. Monday night we cooked the rest of our sausages leftover from a cookout Sunday and Tuesday / Wednesday were pretty much laid back, relaxing days. St. Paddies Day was fun, Friday I used all my Internet time at once and pretty much spent today answering e-mails and writing essays and whatnot. But don’t let the laid back attitude fool you. I’m still having more fun here than I’ve had in ages. I just need to make sure I don’t stray too far away from the real Goob, if that makes any sense.

In case the glaring light off my head in the recent cam pic didn’t clue you in, I shaved my head again this week. I grew bored and annoyed with the hair and decided that it was either time to let it grow out long again, a la the Jesus Look, or lop it all off and start over fresh. And now, as I sit here running my hand over my head, I can’t help but think that I almost forgot how much of a freeing feeling this actually is.

Tomorrow I’m heading back to the beach, as I did last Sunday. I’ve never really enjoyed the beach back home because in all honesty, they blow. But the beaches here are amazing. When we went last week, most of the Aussie’s with us all stared at the waves and commented on how small they were. If I had transported those waves back home, they probably would have been some of the biggest ones of the summer. So frankly, I can’t wait to see how much larger they are tomorrow.

I promise next week will bring with it more frequent posts. I’m about 85% done with the Aussie cast page that I’m making. I have all the pics and info and have written most of the people’s bios. The few that I have yet to do are proving to be the hardest, but I’m aiming to have them done within a day or two.

And with that, I’m going back to the conversation with Alex, John, and Sez that is going on right behind me. Did I mention it’s 0300 and we are going to the beach in the morning?

God, I love this country.

Monday morning, I awoke startled and worried that I had missed my class. I was dressed and headed towards to door within 6 seconds when I realized that 1) I was in Australia and I don’t care about this semester and 2) I WAS IN AUSTRALIA AND I DON’T CARE ABOUT THIS SEMESTER! Of course, as luck would have it, I still had plenty of time to make my class, so I stripped down, snagged a towel, and headed for the showers.

Just as I was washing the shampoo out from behind my eyelids, I heard a guitar start wailing from within the corridor. Never one to pass up an opportunity to sing in the shower, I began a heavy chorus of “Duh, duh, duuuuuh. Duh, duh, da duuuuuh” until the music finally subsided minutes later. As I stepped out of the shower room, I was greeted by Aiden and Memma standing outside my room wondering where I was. It only took a second before they saw me and greeted me. “Oh, so you were awake! Since it was past noon and we hadn’t seen you all day, we thought we’d wake you up with some calming music. Guess we’ll have to try it again later this week.”

I guess my reputation for sleeping in is global now. At least I know I have friends who care enough to give me an early heart attack before lunch.

Everybody here raise a hand if you thought the previous entry was extremely grotesque. That’s what I thought =) If the obvious wasn’t already clear here, let me state it for you. My mates here now know of Shyzer and enjoy it. The previous “story” was written by my friend Sez. I told her she could write something and I’d post it for a day, she wrote that and didn’t believe I’d post it, and me, being the stubborn and hard headed person that I am posted it since I promised to do it before hand. But it’s been a day now and so it’s down. Don’t worry, that’s the last time somebody else will write here on Shyzer (except for Fellner, who still has an entire month’s worth of authorship still in queue from winning the Goob Experience!) But no, I was not hacked and yes, I did watch as she hit the Publish button herself. If that didn’t show that I’m a man of my word, I don’t know what will.

So…anybody who had the “pleasure” of reading that story, I pity you. And if you missed it, well then YOU SHOULD CHECK SHYZER EVERY DAY! You just have to know Sez in real life to appreciate and love how crazy she is. I’m still working on the bios for everybody. I walked around tonight writing down the names and hometowns of the corridor and am typing the their bios as we speak. I bought a cheap flash drive off E-bay so that I can transfer all the pictures and files to a computer that has Internet, so now I get to play the waiting game for the seller to send it to me. He lives in Aussie, so hopefully it will be here sometime this week.

I finally became sunburned for the first time since I arrived here. There are small splotches all over my back where my hands obviously missed in spreading out the lotion and I somehow completely forgot to put any of my neck, so I slightly resemble a lobster from the head up. We spent the afternoon at the beach today riding waves and whatnot. Dutch Dave and I were out in the surf without any flippers or body boards, so the waves were tossing us around like rag dolls. When you consider the fact that Dave is basically a freaking Olympic swimmer, I thought it was a tad unfair. We all had fun none-the-less, especially when the Tsunami Wave came crashing down upon us, resulting in Goob being thrown around on the ocean bed and surfacing completely upside-down.

Anyway, just wanted to give a quick update. Now that I can check / post things on my mate’s computers here in the dorm, I can hopefully respond to things a little quicker and update Shyzer more often.

I officially give up. I haven’t been able to load Shyzer for a few days now on any of the library computers anymore. It will load all the graphics and links to the sub pages on the left hand side, and then lock up and crash the browser. I can get into the MovableType database to load and edit posts, but I just can’t get the damn blog to show up. Color me confused. I can read the comments that have been left so far and have been able to respond to them throught the database, but I’m sick of doing it that way.

With that in mind, it looks like it’s time to let the cat out of the bag and try to see if I can get this baby to load on any of my mate’s computers. Like I said in an earlier post, I intended to keep Shyzer on the DL, thereby allowing me to say anything and everything about whatever I wanted to without having to worry about what people might think. But as I look back over what I’ve posted since I arrived here, there’s not much I’ve written that I wouldn’t want people to read. That being said, you might find that a few paragraphs / posts have pulled a Harry Houdini. Now I expect you all to play along nicely and enjoy the magic show like a good audience would.

I have to say, I’m slightly impressed how I was able to keep Shyzer a secret for 3 and a half weeks. It wasn’t nearly as hard as I initially thought it might be and I doubt I would have had any trouble going the whole 6 months without doing so. Anybody who knows me in real life knows that I talk about Shyzer every seventeen seconds and I was worried that I’d let slip the fact that I run a site during a night of heavy drinking or such. But now that I can talk about it, I guess I can go back to my old habits and bore all those around me with talk of Shyzer!

The summer before I started year 9, Chong and I apparently spent a little too much time indoors watching cooking shows and not enough time outside setting fires in backyards and harassing the neighbors, because somehow the notion that we could cook was implanted firmly in our brains. We eventually discovered a CD of 1001 recipes, so we sat down one afternoon and went through each category picking out dishes that looked decent from the pictures and designed a full 5-course meal. After convincing our families that yes, we were going to cook them dinner and no, we weren’t going to poison them (at least on purpose), they agreed to let us serve dinner the following night.

The next afternoon, we inventoried our kitchens and made our way to the grocery store to pick up what we didn’t have. After grabbing everything needed, we realized we were missing two things on the list. Chong went for the tomatoes and I set off to find an extra box of noodles. I quickly spotted an elderly man going through a stock list the next aisle over and figured I’d save some time and ask him where they were. He saw me walking towards him as I was halfway down the aisle and asked if there was anything I needed, so I went ahead and asked him if he knew where the noodles were. Seeing as how I was still 40 feet away from him and I always equate anybody over the age of 50 as having bad hearing, I initially shouted out my question to him. He looked mildly shocked, but also had the classic “Na, he didn’t just say what I think he did” look upon his face, so he asked again what it was I was looking for, pretending he didn’t hear me the first time. By now, we were face-to-face and I again repeated my query for him. Yet, again, he didn’t answer me and instead looked up at me as if I was the Great Satan himself. After a few seconds, I began to wonder if he was stunned by my birthmark or maybe having a silent heart attack, or even worse, maybe he recognized me as the kid who chopped down a tree in his back yard to build a bridge over the creek. We never did find out who lived in that house. Anyways, I broke the silence and figured I’d give him one last chance to snap out of it.

“Uh, sir…do you know where it is? I’m making dinner for my family tonight and the only thing my siblings will eat is junk food and noodles, so I really need a box of this stuff.” It was right about then that Chong came whirling around the corner and ran up to me half panting from his sprint and half gasping for air from laughing so hard. “Dude, what’s wrong,” I asked, trying to figure out just what in the hell was going on in this store. As he regained his breath, he glanced over my shoulder, saw the elderly employee’s look, and kneeled over with renewed laughter. I spun around to see that every ounce of blood in the poor man had drained far, far down into his body resulting in his face color turning a nice shade of pale-old-white-man. His eyes were so large they were pushing his nose out of place and I finally had had enough. “What in the hell is so goddamn funny,” I demanded a bit too loud and this only fueled Chong’s bit of the funnies. I didn’t know whether to pull a Homer and just start laughing because everybody else was or to start yelling at the old guy. I choose the later. “What? What did I say that is making my friend over there act like a little school girl and is making you look as if you just saw the Titanic pull into harbor? What did I say? AND WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!?”

“Sir, I believe you are looking for Angel Hair pasta, not Angel Dust. The first is food, the latter is a drug that kids like you do these day. I certainly hope you wouldn’t be looking to score your siblings any drugs.” And so from that day forward, I’ve always called it Angel Dust pasta.

But how did the dinner go, you ask? It was fantastic. Everybody pretended to enjoy the food, there were zero cases of food poisoning, and the desert was delicious, which is why I started writing this post in the first place. You see, everything we cooked that night, we made from scratch. From the appetizers to the desert to the freshly squeezed water from the faucet, we both had our hands in every dish served. If I could remember what the desert was, I would tell you, but the only thing I remember from it was the fact that it called for a dose of pure molasses. Sweet, succulent molasses…at least, that’s what I thought it would taste like. If you’ve never tried molasses straight from the jar in its pure form, then you’re doing your stomach a favor. Chong and I both scooped out a spoonful and downed it at the same time, thinking we were about to eat pure sugar in liquid form and experience a new heightened sense of awareness. The only thing I remember experiencing after that was the desire to vomit. I’d never dry heaved over a kitchen sink before that fateful bite, but I was able to check that off my list of things to do before I die that afternoon.

Fast forward seven and a half years into the future to just last week. I was hanging out in the corridor and stopped off at Karen’s room to see what was up. Josh, a fellow American, was sitting on her bed chatting with her and noticed that she had some Vegemite in her cupboard. He asked if he could try some and being curious, I stuck my finger in the jar and scooped some out as well. Just as we both were giving it a go, Karen turned around from her computer, saw what we were doing, and gave a futile cry of “Nooooo” Within a few seconds, Josh and I realized what she was trying to keep us from doing. My mouth sent an urgent message to my brain to spit whatever the hell was in there out and to never, ever again try to ingest it. I summoned up my lougee spitting skills honed from years of contests with my friends and mom and launched the Vegemite straight into the rubbish bin. After brushing my teeth for approximately 90 minutes, I returned and asked how in the hell anybody could eat that stuff.

Yesterday, Sarah and I went on an adventure to make toast. After almost setting middle floor West on fire, we returned to our corridor with the browned bread and sat down to watch Kill Bill 2. After a few minutes, she asked if I wanted a piece and I turned to see my arch nemesis staring me in the face. The toast was covered in butter with a thin layer of Vegemite on top. As I shuddered thinking of my previous experience with the crap condiment, I politely told her there I had no wish to hurl all over her room and that she could keep it all to herself. When she started making fun of me, I told her of my earlier experience and she promised that was no way to eat this “yummy” yeast extract. The only way, she pleaded, was to eat it with copious amounts of butter on toasted bread. I hesitantly plucked the toast from her hand, closed my eyes, and took a bite.

I now have a jar of Vegemite sitting in my cupboard, right next to the bread and butter. Maybe when I get home I’ll give Molasses another try.

As a general rule of thumb, we can miss up to three tutorials without failing the class. As I type this, I am missing my second in two weeks for “America: Good or Evil?” I would go to class, but I still have yet to find the building and I refuse to ask my teacher where it is. The location of the buildings on my map are slightly difficult to understand since it looks as if it was drawn by a retarded two-year old child. Apparently those little redish-brownish swirls are buildings and not giant piles of dung. And while you might think the green blotches around the buildings represent brush or undergrowth, I just now figured out that they represent water fountains.

Water fucking fountains. Water fountains that, according to the map, are the same size as a three story building. I almost think it’s worth failing this class in order to never look at this map again.

I somehow got my Internet to work last night and was able to get on the school network. 15 minutes later I had all three episodes of LOST that I had missed since I left for Aussie and all I have to say is 1) Hurley is freaking hilarious/awesome and 2) Claire is still hooooooooooot. Too bad nobody watches 24 over here. I scanned the entire network and didn’t find a single episode. Over 10,000 gigs on the network and not a single episode of 24. I need to show these people the wonders of Jack Bauer.

(Sidenote: As you can see, the posts didn’t upload like I told them to. I’m at a loss at this point seeing as how I’ve scoured the Internet and tried every solution I’ve found.)

When I came to Aussie four years ago, the only cities I managed to infiltrate were Sydney and Cairns and while both may have been excellent cities to visit, they didn’t really give you a correct impression of the rest of the country as a whole, so I didn’t really know what to expect of Newcastle. Once I finally made it on the correct train and began my journey north during the Day that Wouldn’t Die, I sat back and began to take in the view. Within 20 minutes I was worried.

Not long after leaving Sydney, the train began to weave its way through some rural lands. And I mean rweral to the point where I had to do a double take and go “Wait a minute, how the hell did I get back to South Carolina?!” Every dilapidated station we passed seemed to be falling more and more apart and the towns we passed were almost to the point of abandonment. I speak nothing but the truth when I say that during the entire 3 hour journey, there was not one promising sign that Newcastle would be halfway decent.

On another note, however, I realized something that I never knew about Aussie. Right off the coast is a mountain chain. Half of the train ride we were going through tunnels, passing mountain resorts on lakesides, and basically just snaking our way north. I always envision Aussie as a giant desert with beaches on the coast. But I couldn’t have been further from the truth. The mountains are small in a mountainous sense, but they’re still giant rocks that make you go “whoa…” Think of a smaller version of the Appalachian and that’s what they have here.

When I finally pulled into Newcastle, I begun to relax. Alas, it was another city in the sense of how a city should be. Big. Newcastle itself was a huge industrial town that kind of collapsed in the 1960 and 70s and the world became more and more computerized. So they switched gears and started to become a huge environmental friendly city in an attempt to bring people back to the town. It didn’t really start working until the 1980s, but by now they’ve finally filled a good portion of the town back up. The city itself is pretty big (it seems even bigger at 2 AM when you’re trying to make your way from the pub to the bus stop. They really could place those things a little closer together if you ask me.)

The campus itself is a good 10 minute bus ride away from the actual city, so we are kind of out here in the boondocks. The actual size of the campus is close to the size of USC. The only difference is at least half of it is covered in trees, woods, marshes, brush, etc. They don’t just clear out space to build things. Unless they need a new building, they let fauna grow and frankly, it’s a nice change from the way things are done back home. It remind me of being at camp back when I was a teenager, especially when you consider how the living arrangements are. The school population is around 20,000, but only maybe 2000 kids live on campus. My dorm probably has about 500, (compared to, say, my high school class, which started off with over 800), so when you put that into perspective, it makes everybody feel like family to me. You see the same faces all the time and we do everything together, especially during the first week we were here, called O’Week. We all eat together in a cafeteria just for our dorm, which helps you see and get to know people, and everybody (and I mean everybody) hangs out in the corridor or leaves their door open.

One of the first things I noticed about my fellow dorm mates was the fact that they are so damn young! The guy living next to me is 18 and most of the people on my corridor are 18-20. They don’t act immature or anything, but it’s simply strange being surrounded by so many people who are just experiencing college and who are only three months removed from high school. It makes me feel old, but at the same time I feel like they’re helping keep me young. Plus, it’s always nice being one of the “wiser” ones in the group whose experienced shit before. That being said, it seems like the older kids in the dorm have kind of formed a unique bond. We’ve all got the “been there, done that, let’s now have fun!” attitude. It was slightly humorous this previous Monday morning when all the 1st years were fretting over going to the Tutorial classes since they started this week. “What happens if he asks me a question and I don’t know the answer?” one of our friends asked us. Half the table shifted their eyes around nervously as if they all were frightened of the same scenario happening to them while the other half of us just glanced at each other, muffled our giggles, and waited for somebody to step up and make fun of her. Apparently it was my at-bat, so I responded to her with a completely stern face and said, “Oh, shit, you better hope that doesn’t happen. The exact same thing happened to me in my first Tut and he not only yelled at me, he made me leave the class!” The following five or six seconds was filled with silence while you could literally watch all the 1st years go “Holy shit…is he serious?!” Adam finally burst out with laughter and I couldn’t have been happier, because I myself could hardly hold it in any longer. After dodging the apple thrown in the general direction of my head, I just smiled and told her “Nobody will care. It’s Uni for fucks sake! You could walk in wearing your pajamas and nobody would pay you a second glance.”

I like to think I handled that situation no differently than I would have back home =) And with that, I’m off to dinner where I will hopefully have more fruit and vegetables thrown at me. And who knows, by April, maybe their aim will have improved enough to hit me!