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(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!