Last night’s dinner at the Red Scooter was fun. They rented out the entire restaurant, and it looked like a pretty nice place. They had a lot of tables set up throughout, and there were chandeliers hanging everywhere. As we walked in, everyone received a free drink. They had strawberry daiquiris as an option, so I obviously had no choice but to choose that. Before dinner, everyone was walking around, talking, and taking pictures. The servers for the restaurant were going around with two different appetizers. They had shrimp in some buttery sauce that I kept grabbing because they were so good. The other appetizer was a little weird. They came around with trays of those white, folding Chinese food containers, but inside were French fries and a piece of both fried calamari and fried fish. It was a strange combination, especially in a Chinese food box, but they too were good, so I had about three of them. After a little while, everyone sat down for dinner. The meal was served family-style, and the servers came around to all the tables with big plates of everything. The main course was chicken drumsticks and sausages (again??), and they also had garden salad and potato salad and corn and something else that I forgot for sides. The food was good, but it would have been nice to have a little more of everything. It seems that the portions here are smaller than back home. During the dinner, there was a raffle, and some guy at the table right next to mine won a free trip to Sydney for the Mardi Gras in a few weeks. I was pretty jealous. After dinner, we stayed there for a little while longer, dancing, lounging, and exploring the upstairs of the restaurant. People came around with some type of passion fruit cheesecake and those packaged ice cream cones called Drumsticks. At around 11:00, they said the buses were leaving, and were taking us downtown to a bar known as Eurotrash. There were a lot of people going, and unfortunately, the place wasn’t very big. It also played crappy music, was really hot, and overall was not too much fun. A group of us decided to leave, and we started walking around, looking for somewhere else to go. The free buses weren’t taking us back, anyway, so we had no real motivation to stay. While we were walking, I soon realized that we were in Chinatown, actually quite close to where we had been a few nights ago. We walked around for a bit, trying to find somewhere to go, but we couldn’t, so we took cabs back to Monash. Today, a lot of people started to arrive. There were loud announcements on the speaker system all morning, giving information to the new students. Pretty much everyone arriving today or in the next few days is a new student. For lunch, I went outside where they were having a BBQ and ate sausage for like the 100th time in the past week. After that, we decided to teach the English guys how to play American football, and a group of us went down to the fields. When we got there, we noticed a moonbounce off on the other end and walked down to investigate. The only way I could describe what I saw was people literally playing foosball. It was a big moonbounce, and there were ropes going across the blowup “field.” At regular intervals in the ropes, there were spots to tie people in, and goals at either end. A soccer ball was thrown in, and it really looked like humans were being the foosball dummies. I had never seen that before. Next, we played football for about an hour or so, and then I came back up to shower and stuff. At 5:30, orientation started, and we took a tour around the building, meeting people who are in charge and having them speak to us about certain things. After that, we had a floor meeting in the kitchen, and they brought pizza. They gave us a total of 7 pizzas from Dominoes (I don’t know what sizes they bought, but all would probably be considered smalls in the US), and not one of them was either plain cheese or pepperoni. Every pizza had at least 3 toppings on it. Tonight, they’re having games and trivia. It is kinda weird that I have only been at Monash for a little over a week, yet I’m pretty comfortable here. I think I know my way around pretty well and I’ve met a lot of the people who are here presently. All three of the people who spoke to us on the tour tonight knew me by name. Obviously, a lot more people are still coming, but there are kids showing up today who are actually going to this school for a degree, and at this point, they know even less than I do. It’s a little strange that this is my third year in college, and here I am with all the incoming freshman, going through orientation. But I do enjoy experiencing all the newness again.
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