Day 6 - February 8, 2008

Last night was my first night sleeping in the dorm room. The bed was a little too short for me, and my feet hang off by about 6 inches. Even though I went to bed late last night, I couldn’t sleep much this morning because the jetlag was still affecting me. I got up at 7:00 and had to force myself back to bed until at least 9:00. When I got up, I tried another time to activate my cell phone. And again, I was told to expect a text message that never came. I decided I would have to go back to the store later today. The dining hall here doesn’t open for breakfast until 11:00. 11:00?? By that time, I’ll already be thinking about what I want for lunch. Does anyone ever have to wake up early and eat breakfast around here? That is definitely one thing that I will not like, especially because I won’t have a fridge to store breakfast food. Today, my breakfast consisted of biscuits (Australian for cookies) that I had got on the plane yesterday and a bottle of water. The Office of Residence Halls has a program for students who arrive early, and they were doing a campus tour at 11:00 that I decided to go to. The weather was surprisingly cool today. It is supposed to be summer here, but it was in the 50s for most of the day, and I had to wear long sleeves. The temperatures for the next few days are supposed to be in the 70s, but that still isn’t very hot for summertime. The campus tour was led by a guy named Messi from Dubai who said he had my room last year. Apparently, in the building I’m living in, room number 19 on all the floors is the smallest one. I have 319. There were a few other kids on the tour, a girl from Hong Kong, a girl from Singapore, and a guy from Canada. After the tour, I went back to the cell phone store so that I could hopefully get my phone working. I told them what had been happening with the phone, and they called the company. Long story short, about 2 hours later, I left with my phone finally working. To call it from the US you have to dial 011 61 4 32245662. A weird thing I noticed was that phone numbers here are different lengths. Not including the international and area codes, I have seem some that have only 6 numbers, while mine has 8. I left the Campus Center and went back towards the Halls. I had wanted to go on a trip that was planned to Chadstone Mall, supposedly one of largest malls in the southern hemisphere, but I thought I missed the group because the phone took so long. Luckily, they were still there and I caught them before they left for the bus. The mall was big, and I had a few things I needed to get, so me and a few other people started out by going to a K-Mart and Target to get those things. Here, those types of stores don’t have as many things as they do in the US. For example, they didn’t sell laundry detergent, bathroom items, or food, to name a few. It seems that most stores are more specialized. The mall also had a fresh meat market in it. I couldn’t really see myself leaving a mall with a pound of ground beef. And there was also a supermarket called Coles that we went into. I asked someone where I could find dryer sheets while in the detergent aisle there, and the guy looked at me like I was crazy. Apparently, that’s another thing they don’t have here. The money here looks a lot different than in America. Not only does each bill type have a different color, but the bills are actually made out of plastic. So if it goes in the wash, it comes out fine. The lowest bill denomination is $5, and there are $1 and $2 coins. Oddly, the $1 is larger than the $2. They don’t have pennies, so everything is rounded to the nearest $0.05 when paying. And most prices that you see listed in stores already include tax. So I got a lot of stuff and put everything in a laundry basket I had bought so I could carry it all. I had gotten a fan for my room too, but it wouldn’t fit inside the basket. So I had to walk through the mall and get on the bus carrying a laundry basket full of bags that was sitting on top of the boxed fan. It was pretty awkward, but at least I got some things I needed. While in the mall, we stopped at the food court to eat. There was a place called Hungry Jack’s, which must be the Australian Burger King. They had the exact same logo, had the similar-looking bags and cups, and sold Whoppers. Just the name was different. It was a little creepy. Another thing I noticed is that people here put carrots on sandwiches. They use the little chopped carrots that sometimes go in salads in the US. I had never seen that before, but it seems pretty common here. Got back to the room and finally had some time to go online. I posted my Hawaii pictures on facebook and on webshots. The webshots address is http://community.webshots.com/user/jon986?vhost=community . After a few hours, one of the kids from earlier called me to see if I wanted to go with him to a bar around here. There’s this bar close to campus called “the Nott” that supposedly every student who lives on campus goes to on Thursday nights since it’s within walking distance from the residence halls. Today was Friday, but since there was nothing better to do, we went anyway. It was a short walk, and when we got there, it was pretty much all regulars. Shortly after we arrived, an old guy sitting near us started talking to us about football. He was saying a lot of things I didn’t understand involving football, soccer, and rugby, but I think the gist of it was that he doesn’t like American football because he said it was soft. After a while, he and I got into a pretty sweet discussion about politics, and I was surprised at how much he knew about American politics. After talking to him for a little, I came to the conclusion that he probably had a crush on Barack Obama. While we were at the bar, there was almost a fight between these two guys and three other guys were so drunk they had to be escorted out and have a cab called for them. And there were only about 20 total people in the place. Typical Australian pub, I thought. The bar closed relatively early, and we were back to the dorms a little after 12:00. All the other international students should be arriving in the next few days, so that should be interesting.