Welcome to life at my new dorm aka college! I have to say that I am very fortunate to live in a college... Why might you ask? Oh, let me tell ya!
First of all, I have all of my meals prepared for me which is super nice. I don't have to go grocery shopping, everything has been taken care of, and it's decent food. Although the college is nondenominational, the college obeys Jewish dietary rules. There is a meat kitchen and a milk kitchen, which seems weird, but that just means that for lunch and breakfast there's no meat served (maybe some boiled eggs or fish instead), but at dinner there is. Also, the food is super healthy here, we never have desserts; it's mainly fruit if we want to have something sweet. Here's a bit of culture shock: Australians are very proper when they eat, rather than cut everything up at once like we do, they use a fork in the left hand and cut off one piece with the right; they don't ever use their hands to touch their food either, it's always with a knife to shovel the food onto the fork. Imagine how you would eat at a debutante ball... I feel absolutely ridiculous when I try to eat like they do, and even more ridiculous when they ask me why I eat my food the way that I do! I'm slowly learning how to eat like a lady. It's so annoying.
Second, I live on campus. I literally can walk to all of my classes and I'm close to all the bus stops. My friends, Clare and Kristin, both live in Bondi which is a 40 minute-ish commute (I have to admit that I'm super jealous they live in Bondi though--it's one of my favorite places in Sydney), but think about having to kill time on campus between classes or having to get up at 7 am to make a 9 am lecture. Don't worry mom and dad when you read this... It turns out that Sydney can be a little dangerous at night, so I feel bad for my friends that live in Randwick. To top off the fact that apparently theft is fairly common in this area (foreign men and women are targeted mainly, yes! Got my boomerang to protect me!), there's no light posts on Sydney's streets... Barely anything. It kind of terrifies me to walk to my friend Courtney's place at night.
I am very lucky: I get to live with almost all Australians. The girls in my alcove, Sammi, Renee, Sarah, and Cristabel, are absolutely ridiculous. It's fabulous. I will tell you this: these Australians can drink. We had a party at "Churchies" a pub/casino on Sunday night (before they hazed us... That's another story), we did a pub crawl on Wednesday night (soooo much fun!), went to an inter-college party on Friday night at the Coogee Bay Hotel (I tried to order a "Stars and Stripes" in an Australian accent and failed miserably), and had our cocktail party on Saturday night. They're all so welcoming.
College life is great so far. I can't wait to get to know all of these people even more over the next couple of months. :)
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