The Aussies are back!

The change in atmosphere on campus between last Wednesday morning when we left for Byron Bay and Friday night when we returned was pretty much tangible. Up until our trip it had been more or less a ghost town. There were a few people at meals and you might run into someone walking through the halls, but other than that everyone was still away for holiday. This weekend, though, it literally felt like the campus came to life with the return of the Australian students. This has meant a whirlwind of meeting new people around every corner, very freshman-year-at-Vandy style. It’s exciting, though, to realize these are the people I will be living with over the next four months, and that I have the opportunity to become close friends with some of them. At lunch today someone was telling me that my college, St. John’s, seems to be the most tightly-knit out of all of the colleges on campus. For example, at meals, people don’t just go sit at a separate table with their friends. It’s a college tradition to fill any empty seats before starting a new table, so you get to sit with different people and talk with everyone. He said it’s a very close community. I approve.

This past Saturday I ventured into the city with my flatmate Bec to look for a birthday present for Andrea, the other flatmate who just turned 21. We ended up at the Queen Street Mall, an outdoor assortment of stores selling everything from food to clothing to souvenirs to home goods. I had another interesting run-in with Australian culture on this shopping trip: when I asked the employee at Target where I could find laundry detergent, she directed me upstairs…to a different store. Apparently Target doesn’t carry it! It does in the States, right? Maybe I’m just going crazy…

Yesterday morning I walked to Mass again, this time with another girl from our program. The little church seems quite casual and family-oriented, which is a nice change of pace from life on campus. The rest of the day consisted of a run, eating meals with lots of Aussies, and setting up the inter-college file sharing network that our school provides. Basically, if one person uploads a movie, tv show, or music, everyone else on the network can download it. You can find pretty much everything on there. I might never come home just because of this program!!

Today was the first day of classes. Hopefully for the rest of the semester I won’t have any class on Monday, but since I’m still waiting for Vandy to approve the religion class I’m hoping to take, I went to my back-up class today just in case. It was a three-hour long Aboriginal studies lecture on Torres Strait Islander studies. The cool part was that there was a guest lecturer, a man who was actually born on one of the islands in the Torres Strait. While he was very funny and seemed quite well-informed, he definitely was not a professor so it was often hard to follow his points. Regardless, as I sat there listening sandwiched between an Australian and a French student (a Frenchman? That sounds far too formal!), I couldn’t help but feel the excitement at such a new and foreign opportunity. This semester I will get to meet and form relationships with people from literally all over the world; I’m pretty sure it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. However, I won’t lie, I don’t know if I can handle sitting through three hours of basically straight lecturing every Monday, so let’s hope that religion class gets approved!

With the beginning of classes also comes the beginning of our college’s formal dinners, or as I like to call them, Harry Potter dinners. I seriously felt like I should have been holding a wand the entire time. Though I think you’d definitely have to be at one of these dinners to really understand, I will try my best to give you a feel for what they’re like. A hundred and fifty, give or take a few, students filed into the dining hall decked out in long, loose, black robes; think graduation garb. We snaked around wooden tables and chairs until we came to an empty spot, where we then stood behind our chair until all of the students had found a seat. Next the graduate students, the dean, the warden, and possibly some other important people (I couldn’t see very well) filed onto a stage at the head of the room and stood around a long table up there. The warden said something in Latin, to which the rest of the room responded in Latin (while I stood closed-mouthed and amazed that this was all actually happening), and finally everyone sat down to eat. The Harry Potter-ness continued after dinner as the warden stood and addressed the room, welcoming everyone back, explaining what is expected in terms of proper conduct, and making announcements. I am not a huge Harry Potter fan, but I cannot even explain to you how much I felt like I was at Hogwarts. And these dinners happen Monday through Thursday. Perhaps we can instate something similar at Vandy??

Last, in case you happen to need a laugh today, check this chick out in her academic gown: