During my first full week in Australia (before classes started) we had Orientation Week at RMIT Village. We called it O-Week for short, or Re-O-Week since we're starting up semester 2. The fun started with an information session on Monday with presentations from the manager and the operations manager of the Village, the fire and police departments, and the residential life coordinator who, with the RA team, puts together cool stuff for the residents to do. The gist of it was “Have fun, but don’t do anything dumb, and don’t start fires.” Excellent.
Monday night we had "Gender Bender Speed Dating". The girls dressed up as guys and vice versa, and then headed to the study room. It had been transformed into a 'speed dating' room with long tables and lots of chairs. Whenever the alarm sounded, the guys had to rotate on to the next girl along the table. My new friends had acquired fake mustaches from a costume shop nearby, and Sarah drew a mustache and goatee on me. It was a really entertaining way of meeting people from the Village.
Afterwards we went to the pub next door called The Turf Club Hotel. There we had a blast dancing and meeting new people, hanging around until 1 am when they closed and kicked us out. Being Monday night and with orientation at 9:45 am the next morning, none of us really complained.
After orientation on Tuesday, we raced back to the Village to get ready for our next O-Week event: rock climbing! I was super excited when I found out Mia, Sarah, Meg, and Caroline had signed up for the event as well. We loaded a bus with some 15 other people and drove ten minutes out of the city to Cliffhangers, an indoor rock climbing gym that boasts the tallest walls in the southern hemisphere at 20 meters (about 70 feet!). We were trained in clipping into the ropes and belay devices and belaying and then were let loose on the gym. Here's Meg belaying Caroline, who's nearly at the top of the wall.
I learned the Australian grading system for assigning difficulties to different climbs. It’s a little different from the American one, but the idea is the same. The bigger the number, the harder the climb. They had one really hard wall made up of tiles that made it similar to outdoor climbing since the holds were more like grooves on the wall. Finally there was a neat bouldering cave where you could climb along the ceiling.
After we had showered and rested from our rock climbing adventure, MUSEX (The Melbourne University Student Exchange Society) threw a welcome party for the new students, again at Turf. On Wednesday night we had an “Under the Sea” themed party for O-Week at the Village. I’ll write more about that later on, since it coincides with another fun event. Thursday we had a barbecue out in the courtyard around noon. I actually woke up to music that sounded like it was blasting from inside my room but it was actually coming from the speakers in the courtyard. Our next MUSEX event occurred on Friday night. We walked to an Italian restaurant only a few blocks away and enjoyed a delicious three-course meal. The gelato was the best. We broke up our group of friends so we could meet new people. I met a couple of girls from Ireland and England, and one guy from Norway, whom I will avoid insulting by not trying to spell his name.
After dinner, Mia went back to the Village for "Animal Party" so she could dress up as a cow. The rest of us joined the MUSEX crowd and headed to a club a few blocks away to dance the night away. The next afternoon, the RAs threw a 'Recovery' barbecue, complete with fried eggs, bacon, toast, and pancakes. They would actually cut a hole in each slice of bread and fry an egg inside. It was a little on the odd side for some of us, but definitely delicious.
Whoa! Talk about a welcome week!
Recent Comments