All of the new La Trobe University freshmen, or JAFFY’s (Just Another F*ing First Year) as the Australian’s call them, have started to move into the dorms. This has caused quite the commotion on campus, with all the moving vehicles, families, nervous/scared/excited faces of the 17 and 18 year old freshmen, moving boxes, RA floor meetings and such. However it was rather relaxing for me and the other foreigners who have already been living on campus for about a week or so. We all decided to head down to the moat area of our beautiful campus and lay in the sun while all the newbies moved in. Move in day also represents the beginning of OW (orientation week) for all of the new students. This is the week of activities, getting to know each other, ice breaking games, etc. so that all the new kids have a chance to make friends and get acquainted with life on campus. Or so I thought…apparently O Week down under is done a little bit differently. As you may know, the drinking age here is only 18, so all of the incoming first years are not only on their own for the first time in their lives, but many of them have just turned the legal drinking age…Some of the O Week activities have been a “pub crawl,” where the RA’s take you to a number of different bars where you spend about an hour or so at each one until you eventually ‘crawl’ home. An event called Edward 40 Hands, where they duck tape a 40 of beer in each hand and you cannot take them off until you finish them both. Milk Chug, where each student must drink two liters of milk in 10 minutes, which is impossible and yet people still try to accomplish the task and the inevitable occurs… I will spare you the gruesome details. In addition to the weird Australian hazing activities, O Week also consists of a “Scribble” party, where all guests wear a white T shirt and bring a sharpie and then proceed to draw, write, scribble, etc all over one another, a Carnival Day complete with a live band, jump house, cotton candy (which they call Fairy Floss here),  balloon artists, jugglers and most importantly free food! And a “Moat party” which consisted of being put into 6 teams and then competing in strange competitions. For instance, the sardine toss, where each team has to toss the strong smelling sardine around until someone drops it and that team loses, and the “rope tie” competition where all teams take off their clothes and tie them together in a long rope and the team with the longest rope wins (aka: the team with the most naked kids wins). Surprisingly only two freshmen, both incredibly intoxicated, succeeded in stripping past underwear, and their team still lost, but it was very entertaining. Each of these “events” is followed by an after party with a DJ and dance floor… This week has been busy, exhausting and incredibly fun.
Fortunately, the foreigners (myself included) are mainly seen as a kind of dorm pet, we are not necessarily required to go to the meetings since they usually pertain to full year students. The rare times that we are actually needed is usually for entertainments sake, such as when we are asked to say a word or phrase because we “say it funny.” At first I had been excited about the thought of the new students arriving, since it has been rather dull here on my floor for the past week. The only other person on my floor was an exchange student from China who didn’t speak English, closed his door when I said hello, and consistently left the toilet seat up in our shared bathroom. However this week I have been thinking fondly of those times, when I didn’t have to wake up at 6am just to take a shower and brush my teeth, when there wasn’t screaming and slamming doors until 4am, when there was room in the shared fridge for my groceries…