Ready, steady, gO-week! (Cara)

Happy O-Week, internet! Regardless of who you are, my mysterious reading audience, I hope that the coming set of days are fabulous, whether you’re a current student, someone dreaming of coming to a future O-Week, or any other curious internet-o-phile.

I had intended to be riding the blog-train straight off the bat, but this whole start-of-uni scene tends to leave one with remarkable little free time, and even less energy! I had a glorious moment this morning when I realised that I had twenty minutes free after breakfast to crawl back into bed.

Oh – introductions! I’m Cara, going (obviously) into first year. I’m doing a Bachelor of Arts, partly because I want to do psychology and theatre (and literature and French and linguistics and *gasps for breath*…) and partly because I’ve not got a decided, definite ‘career path’, a thing which sounds ghastly. Arts seems to be a nice, flexible degree, especially with the Melbourne Model. I’m living in college this year, at Janet Clarke Hall. It’s the littlest college, and from my five days or so here, it shows that the size gives a close, friendly, laid-back environment. It’s fabulous. And apparently we’ve got the best food on the Crescent. I moved here from Perth, and am thrilled to bits to be living in a proper vibrant big city with charming laneways and imposing skylines and enough light pollution to remind you how beautiful the stars are when you can see them.

I spent my first handful of days before college O-week started getting lost around campus, mainly. Honestly – who decided to give buildings such identical-sounding names as Redmond Barry and Richard Berry? To say nothing of Raymond Priestly! I also ventured excitedly through the city as much as I could, bought a secondhand bicycle, blue coffee plunger and pile of shiny new stationary.

I went into the uni bookshop on Academic Advice Day to start looking at textbooks, but I wasn’t psychologically able to deal with the hefty weights (especially the Homer To Hollywood reader…phwoar) or hefty prices (Psych books in particular) so I started small with a tiny stapler. I’ll work my way up through the stationary and memorabilia sections before I broach the books sections proper, I think.

On Sunday afternoon, the rest of the freshers, aside from the small handful of us who’d already slipped in covertly, arrived at JCH for the start of Rode-O Week, a real mixed bag of laughter, solemnity and madness. I don’t want to give too much away to future students, but think dancing the compulsory Fresher Dance in the middle of Bourke Street, being instructed not to wash your fresher shirt all week (although some of us rebellious outlaws with some sense of hygiene and odour responsibility are planning an illicit washing-machine load late at night), and being generally welcomed. Thoroughly, kindly, and with water-pistol violence. I’m particularly surprised by how quickly us freshers started to make friends. After only a couple of days it already feels like we’ve been living together for positive ages, as the general consensus seems to concur. Then again, it is hard to do conga-lines on a tram while wrapped mummy-style in toilet paper and not start to feel close to the people you’re with, you’d simply die of humiliation!

Uni O-week itself starts tomorrow morning, and I should get my internet smoothed out soon enough that this post won’t become totally irrelevant by the time it gets online!

Goodnight!