Orientation Week: Part I

An accurate description of the orientation week so far, in my opinion, was thrown out at the dinner table last night: a summer camp.  I say this because we have had a lot of structured activities during the past two days, as well as evenings free and after dinner activities with the RAs.  On monday most of our day was spent sitting in the Octagon Theatre, unfortunately not watching the people on stage pummeling each other in various martial arts style, but talking to us about all the information they gave to us is a giant clear envelope about registration and enrollment coming up later in the week.  The day of sitting around was capped off however with a trip to the "Tav" on campus where they gave us free pizza and a chance to hang out with all the other study abroad and international students.  We spent most of the late afternoon there before heading back to Thomas More for dinner at six (the time dinner is everyday).  On a side note, another reason it seems a bit like camp is because the meal times are only an hour long so everybody is basically forced to eat at the same time, as well as eat the same food.  Anyway after dinner most of us went out to The Deen, a bar in downtown Perth to celebrate Kate's 21st birthday, which was a novel experience for me at least and quite fun since almost everyone from our ND group went along.

After a night out some of our members were not feeling so well in the morning and either slept through or delayed the opportunity to take a bus tour of Perth and Fremantle that left the following morning.  We started out driving through Kings Park, a huge track of preserved land right behind our dorm (which is called a college here and will be referred to as such in the continuing posts).  This park is a beautiful piece of land with so many exotic trees and plants that I need to photograph some morning or evening.  We got out and walked around at a war memorial that had an overlook of downtown Perth.

The tour then took us to Cottesloe Beach on the outskirts of Fremantle, the closest beach to us.  Despite it being winter here, the weather was extremely pleasant and almost perfect for hanging out on the shores of the Indian ocean for an half hour or so.  Three of our group members, Joey, Alan, and Kevin, decided they couldn't wait until Saturday to go back and swim and jumped in right there.  Our trip then concluded with a bomb fish and chips meal in downtown Fremantle right on the harbour, and a trip to another war memorial overlooking the city of Fremantle with the skyline of Perth in the distance.  Overall a great two days capped off with some life sized chess with Alan followed by Ultimate with Derek, Kelly, Mary Kate, Kevin, and Will in the open areas in our dorm before dinner, and a group movie after.