I walked around campus in the morning, to get to know it a little. Then, at 11, I met with 2 friends from CIEE, Corin and Carrie, and we walked to Kmart to get phones, but they had sold out just minutes before we got there. We did some shopping at Kmart and Cole's for some food and basic things we needed. When we got back we were already running late for our foreign studies meeting, so we put all of our stuff in Carrie's flat and went to the meeting. Afterwards we went to the library to get student IDs and the guild shop to buy transperth cards for the public transportation. We were going to get phones in Freo after that, but everything closes at 5, so we didn't have time. Instead we went to Corin's flat to get Uno to play under the pagoda in the Chinese Gardens and two of her flatmates came. For dinner we had an international student dinner in the Rec room of the village. We had pasta and met some more people, including one from Sweden and one from Denmark. After seeing the other flats and other peoples flatmates, I decided to ask for a flat transfer, but they said no and sent me an email that they would make the people clean and fix the new drain. There is also another girl that lives here, but may be gone for holiday. I also finally got my heater, which works well when it stays on, but it has a one hour timer and has a weird on/off system during that hour.
Tuesday:
Today we had a meeting for the Northwest Outback trip. I'm really excited for it, we are going up the coast, inland, and back down. It lasts for 10 days during either of the first two study breaks, but I have a trip for my biology class during the second break, so I need to go during the first one. We then had a meeting for just the CIEE students. After that, Corin and I went to the Unicredit, where I opened a bank account for the semester, and went to get our guild membership stickers since we found out that CIEE pays for us to be guild members. We then split up and I went to look for my classes, but the three of us (Corin, Carrie, and I) were going to meet in about an hour to go to Freo to get our phones. In the meantime, I went to find my classes, but my biology lecture on friday's classroom was hard to find, so I didn't have time to find two of the classes before meeting them again. I also don't know where the lab is going to be, so I haven't found that out yet either. We then went to Freo to get our phones, and they actually had them! YAY! So I now have a phone that works and can be called and texted (incoming are free to me). We then walked around town and to the water, where I took a few pictures, and Corin has on her camera a picture of the three of us that a nice elderly couple took for us. There was even a place called Joe's fish shack that looked exactly like Joe's crab shack. We then went back to Murdoch and went to our flats until around dinner. We had an international dinner at 6:30 at the food court near bush court (the center of campus, like pine grove.) We were split up into groups based on Australian animals that we wrote our names on. My group was the Dingoes. We played a 'get to know Australia' game and a scavenger hunt, which included needing a picture of two people from different countries, hence the picture on flickr of me and Cass, a girl I met from Singapore that was at my table. We then ate, it was asian food and pretty good. After dinner there was another game where we had to make something that expressed Australia out of tin foil. My team made a giant continent of Australia, including Tasmania, and we had a kangaroo, Uluru (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uluru), and a quokka (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quokka.) There were two teams that won, and one team created a koala in a eucalyptus tree and the other had Steve Irwin being stung to death by a sting ray (which I think is too sad to have won.) After that, I just came back, set up my phone, and am going to bed.
