Orientation

This past Monday, the 20^th, was our orientation at “Uni”. It was held in a big auditorium room with all study abroad, exchange, and international students. They covered all the important information, and then they had us participate in some activities, games, contests, and giveaways. They asked for six volunteers to the front of the room and they had a vegemite sandwich eating contest. Vegemite is a very popular Australian spread. I haven’t tried it yet, but people say it is very salty. Then they asked for another six volunteers and they had a tim-tam slammer eating contest. A tim-tam is a very popular chocolate wafer cookie bar. A tim-tam slammer is when you bite off a corner edge of each side of the tim-tam and then drink coffee through the cookie. Afterwards they had a barbeque for all of us and they gave us each a free drink ticket to the bar on campus. A typical Australian BBQ is bread and sausage. You get a piece of white bread, put some BBQ sauce on it, and then add your sausage.

Later that night there was a pub-crawl that was organized for exchange students over in Surfer’s Paradise. We met a lot of new people from all over the world. I signed up to be a part of the “buddy” program at Griffith. They pair you up with a student at Griffith University who is Australian, but who has participated in a study abroad or exchange program themselves before. I got to meet my buddy, Brittany, at the pub crawl. She seems “lovely”, as so many people here say. Orientation went well and the pub-crawl was also a lot of fun!