Waking Up Early

James Cook University, and especially my place of residence, St. Mark's College, looks old. Everything is made of red brick or concrete, none of the modern metallic structures that dominate even old-time institutions like Swarthmore College. Inside, the buildings (or at least the dorms) are similarly simple. My dorm room is a small room with a large bed that takes up just about half of the floor space. I've got a desk, some shelves, a ceiling fan and two fluorescent lights.

The windows have no screens. One perk: the cleaning crew will change my school-provided towel twice a week, and my linens once a week if I so desire. What service!

As for the rest of campus, I haven't really explored many buildings because they've been closed. Very few Australians are actually here. It's weird, for a boy from Indiana who goes to school in Pennsylvania and visits Minnesota every summer, to walk around at school amongst palm trees and other exotic flora, none of which are the least bit recognizable. The birds, too, are different--there's not one that I've seen in real life before. Oh, and wallabies roam the campus. They're like mini-kangaroos. Here's some pictures I took:

There is no central university dining hall. The St. Mark's kitchen has few options--basically one entree and side dish at every meal. Right now options are even more limited because so few students are here. There are probably twenty people living here right now, almost all of them foreign with a few other American girls mixed in. Most Australians won't get here until next weekend. The ones that are here seem nice enough, and all of them have colorful nicknames: Trucky, Tadpole, Saurus. Trucky is my Residential Assistant. He plays mid-90s American pop all day, even when he's gone. Songs that I have heard: Lenny Kravitz's version of American Woman, Seal's Kiss From A Rose, and once I heard him singing along to Lean On Me at 5:30 AM (I don't know why I was awake; jet lag, maybe. It was still funny). He is a giant.

Speaking of jet lag, it put me to bed early for the first few nights (9-10 PM. It's early for me.) It helped that no one was here to tempt me to do anything, and that my room was without internet. Once I got tired of reading or playing the pinball game that came with my computer, there was literally nothing else to do. So I slept.