Orientation at QUT

I was lucky enough to be able to tag along for exchange student orientation at QUT yesterday. It's actually the first time I've been to another university's orientation, and it was great to see things from a different perspective. The Norwegian contingent was by far the largest, with 55 students who were obviously happy to be in Brisbane.

The ones waving their hands in the air are Norwegian. They were also shouting WOOHOO :).

The police made sure they all knew what a breathalizer was.

Everyone with a birthday got a cupcake. I thought that was a nice touch. The cupcakes were  WICKED tasty.

The highlight was definitely the performance by the police who demonstrated their various torture instruments (gun, tazer, baton) and got the point across that students should do as the police said or invariably experience pain. Not sure that would work as well in Norway where the point would be they should do as the police said or they may risk a night in a single bedroom with shower and two free meals. Tonight I am even luckier and get to take a river cruise with the QUT International staff and all of the new students.

Spent most of today so far trying to update the address on my CV on my new Windows computer which will not let me download Open Office, use my scanner or print to .pdf. WordPad has screwed up the alignment and formatting...and it keeps beeping at me. (This is the type of blogging the husband approves of, by the way.) I absolutely refuse to pay for Word when I could have Office for free. I am soon giving up on Windows and installing Linux, and then I will be on track again.

I forgot to mention that the water in this building smells like pool, so having been spoiled by the Norwegian water for 15 years, we have been buying water in bottles and lugging them back from the shop. This all changed Monday when we invested in a Brita water purifier. I can highly recommend them. The water tastes great now (which is to say it doesn't taste at all, least of all like pool).

One of my big concerns about living here without a car was grocery shopping, but as we observed the day we did rent a car, the car parks are so big and our supermarket so close that it is actually further to walk from the shop to the parking spot in most shopping centres than from our shop to our apartment. But, if we did get a car it would definitely have to be one like this:

I believe they call it a "ute" as in utility vehicle.

The liquor store is also dangerously close and open all kinds of hours that a Delawarean living in Norway is not used to, but so far we have been very good. Just buying wine on a Sunday for the novelty of it all. Also, there is a cool little DVD vending machine where you can pay by credit card and get at DVD at any time of day or night. You can return it to any similar vending maching 24 hours later. Now, why do we not have these in Norway? It's all Soegne would need since the video store shut down.

Well, those are some little thoughts from me for today which I cannot see have infringed significantly on anyone's privacy (well, maybe except for the ute owner's and the birthday girl). I will now have to Google "smart casual" to choose an appropriate outfit for the river cruise.