Madness I Say! Madness

March madness is upon us as any american would know. as usual the track team has a series of brackets. i'm already screwed, well not yet, but i forsee this going terribly. A game we often are involved in is coming up with creative names for the brackets. this year mine is fucking kangaroos, in a loving reference to End of Zee World

The best might be Jon Ryss with Nice Brackets Lady! The funny thing is that no one else here actually cares or even knows about it. its a bit of a change, but it seems like they do a similar thing with footy (AFL), but i'm not going to do that. i don't even understand the rules. rugby starts tonight, that should be fun, if dangerous. ideally i'll keep all my teeth though
Wednesday was an interesting night. It was essentially an initiation thing, but unlike those for the xc team, this one involved lots of drinking. luckily there were at least 16 of us, so the goon bags went pretty quickly. We learned the college war cries, which consists of almost cleverly yelling curses at the rival colleges. None are polite enough to be posted here. We went out after, and I am proud to say that i can actually remember a wednesday night, well most of it anyway. i also made it to class at 9 am thursday. i may have still been drunk, but i took good notes and enjoyed the class. then i went to sleep until about noon. i came down into the common room and found millsy and chopper. unlike last week they were both moving and eating. neither of them could finish their meals, so i got free food. later that day I got to something else even more exciting
I went SCUBA DIVING. it was a shore dive, which i'm not sure if i've done before. i prefer boat dives because it doesn't involve me getting lost and going around until the my buddy finally took over. The other thing is that all the people, or at least some of them were hard core, like a level or two beyond me. one guy had a $22K camera set up, and it was just all a little much. plus they seemed to know each other already and i felt a little left out. still i do like scuba diving, and even though the visibility was not great we saw some cool things. there was a crab and a large lobster thing, as well as some fish. i do wish the water was clearer. everyone was saying that I would get really cold with only a 3mm wet suit, but I was fine, apparently it was much warmer than usual at around 68 degrees. still i got to go diving. wooooo. i didn't see the octopus though, which i am devastated about. maybe next time...sigh

Who and What?

It seems like a good idea to explain the goal of this blog, a mission statement if you will. The goal is very simple, to document my semester in Tasmania. For the record: TASMANIA, not Tanzania, if Jon Ryss says Tanzania, he is lying. Australia not Africa. Moving on, there are two orders of business to take care of. Firstly, who am I? Secondly, why am I traveling halfway across the world to a random island of the coast of a larger island?
I'm Toby. I stand just shy of five and a half feet tall and like running, scuba diving, long walks on the beach, napping, british humor, and baby animals. I tend to spend too much time on the internet and wasting time in general (as proven by the creation of this thing)...Major in Biology, even though I find most of it terribly tedious (other than zoology and ecology) and have taken higher level classics courses, leading me to whine that every movie involving mythology is inaccurate...I also substitute the word now with meow.
Why do I want to go to what some would call a god forsaken rock in the Tasman sea?
Answer: Why the hell not
Answer 2: I've wanted to go to Australia for give or take 20 years, and this is Australia's favorite vacation island
Answer 3: I've wanted to go to Australia for a long time, but have never had the opportunity. So I go to the first study abroad meeting at school and I'm sitting there thinking "yah! awesome! I'm going to australia wooo!" First thing out of the Off Campus people's mouths is "Don't go to the places that have lots of international students, like Sydney and Melbourne" at which point I stopped listening and silently bellowed "DAMN YOU CRUEL WORLD!!!" My mission then became to find a place that while still in Australia, would not cause them to argue with me. I quickly found a program out of UTAS (The University of Tasmania). Other than having a cool name, it actually seemed pretty legitimate with cool programs. I convinced my parents it wasn't a fake school and eventually (the day before it was due) got all the paperwork done
The adventure starts tomorrow, and I'll introduce the cast of characters for the first leg of the journey
 Why Australia?