Meet Teddy. He lives on campus. Cute? Yes. Cuddly? No. Though we are attempting to hug him in the pic you see.

Having been starved of adventure for a little too long - like, a whole week or two! - and starved of the great outdoors for even longer, I decided it was about time I did something. So today four Americans, three Kiwis and a British guy jumped into a couple of cars with the intention of going hiking. I don't even know if you could call ours a hike, it may be better classified as a good walk, but we went out to Torrey Pines, a nearby nature reserve, and explor...

Mmm... Cookie dough icecream...

A week ago today I moved in. Started classes on Monday, and am loving them. The psyc classes you can take over here are not as broad as the ones back home meaning you get to go really in-depth into whatever it is you're studying, like my drugs and behavio[u]r class or my adolescence class. The latter is giving me a real education in American culture, like the survey we had asking us which "group" we were in at high school to which answers like &qu...

How to Speak American 101Here's a classic example of how not to.Last night I was hanging out with a group of Americans and, feeling hungry, decided to express myself, eloquently as always of course. So I told them, "I'm keen for a feed ay."It didn't take me long to realise I may as well have been speaking Japanese. There were three things wrong with the sentence: Americans don't say "I'm keen for," they don't call somet...