PISS OFF

When I first arrived on the University of Adelaide North Terrace campus, I felt lost. Not just metaphorically lost, although I did find myself wondering what on Earth I was doing here and feeling like a complete imposter. I was also literally and physically lost.

Every pamphlet and website I had read told me the first place I should go when I come to campus is the Hub, level four. Maybe you can relate to my confusion when I walked into the Hub on the ground floor and looked up. The ceiling is transparent. This was how I came to learn that lovely architectural quirk of the Hub/library building: every floor is a ground floor.

Over the year, I gradually explored the campus, and came to know more of the oddities of the buildings here. I suppose as a result of being built on a hill and over a span of over a century, some of the architecture has somewhat of an eccentric streak. There are plenty of rooms half a floor down, windows which don’t reach the outside, and external walls which have found themselves on the inside of buildings. There are ordinary looking wooden doors which swing open automatically when you approach them, and that elevator which is inexplicably not attached to the building and must be reached by crossing mesh walkways which were certainly not designed for people wearing skirts, or the occurrence of wet weather.

Every map I have seen shows Ingkarni Wardli and the Engineering and Maths Sciences building as separate and unconnected buildings. Standing between them, however, can be slightly confusing when you look up and notice that there are several floors worth of building above you. Some parts of the campus truly succeed in the inside/outside space concept, as I can’t figure out whether I’m inside or outside at all.

All this is not to say that I dislike the slightly absurd nature of the campus’s buildings. At first I was simply lost, bumbling around in a surreal maze of confusion. Now, after a year getting to know the university, I find that the peculiar features add a mild taste of adventure, giving the place a sense that there is always more to explore. Studying on a campus which sometimes makes me wonder if I’ve stepped into a surrealist artwork makes just walking between classes an interesting part of my day.

Another thing I’ve found is that everyone experiences the campus differently. Walking around with my friends, they showed me almost-hidden corridors, stairwells that I didn’t know existed, much faster paths than the ones I’d been taking for a year and the (apparently) cleanest toilets on campus.

Whilst it is inevitable that everyone will get lost on campus at least once, so long as you’re not in a hurry it doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. You might end up finding the perfect study spot, a café you had never seen before, or those mystical perfectly clean toilets. If you ever have an hour to spare (ha ha) I recommend getting lost as an excellent pastime, especially with friends. That being said, if there is somewhere you need to be, remember that the first digit of any room number is the floor that the room is located on. Unfortunately, this only helps if you know what floor you are on to begin with.