I come from Singapore, and I never saw a live goose before I came to York.

York's therefore been a real eye-opener in this way. I went into transports the other day when I saw my first hedgehog.

Everyone mentions the ducks. I don't know why, because the geese are so much more prominent. I had a friend; she was attacked by geese within the first fifteen minutes of her setting foot
on campus.

Geese - noisy blighters

When I lived on campus last year, it was the geese that woke me up every morning, not the ducks. The noisy, belligerent, aggressively incontinent geese. The ducks just do their own thing. Sometimes they cross the carpark in formation.

I come from Singapore, and I never saw a live goose before I came to York. In fact, my contact with animal life has largely been of the domestic variety. Dogs, cats, goldfish, budgies. Sure, I saw chickens, or pigs, or cows, but they were dead and in unrecognisable pieces on the dinner table.

York's therefore been a real eye-opener in this way. I went into transports the other day when I saw my first hedgehog. I went home and told my
housemate all about it, whereupon we sat in the living room and made hedgehog faces at each other until another housemate walked in on us and deflated our hedgehog glory by telling us how hedgehogs were flea-ridden vermin.

I live with three other people from my first year college block, all of them England born and bred. I think I bewilder them sometimes with my gross
lack of experience with native fauna: cows, geese, Bruce Forsyth, horses, Neds, hedgehogs - I could go on all day.

Ducks - do their own thing

I realise now that I've written it, that this is a rather bizarre first diary entry. It has to be said, however, that the first thing I noticed about York (and England in general) when I first arrived just over a year ago, was how much livestock there is, just randomly wandering all over the place.

Surely they must belong to someone! And the ducks! How do they keep their numbers down? What if they suddenly decide to multiply exponentially and overrun the campus before staging an insurrection to demand equal
rights?

These are questions that never occurred to me before I came to York. Things that I mean to talk about later, at some point of time: memories of
Freshers' Week, living in halls, working and studying simultaneously, the evilness of chocolate digestives. Things I need to do now (but do not really want to): read for my essay.

Reluctantly,
Suzanne