Chris Banyas
Life Editor
Twelve-thousand, eight hundred and forty-three kilometers, or for us American types, 7,980 miles as the crow, or Airbus, flies, is quite the commute.
Things begin to distort over such distances. Time zones pulse and shift with the passing of each season and holidays get confused.
Many students commute to class by bus, car or bike, but some students travel much farther, leaving everything and everyone they know behind in pursuit of an education.
This distance represents the journey made by Jessica Tolmie, a junior in the James E. Rogers Department of Communication, Media and Persuasion at ISU, from her hometown of Newcastle, Australia, to Pocatello, ID.
The trip has presented Tolmie with a set of issues unique to someone living so far away from their home.
“Family and friends, that’s where the majority of my homesickness comes from,” said Tolmie. “At the moment they’re 17 hours ahead of us. At the start of the fall semester its 16 hours, when their daylight saving time changes to go into summer it becomes 17 hours and then when ours changes to go into winter it becomes 18. So the majority of the year they’re 18 hours ahead of us.”
Something as small as sending a sibling a message is, for Tolmie, now predicated upon a series of calculations.
“I go to send them a message or something and I’m like, ‘oh, its two o’clock in the morning, I have to wait another six hours,’” said Tolmie. “I always feel like I’m forgetting stuff.”
Tolmie is blazing a path of firsts in her family. She is the first among them to travel outside of their native country and she will also be the first to graduate college.
She received a softball scholarship to study at Temple University in Philadelphia and spent the entirety of her freshman year there.
“My dorm was on Sixteenth Street and Fifteenth and beyond was basically, ‘don’t go there, no matter how big a group you’re in, no matter what,’” said Tolmie. “The university alerts were terrifying. The first week I was there some kid wandered the wrong way home while he was drunk after a party and got shot in the neck.”
Tolmie eventually transferred to Idaho State University, to continue her education and further her softball prospects.
One of the many things she misses about her family is that they would help her with her sport. Tolmie serves as a pitcher and her brother would catch for her and provide coaching.
There are many differences between Australia and America, but the one that Tolmie has felt the most has been the food and specifically the extremes of flavor.
“We [Australians] find bread is one of the biggest things that we notice. To us, bread here is basically like cake, it is sweet,” said Tolmie.
Peanut butter and jelly is an example of an American staple that Tolmie cannot stomach.
“Mixing sweet and savory is something that kind of grosses us out a little bit,” said Tolmie.
Like the extremes of flavor, the extremes in temperature are something else that has been hard for Tolmie to adjust to.
Australia is widely known for its animals and one of the first things that many Americans think of when the country is mentioned is the oh-so-cute-and-cuddly kangaroo.
“I get tired of the ‘do you have a pet kangaroo?’ questions. That kind of gets on my nerves after a while, at first it was entertaining, and then it gets like, ‘really guys?’” said Tolmie.
Generally considered to be less cute are the many different kinds of poisonous creatures that live all throughout Australia.
There are numerous spiders, snakes, jellyfish and other dangerous life forms that keep people observant, especially when travelling in the wild.
One of Tolmie’s favorite things to do, especially in the summer, is to spend time on the beaches that surround Australia.
It was on one of these trips that Tolmie had a run in with one of these animals.
“You have to kind of walk down this little bush trail to get there and there was a little baby eastern brown,” said Tolmie.
The eastern brown snake is one of the most venomous snakes in the world and is responsible for a huge portion of the total deaths caused by snakebite in Australia.
“It basically looked like a twig and my mum was walking in front of me and my brother and she kind of stepped on its tail so it started flipping out,” said Tolmie. “Your instinct is just to run, get as far away as you can, but generally they will catch you if you do that, so you’re supposed to stand still. I sent my coach the ‘I got home safely and then almost got bitten by a deadly snake’ email like the first day I was back.”
