As Jim Morrison crooned, "People are strange, when you're a stranger..." I don't think the talented Mr. Morrison was  necessarily referring to the weird things that university students leave behind in their dorm rooms at the end of the semester, but since he is no longer with us, I can't be sure.

The charity Unite in the UK has the rather interesting task of reuniting students with their lost belongings and is responsible for collecting the items, counting them, and reporting on what the students have left behind. In the past, these included mostly traffic and road signs (I always suspected the Brits were an unusual lot).  Now the list is different, but no less bizarre.

Among the list of items left:

• a pair of budgies (also known as parakeets)
• a snake
• frozen chicken feet ( having tried that particular delicacy, I can understand why this was left in the room)
• a snake
• an inflatable swimming pool with water (the water was probably stagnant and I imagining it rampant with creepy-crawlies)

More commonly, the students left mobile phone chargers, text-books (do they not have the buy-back policy in the UK? this would never have happened at my school- the cash for books policy gave me gas money for the long ride back home), and more tragically, Ipods.

The agency happily reports that a majority of the pets that have been left behind have found either their old owners or been placed in new homes.