If anyone knows a place where I can directly download the GZed blockchain, it would be greatly appreciated. <3
I don't know what your situation is but if you can't download it yourself why not put up a thread in the services forum seeking someone who will download it for you, burn it to a few DVDs or a USB stick and mail it to you? It should be safe to do this because the file's checksums are published online and bitcoin-qt does verify it as it imports blocks from it.
I'll gzip & seed it for a price. I would do it for free, but, it's not free for me. Bandwidth costs money, so does thirty odd gigabytes worth of space.