A GREAT Coffee Date

The last couple days were really good.  Yesterday was nothing too exciting.  I attended an orientation session in the morning – SUCH a joke!... both in the “waste of time” and “this is really funny” waysJ.  It was the start of orientation week for the whole school so… LOTS of first years.  It was like freshman orientation all over again.  I left the “guided” tour early and went and bought my textbooks.  It’s actually cool how they do books here.  The professors put them together for each individual course and they’re actually compilations of textbooks and articles that we will be studying.  It is then bound in a Deakin University cover.  It seems much more efficient than buying a full textbook when you only actually read from a few of the middle chapters.  Anyway, I was impressed with that – go AustraliaJ.  After that I wandered through the clubs fair and saw all the fun things to get involved with while I’m here.  I went back home and decided to take the tram to Camberwell (a cute shopping suburb about 20 minutes closer to the city).  I walked around for a while and then came back towards Burwood (my suburb).  I got off about 10 stops early and wandered through shops closer to my house.  It was a LONG walk, but good to stretch my legs.  I made it home, ate lunch and then went back to campus.  I found a quiet spot and got caught up on my correspondence.  After that, I went back home and had a quiet night.  I have been SO exhausted the last few days.  I know that it has a lot to do with walking everywhere, longer days, and the fact that I’ve met a lifetime’s worth of people in the past week.  For an introvert, that is a tiring endeavorJ.  But, no worries, I’m staying strong and making lots of new friends!  Today, I slept in a little bit and then went to the gym, worked out, and came home to get ready.  My housemate Camille (from London) invited me to go downtown with her and try out some of the famed Melbourne coffee we’d both heard so much about.  I was not about to turn down a COFFEE dateJ, so we headed downtown this afternoon and scoped out a good place.  We found a little place in one of the laneways off Flinder’s street and ordered our coffee.  I picked the place because they had a sign that said they didn’t charge extra for soymilk… score! J.  The coffee was delicious and our conversation while we drank it was AWESOME!  We talked about our plans for the semester and things we want to do.  It turns out that our interests are really similar.  She wants to have house hang out time/dinners and get to know everyone we live with better.  I had been thinking that that would be SO fun.  We’re going to initiate it this Sunday and make dinner for everyone.  They don’t know yet, but they’ll love itJ.  I think I’ll introduce them all to American chili and cornbread.  She also mentioned that she wants to learn how to bake and I LOVE baking, so we’re going to do that together too!  I also told her about my lunch Sunday with my friends from Church at the Dumpling King.  Apparently she LOVES dumplings, so we’re going Saturday.  Anyway, apparently we have a lot of similar interests and now have lots of plans to do things together.  I’m excited to see how our friendship develops.  Tomorrow, we’re going to the beach.  Yay!  After our coffee date, we wandered around the city and checked out the small shops and kept discovering mall after mall.  It’s incredible.  I felt like they kept appearing in random places… we’d take a wrong turn and be in another mall.  It was crazy.  We also walked past the Victoria State Library and they had an exhibit for Australian Picture Books in their gallery.  We went in and wandered through paintings from kids’ books.  It was great!  And then we walked through the Greek Precinct and stopped in a bakery.  I got some chocolate and walnut baklava.  I didn’t know what it was, but I figured after all the times I’d called a balaclava (a piece of ski gear) baklava on accident, I had to see what I’d been referring tooJ.  It was pretty good.  It was like a piecrust with a jelly pudding, covered in chocolate and walnuts.  I liked it.  We finished walking around and made our way back to the tram and came home.  I finished my night with dinner, some Boy Meets World and laundry.  I have lots of fun plans for the last week of my “summer” break.  I’m excited for everything right now… this week, friends, school, life.  It’s a great place to be!  Life is good.

Australian Friends!

Today was a great day FULL of socializing.  It started this morning when I woke up to Skype my parents.  It was SO great to see them and get to real talk to them.  I have been in touch mostly via email, but actually hearing their voices and seeing their faces is great!... really special.  I left shortly after for church and had a nice walk there in the rain.  It was a great service, but it was also just nice to meet some new people.  Everyone is incredibly friendly and welcoming.  People are SUPER eager to meet me.  Seriously, so many people came over and said, “I haven’t seen you before, are you new?”  Then I respond and they become even more eager as they hear my “accent”.  It’s really funny.  Australians LOVE Americans!  They all want to come to the States.  It’s pretty perfect for me J.  I met a few people my age before the service and then was invited by my friend I met last week to go to their “young adults” lunch after.  We went to Box Hill (another suburb about 10 minutes from where I live).  It’s like a Chinatown city.  It’s cool.  There are lots of great restaurants and little shops.  We went to the Dumpling King and I had some great vegetarian dumplingsJ.  It was GREAT to get to know all the kids my age from church.  They are all so fun and just really cool people.  And they are Australian!  I’ve met so many exchange students from the states so far, but not many Australians.  It’s really fun to know some locals.  They had a million questions about America… is Mean Girls the way high school actually is?  Is Microsoft in Seattle?... Have I seen the Simpson’s episode where they go to Australia?... it was really funny!  I had so much fun talking to them and hearing their perspective of America.  They love to laugh and have fun… it was great!  After lunch, I went to a BBQ that my landlady hosted for all of her houses.  She has ten houses around our area where international students live, so the purpose was for us all to get to know one another.  It was really fun meeting all those people as well.  I tried a little BBQ chicken on a skewer (delicious) and a piece of Wellington cake (sponge cake, dipped in chocolate, coated in coconut shavingsJ).  It was good.  Overall, it was a great day full of good food, lively conversation and LOTS of new friends!  It was really fun.  But… I’m exhausted!  I know I’ll sleep well tonightJ.    

Registration… and the beach.

The last couple days have been pretty excellent.  On Friday, I had my first real orientation meetings.  We had a short lecture regarding registration for classes and then were allowed to actually enroll.  It was very quick and painless.  I got all the classes that I wanted and have an excellent “timetable” as they call it… “schedule” for all you back home J.   I’m only in class 10 hours a week and don’t have any class Friday!  I am taking Australia: New World Nation (Australian history), Middle East Politics, Sex and Gender in History, and American Foreign Politics.  I’m really excited to take an American foreign policy course from an Australian perspective.  I think it’ll be really interesting.  I’m looking forward to the start of school… I know it’s strange, but my brain is ready to be academically stimulated J.  I realized that I haven’t been in school since the middle of December and I’m ready for a challenge again.  After registration, I went to the gym – excellent again – and then home to eat dinner and get ready before going out for one of my friends’ birthday.  It was a pretty fun night.  We took the tram downtown and went to a club to dance and hangout.  Melbourne is alive at night!  It was crazy.  The club was pretty fun and it was a really big group that went, so that was good… lots of new friends!  I decided that it’s not really my scene, but it was fun and another good experience to have.  My goal is to try a little bit of everything – I tried it and now, whether or not I want to go again, I know what it’s all about and I’ve experienced it.  Check J.  This morning (Saturday), I woke up, got ready, and headed to the beach.  It takes a LONG time to get there by public transportation (close to two hours)… not my favorite.  But it was really nice lying in the sun!  I put on sunscreen this time, so there are only a couple spots I missed that got burned.  I went with my roommate Camille (pronounced Cami) from Britain.  It was nice to get to know her better and we had a good day together.  When we got to St. Kilda (a little south of downtown Melbourne), we laid on the beach for a couple hours, then got some lunch, and finished the day by wandering through the streets of St. Kilda and looking at all the fun shops.  It was very low key and very fun.  We caught the train and then tram back to our house and called it a day.  It was fun.  Everyday I seem to find myself creating new potential plans for free days.  It’s so fun knowing that I’ll have the opportunity to see as much of Melbourne and the surrounding areas as I want.  Everyday is an adventure and everyday is a gift.  I found a card today that I couldn’t not get… it says, “LIVE.  Don’t save anything for a special occasion.  Being alive is a special occasion.”  I’m alive.  I’m I’m loving life.  I’m set J.

Melbourne.

Yesterday (Thursday here) I dragged myself out of bed and got ready for the day.  I was still so exhausted from the Beach Orientation trip.  It was an incredibly busy three and days and has taken me a little while to recover, both from the incredible amounts of social interaction and my tired muscles that weren’t used to surfingJ.  Before I left for the day, my mom got a hold of me to tell me that my Grandpa Gordon had passed away.  I knew it would be soon and had been praying for his peace for a long time, but it was still really hard to be 4000 miles away from home.  It magnified any loneliness I was feeling.  But instead of sitting at home crying, I took off for the city.  I decided that there was no better way to honor my Grandpa’s memory than travel and explore – his passion.  I took the tram downtown.  It took a little over an hour and I’ve decided that it is not my favorite kind of public transportation I’ve ever been on, but it’s kind of the only choice here.  There are a LOT of stops and it is really jerky, but otherwise, it was convenient.  When I got into the city, I had no idea where to go, but wandered through Federation Square (their big central pavilion) and then saw a sign for an exhibition of Disney cartoon drawings.  I went in and walked through the gallery.  It was incredible!  It was full of old concept drawings as well as sequences of drawings for some of the most classical Disney movies (Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Tangled and the Princess Frog).  It was so cool to see the old drawings and watch the TVs they had set up that showed selected scenes of the movies.  I stopped at each one for a little fill of Disney magic.  If there was any day to just stumble upon Disney, yesterday was the dayJ.  Life is cool like that.  After that, I wandered through the Royal Botanical Gardens and enjoyed the sunshine, then walked back up to the downtown core and wandered down Flinder’s Street.  There were tons of laneways, which reminded me a ton of Diagon AlleyJ.  It was great!  They were comprised of tons of little stores that opened right into an alley.  I wandered down a few of these.  I stopped at one called, “The Little Cupcake Shop” and got a baby cupcake… delicious!  And then kept walking around.  They have TONS of shopping in Melbourne.  After I made it through all the laneways, I hopped on a free City Circle tram and took it in the full circle.  It provided an audio commentary of main points of the city and helped me find my bearings.  It was nice to get a feel for what the city has to offer and what I’ll want to see and do while I’m here.  After that I walked down to the Greek Precinct and then back towards Chinatown and then boarded the tram back to Burwood (my suburb).  It was a busy afternoon.  Overall, I decided Melbourne reminds me SO much of Seattle.  There are tons of similarities.  I took the tram a couple stops further than my house and got some groceries.  It is strange not having a car – I have to be much more careful about the amount of groceries, especially liquids, I buy at once.  Whatever I buy I have to carry home myself.  A ten minutes walk isn’t far when you’re empty-handed, but when you’re carrying a ton of bags, it can seem like foreverJ.  I made it home fine and made some dinner, did some laundry, got things organized for orientation today, and then crashed a little after 10pm.  It was an exhausting day, but I feel good about my adventure to Melbourne and now have a much better idea of how the trams work, as well as my bearings for the city.  It was the start of my great adventure here, dedicated to my Grandpa Gordon.  I know his passion for travel runs through my blood as well.  I can’t wait to see and experience everything I got a taste of yesterday.  It’s going to be a great semesterJ.  

BEACH Orientation Trip.

The last three days were incredible!  I’ll start on Monday morning, because that’s when the fun startedJ.  I woke up early. got ready for the day and got online at 7am to skype my parents.  Unfortunately, that was interrupted by a strong burning smell in our house.  All of my roommates came together to try and figure out where it was coming from or what it was… I think more bonding occurred in those 20 minutes than in the two previous days I was there J.  We decided to call our landlady and she rushed over.  She decided that the smell was not a gas leak, but marijuana.  I laughed.  Really hard.  Once we convinced her that no one had smoked marijuana, she called the electrician and he came to look at our house.  In the meantime, three of my housemates and I left for our international student beach orientation trip.  We boarded the buses with around 100 other students and took off for the coastal city of Lorne along the Great Ocean Road, west of Melbourne.  It was such a cute coastal town!  I loved it.  When we arrived on Monday, we ate lunch and then had a free afternoon to walk around and just spend time getting to know everyone.  I spent a lot of time with my roommate from Michigan.  We walked on the beach, played in the water and just got to talk.  It was really nice.  That evening we had dinner with everyone, played cards and listened to the jazz band that had come perform for us, and then went to bed early.  The next day was full of adventure!  I woke up and ate breakfast and then had some free time to wander around.  I walked along the coast and watched some of the other students as they participated in their scheduled activities.  I made a friend from Portland whom I spent a lot of time with.  She’s great!  Also, she knows a couple of my friends from Whitworth, which was a fun connection to have.  It makes the world feel a little smallerJ.  After we wandered around for a while, we made our way to the beach and our SURFING lesson!  It was awesome.  I loved it.  I kind of made it to my feet a couple times.  It was so hard and such a good workout.  Also, addicting!!  I am definitely going to try it again sometime.  I really loved it.  After surfing, we ate lunch and then went surf kayaking.  It was so intense!  The surf was really big and the kayaks were really small.  SO not my thing.  My partner and I decided that between the seasickness from the rolling waves and the instructor being thrown from his kayak by a huge wave, we were more excited to be onshore.  That adventure was not for us.  At one point, she said, “oh my gosh!  It’s like the Titanic out here!!!”  I laughed.  That might have been a little dramatic, but seriously, it was scary.  After kayaking, we hiked through the forest with a guide.  It was a beautiful hike and I didn’t see any spiders or snakes… perfect!  The landscape reminds me a lot of the Pacific Northwest.  There were lots of ferns and little creeks running through the forest.  It was very beautiful and the perfect weather.  After our hike, we went back to our accommodations (a backpackers hostel) and took a shower before dinner.  Dinner was great and the rest of the night was more of the same… socializing with new people and laughing with new friends.  This morning we woke up, had breakfast, and boarded the buses for a journey to the Twelve Apostles.  This landmark is a set of limestone pillars rising out of the sea along a steep limestone cliff shoreline.  There were originally twelve pillars (hence the name), but over the years a few have collapsed and there are only eight currently.  We stopped along the way to look at wild Koalas in some trees on the side of the road, take a short nature walk through a rainforest, and then made it to our destination.  The Twelve Apostles are BEAUTIFUL!  They are incredible.  All of my pictures look fake… like they are a painting, not real life.  After that stop, we continued back home.  After sitting in rush hour traffic in Melbourne, we made it back to campus and I had dinner, showered and got caught up on all the internet time that I missed the last three daysJ.  Overall, the orientation trip was incredible.  I got to experience and participate in so many new things and made tons of new friends and potential new friends.  I’m so excited for the semester!        

A Great Sunday

Today was a pretty uneventful day.  I woke up and got ready to go.  I left and headed to church.  It was a pretty good service.  The best part, of course, was the people.  They were incredibly friendly, yet again!  Everyone around me noticed that I was new and introduced themselves.  I met a girl who graduated from Deakin University last year and she was very excited that I was there.  She gave me her number and offered to show me around later this week.  It was so nice!  I’m really excited to get to know her better and have a guide to the city.  She told me that Melbourne is known for its shopping and coffee… PERFECT J.  After that I walked back toward campus and bought a coffee and read for awhile.  I made my way home for lunch and then headed to the gym.  Apparently I signed up for a personal trainer and didn’t realize…I had a workout waiting for me.  It was pretty greatJ.  I came home and made dinner and watched an episode of “Boy Meets World”.  I’m about to write a few emails and then pack for the beach.  A few updates… my other roommate moved in today.  Her name is Cami and she is from the UK.  I’m excited to get to know her better.  Also, I head out tomorrow for my Beach Orientation Trip.  I will be gone for three days to the town of Lorne on the Great Ocean Road.  I’m really excited… it should be a lot of fun and awesome to meet all the new exchange students!  I’m still loving it here… life is goodJ.  

Melbourne... and settled!

Hello for the past couple daysJ.  I have been slacking on my blog lately, but in my defense, I was moving.  I woke up at 4:30am Friday morning and caught the train to the airport.  4:30am is EARLY.  I made it to the airport fine and was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was.  Apparently Australia isn’t on threat level “orange” or whatever it is we do in the US, because they didn’t care about liquids, shoes off or seeing my ID.  I found my gate almost an hour early and then we were delayed for about 25 minutes.  I spent my time reading Harry Potter 2… it made home feel a little closerJ.  My flight was really quick (a little over an hour) and then I was in Melbourne.  I found my meeting area and a couple other students going to Deakin University.  One was from New York, and one from California.  They are going on my orientation trip Monday so hopefully I’ll get to know them better next week.  My shuttle took me to my house next to campus and I met my landlord and got settled in.  She took me to her office (her kitchenJ) to do paperwork and kept saying, “it’s so nice you’re not tired from the jetlag.”  I was all, “yeah, that is nice, but I’m SUPER exhausted from the 4:30am wake up call!”  Anyway, finished paperwork and realized I hadn’t eaten lunch so I went to find food before I passed out.  I wandered toward campus and found a subway, got a sandwich and proceeded to campus.  I walked around a little – it’s super hip and modern.  I really like it.  I feel trendy thereJ.  I made it to the gym and started my membership.  It’s much more intensive and involved than I’m used to, but I think it’ll be good.  Before I could even workout they made me meet with a trainer to take measurements (height, weight) and answer health questions.  It’s nice though, because they have a computer system that keeps track of all your information, measurements and workouts and a trainer creates a workout schedule for you.  It’s not really something I need help with, but I’m sure it won’t hurt either.  I also met a new friend at the gym (another exchange student), which was awesome.  I walked back up toward my house and then went grocery shopping so I could have dinner and breakfast.  I got all the essentials and came back home.  I had dinner, got unpacked, did a little laundry and went to bed before 10pm.  I slept in this morning until almost 10am, which felt insanely good!  I didn’t even realize how tired I truly was.  Also, my bed is REALLY comfortable.  After I woke up, I got ready, had breakfast (I LOVE Wheat-bix) and then began putting up pictures in my room.  It feels much homier now!  I walked a couple miles to K-mart and got a beach towel and another pillow and then came back, dropped it off and went to the gym.  I had my health assessment and then ran a little bit before taking off walking the opposite direction of my house.  I wanted to explore and see what I lived around.  It was a nice long walk and I was already wearing my running shoes so that was good.  I finished my walk and came back and made dinner.  A couple of my roommates from China made dinner a little later and offered me some.  I tried a little (chicken wings).  It was good, but mostly I just wanted to join them to get to know them.  It was fun having been to China because they wanted to know about my trip and we had a little more in common.  Two are from Beijing and one is from Chengdu.  I’ve met all my roommates over the course of the last couple days.  Stephanie is from Chicago, Amanda is from Chengdu in China, Kevin is from Beijing, Mark is from France, there is a girl coming from the UK next week and I am from Seattle (so much easier to explain than EllensburgJ).  Everyone speaks English reasonably well.  My living situation is awesome!  I have a single room and then we all share the kitchen, and living room.  There are separate bathrooms for the boys and girls.  I am about a ten-minute walk from campus one way and a ten-minute walk from the store the other way.  There is also a tram that runs down the middle of the street that goes all the way downtown… I haven’t explored that far yet.  Burwood (the suburb I’m in) reminds me of Monroe Street in Spokane.  There are lots of residences and then random strip malls thrown in.  Overall, I like it here.  I’m still excited to meet lots of new people, but also know that for the introvert in me, that’s going to be exhausting.  Caw caw RAWR… I can do it.  So, recap… I’m in Melbourne, I’m moved in, my roommates seem nice enough, my house should be great, I’m still excited about the semester and I am loving life.  I saw a billboard today that said, “Life is a huge canvas… throw all the paint you can.”  I thought, “done!”  Life is good.