Weeks 5, 6, 7: Races, Boat, Trailride, and Job

So I've been quite negligent to my blog-writing duties. I guess I haven't been in the mood for writing anything. A lot has happened since I last wrote, so I'll try to be brief--or at least concise.

The first outstanding event that I can't remember writing about was going to the horse races... two Saturdays ago. Wow, I've been putting this off a lot longer than I thought. It was a big day at the races and the weather was nice, so I took off from Unilodge and caught the short 10-15 minute train it took to get to the racecourse. I was there from about 12:30 to 4:30 or so, and saw most of the days races in between wandering around the grounds and taking pictures. The main attraction was the Lexus Newmarket Handicap, a big G1 race with a million dollar purse. Black Caviar, a sprinting filly who was undefeated for her first 9 starts, was going for her tenth victory. Before the race you could collect any number of free black caviar souvenirs. I scavenged up two little flags, a hat, and some pins, all made with the orange/pink and black silk colors. She ended up winning the race seemingly effortlessly, it was pretty impressive. I even scored a coveted fence-side position to take some sick pictures of her in the winners circle-thing. They handed out free prints of her crossing the wire a couple hours after the race. My other favorite part of the afternoon was the free 'how to use one of those confusing betting machine' lessons I got from a nice gentleman that even spotted me 5 dollars to bet--too bad my horse lost by a nose.

That night I made another mad dash across the city to catch a train out to Woodend. I have an uncanny ability to hop on the train a minute before it's about to leave. I always mean to plan ahead and give myself enough time to warrant a casual pace, but things always come up and I end up being one of those annoying people weaving through the standing people on escalators. But, back to the story, Michael had invited me to a get together at Jay's house that night, and he was even nice enough to pick me up and drop me off from the train station. Elisa had plans for the day and wasn't able to come by until late, but I had a great time hanging out with Michael and everyone else there. The next afternoon Michael dropped me back at the train station to head back to the city.

Last Sunday night was loads of fun. I'd bought tickets a few weeks ago for a dubstep boat cruise with some of the people in unilodge. It turned out to be a bigger group than I thought, about 16 people, that all loaded into taxis to find our boat in the docklands. We got to spend the next 4 hours cruising back and forth through the industrial dock lands, under massive bridges, and out in some open water across from the city skyline, all with beautifully blasting dubstep. The cruise in itself was great, going through the docklands with all of the massive shipping freighters with giant railroad cars being unloaded off of them all throughout the evening was really neat to see. It was a long night of lots of dancing, general deafening from the dubstep, and good times with a lot of unilodge people. We took the free party bus back into the city, rocking back and forth to the music and dancing all the way, to the afterparty at Miss Libs, a bar not far from unilodge. We spent a little while hanging out there and then went home to retire.

The next fun outing was Tuesday night, back to Miss Libs, actually. Some of the guys from unilodge are in a band that was performing there. It was pretty crazy, seeing most of the outside courtyard/music performance half of the bar completely filled with unilodgers. There were other people there, but it was hard to find them amongst the sea. I think someone said they counted at least 36 known occupants of unilodge. The music was good, the guys are amazing good guitar players, and the singing wasn't too bad.

Wednesday was a good day. My australian wildlife class lab was at the Melbourne zoo. We had to walk there, which took about 20 minutes, and then spent the next three hours wandering around in it. The work we are given to do while we are there is really rather simple and not necessary to do while actually on the trip. We get a couple page worksheet with questions that are more google-able than actually findable at the zoo. Otherwise, we had to fill 3-4 pages with sketches and notes, on basically anything that interested us. Unfortunately, the assignment was focused on the reptiles, lizards, frogs, and oddly seals, so I didn't get to explore the whole zoo, just those areas. At least it was free entry, and now I've got that half done for when I go back.

I walked back with an american who started talking to me after recognizing my Penn State bag, and a nice Australian guy who was telling us about his length travels he takes for competitive fencing. I got back around 5:30, and was welcomed to the site of unilodge setting up for their little party they were putting on. It was themed liked a 5 year olds birthday party, there were balloons, little carnival games, and even a clown doing magic tricks. The best part, though, was the free food. They were grilling sausage/hot dog things, that you would eat on a slice of plain bread with fried onions and your choice of condiments. I think I had 3, maybe 4, a couple bags of popcorn, a bag of cotton candy, and however many cokes it took to wash it all down. Oh, and I won a pack of unilodge jelly beans playing one of the semi-unbeatable games. On the whole, it was rather successful, though gluttony is a bit painful.

The rest of the week was relatively uneventful, from what I can remember. This past Saturday afternoon I took a train out to Elisa's. I missed the Woodend stop, for some reason unknown to me, and ended up in the next town, Kyneton. I had to wait 20 minutes or so for Elisa to drive out to pick me up, but I spent some time exploring the deserted station and tracks. We went back to Elisa's, had a few minutes to chill, and then headed down the road to her friend's house for the evening. Her best friend from middle/high school, Myvy, and her family were making a big dinner.It was a pretty big bunch: us, Myvy, (different) Jess and Rachel (two friends from highschool), Myvy's parents and twin brothers, and an Austrian couple that had been traveling the country and were staying at their house. The food was amazing, I must say. For starters we had crackers and cheese and home made dips of some sort with champagne with strawberries in the glasses. So tasty. Then some ridiculously good lasagna with salads for dinner with some really sweet white wine, Moscato I think it was called. Then we all played scategories for a while and then had desert called "lemon delicious." It's some kind of cake/puddingy/lemon stuff with ice cream. After dinner we all sat around and talked for a while. Jess, the resident 'hippie' who is an Outdoor Education major, told us about trips hiking or kayaking or whatnot inbetween Rachel and I's long, drawn out conversations on horses--owns her own horse, and works at one of the farms nearbye. I feel like we need to hang out. Meanwhile, Myvy, going to school to be a physical therapist' was taking turns palpating Jess and Rachel's back to feel their spinal processes. It was a fun evening. 

Sunday was nice. We woke up around 8:40 and were out of the house picking everyone up by 9. My plan for Jess and I to go riding had grown to include her boyfriend Aaron, Elisa, and Michael. We were given our horses, mounted up, and headed out. The riding was a bit mundane for a while. The first half, maybe three quarters of the ride was spent just sitting ontop of my trusty mare, Alabama (I would get the one named after a US state), while she boredly followed the rest of the horses along a beaten trail through some woods and hills. It was nice, relaxing, but generally annoying to not really be riding--though to be fair though I was rather impressed at how well trained, or how docile and complacent  they were. Luckily, I caught a break when we were allowed to break into groups based on experience to speed things up a little. I went with one of the girls who worked there to canter around. It was rather simple, still, since 'Bama seemed to pick up whatever pace the horse infront of her was going, so I didn't even have to coax her into a trot or canter, she just took off. I had a blast, though, cantering about through trails around the property, ducking through bushes and trees. My mare wasn't the smoothest ride, but being sore was so worth it. 

After riding we drove into town to go to the Daylesford market. It was alright, but the Gisborne market that I I went to a few weeks ago was generally a lot nicer, with most of the stands being artists or crafstmen selling their work, whereas Daylesford was mostly just a bunch of people selling random things and old stuff. Elisa, Michael, and I lapped Jess and Aaron a few times (they were much more thorough shoppers) until we caved and left to find lunch. It took a lot of searching to finally find somewhere we wanted to eat. Michael and I each got chicken parms, costing a whopping 19 dollars. I bitched about how expensive food was for most of the meal. Elisa left for a while to go pick up the other two, and Michael and I had a lovely chat--mostly about how expensive the food was. After lunch we headed home. We dropped Michael off and went and hung out at Aaron's house for a while. We watched some big bang and snacked on candy we bought at the market. 

We went back to Elisa's around 5 and were both exaughsted. I took a shower and then we both went back and forth between napping and reading until dinner at 6:30 or so. I borrowed a book from Nancy's shelf, since she has a lovely collection of fantasty books, so I'd have something to keep me busy on the trains since I just finished my other book. Dinner was great, as always. There was some kind of meat, possibly lamb again,  then green beans and broccoli and a whopping mound of mashed potatoes. I didn't really care about the rest of the food, though it was good, but I've been craving mashed potatoes all week for some reason. I was so happy. I spent some time hanging out with her family downstairs watching tv after dinner. Her mom made some really tasty desert, creme brule or something? I'm not sure, but it was lovely. I ate so well that weekend, especially compared to the past week where I ate mostly ramen and similar quality food. I caught the last train home for the night. 

Monday was spent mostly in a state of severe soreness from riding the day before. I decided to take it easy and read most of the day. I did receive a call though, from one of the few places I'd applied to in my feeble job search. Tuesday morning I woke up super early and went on my grand adventure to find Chadstone. It takes about an hour to get there, which is really obnoxious. First, a tram ride to the train station, then a train, and then a bus to the mall where the company is located. It was a simple group interview that involved answering one or two questions and reading off a script, basically all the job requires being able to read, speak, work a computer, and be desperate enough to want to work there. I got a call back Tuesday afternoon and was signed up for training for today. The training was about as painful as the commute, and lasted from 11 to 3 today. We spent most of our time practicing reading out and coding in the answers to the endless surveys we have to do for market research. Yeah, I'm going to be one of those annoying phone interviewers. Some of the exciting 10-20 minute long surveys I got to read and reread at nausium today were about road safety, an energy company and electric rates, the housing market etc. The only way I made it through was knowing that I was getting paid $80 to sit there. So, despite the commute, and the job itself, the $20 an hour paycheck is far too tempting to pass up. I've never made that much money in my life, but around here, its only barely above minimum wage. I have my first shift tomorrow night, so I guess I'll found out how worth it is really is. 

I accidentally finished the book I borrowed from Nancy yesterday, I thought 700 pages might last me a little longer than two days. Guess not, but now I don't have anything to read, so it's going to be a long commute tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to this weekend though, I've booked a day ride in the high country mountains, about 3 hours from here, on Sunday. I'm going to be in so much pain on Monday, but I can't wait. So that was my last two weeks or so. Stay tuned for more. 

Weekend of 4th week: Open Range Zoo and Macedon Waterfall

So the weekend turned out to be a success. Saturday morning I woke up early to catch the 10:30 train out to Elisa's. As always, no matter how much time I've given myself to get there, I always end up getting onto the train with only a minute or two to spare before it's pulling out of the station. Ah well, at least I've stopped missing them. I've started remembering to bring along a book to read, so the hour long train ride out to Woodend goes by quickly. Elisa picked me up at the station at 11:30 and we hung left her place at noon once Michael arrived. 

We had a nice hour long drive to get to our destination for the day: Werribee Open Range Zoo. There was a pitstop on the way there to get some lunch--such a tasty Big Mac. Luckily, the weather was perfect for the day, not a cloud in the sky and probably in the mid 70s in the sun. Once we got to the zoo, we payed our admissions, only 22 dollars, and were automatically signed up to go on a 2:35 safari ride. With 20 minutes to spare, we decided to go walk through the open range bit, where they have Australian animals like kangaroos and emus wandering about the large enclosure. On our short walk we quickly discovered that all of the animals were far off the path, hiding under the trees for some reprieve from the sun. Fortunately, I was taught that if it's not roped off, I can climb it (or in this case trek across is), so we went to pester some lazy kangarros. We also discovered Elisa's fear of emus, which were admittedly rather intimidating looking and seemed to hover in small groups around the kangaroos. We found a bunch of lounging kangaroos (surrounded by emus), but before we had time to chase them out so I could see them hop about, we realized we needed to catch our sarafri bus so we headed back to the center of the zoo. 

By some miracle, Elisa, Michael, and I got an entire bench of the otherwise packed bus; every other row had 5 occupants, with children under 10 seeming to be the majority. The safari took us across the world!, as the drive would exclaim every time we went into a new encloser. "And now we've crossed into North America!" meanwhile I'm exclaiming the speediness of our travel--that was nothing like my 14 hour flight across the Pacific! Anyways, we got to see a lot of cool, lazy animals in the first few zones like buffalo, some gazel-like things, camels, hippos, and so on. Elisa and I took turns passing my camera off depending on which side of the bus was closest to the animals. The African Safari (also only a hop skip and dive away from Australia apparently) was the coolest place. There was a small herd of giraffes, rhinos, zebras, and more deer like things, all up right next to the bus at most times since the hay truck had just come through, causing them all to gather nicely for a group photo. Further up the road was a herd of zebra with a foal only two weeks old. It was soo cute. 

The safari took about 45 minutes and was really nice, overall. Though, at one point the ~3 year old girl behind me kept signing lyrics from "In the Ayer," which kind of made me wonder what kids are learning these days. After the safari we had a brief drink break, which included playing with the cute meercats whose exhibit lined the cafe. We decided to walk around the rest of the zoo before returning to pester more kangaroos. There were lazy lions, wild dogs that were eating lunch, cheetas that kept pacing inches away, separated only by s thin piece of glass, and hippos getting their teeth checked. Once we finished the loop it was back to open range section. 

I was disapointed to find that herd of lazy kangaroos we'd found earlier were no where to be seen. Michael and I tried to see how close we could dare get to some emus, much to Elisa's discomfort. I kept saying that I was going to get a great picture, of Michael chasing the kangarros, hopping after the emus, who were chasing Elisa. Would have been great. On our way out, we happened across two kangaroos right near the path. I stood there, poised to take a picture of them hopping about, but instead they either collapsed into the grass for a nap or sheepishly dragged their feet around on the group to only mimic the motion of hopping. Determined to get a picture of them hopping around, we tried to wait until all the other guests weren't around  so Michael could scare them and make them hop. The whole time new families pushing strollers and running after children kept on passing, the two kangaroos continued to do absolutely nothing. After about 10 minutes my camera battery suddenly died. Luckily, I had the backup in my purse. I was in the middle of changing it when for no particular reason, both kangaroos get up and hop dramatically off. Of course, all in the 10 seconds that it took for me to change the battery. Damn kangaroos. 

After having spent a couple hours out in the sun at the zoo, we left and drove the hour back to Elisa's house. We went into town to rent movies and get pizza for the evening. We rented Easy A, at Nancy's request, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, for her brother and his friends, and Going the Distance, because it was the first thing Elisa grabbed after a long period of indecision. Getting pizza took longer than it should have, so I spent about 10 minutes sitting in the car while Elisa and Michael waited inside. Most of the time was spent being entertained by a lone fly trapped in the car with me. Otherwise, I'd started flipping through Elisa's roadmap of Victoria, looking for funny named towns--and let me tell you, there were a lot. I decided next time Elisa and I need an idea on where to go, we're going to go to the funniest named town I can find. Finally, we retired to Elisa's house for the evening. We ended up watching all three movies, leaving us getting ready for bed around 1am or so. While "helping" Michael and Elisa get mattresses out of her guest house, I was quickly distracted by the stars. I hadn't been outside on a clear night in the country yet, but woah, the stars here are beautiful. There seemed to be hundreds more than I'd ever seen before, and even brighter than that. I just stood outside for 5 minutes, spinning in circles trying to look at all of them. 

The day we slept in, and didn't start thinking about what to do until after 11 or so. Her Mom suggested the Gibson market that is put on on the first Sunday of each month. It was only a 15 minute or so drive to Gibson. It was a nice sized town, another beautiful sunny day, and the market was very cute. There were loads of tents lining the center of town with people selling food, flowers, arts and crafts, word work, jewelry, books etc. We walked around for a long time, looking through all of the stands. After we'd finished with the market we found a little cafe and sat out on the street for lunch. I got the chicken parm, or parmagana, special for lunch. It ended up being huge, and delicious, and oddly enough they serve chicken parm ontop of french fries. Such a good choice. After spending a couple hours in Gibson we headed back to Woodend to run a few errands. After we'd dropped off the groceries at Elisa's, we decided to go find a waterfall we'd heard about that was nearbye. 

We drove up and over Mt. Macedon again, over a crazy windy dirt road that wove through a forest of black trees, mostly burnt by a wildfire long ago. Wildfires here are rather common, large ones happen every 3 years or so in some places, and everyone is extremely fire-safe. There are signs along the road indicting the fire risk level of the day, and at gas stations you're not allowed to even operate a cell phone, in case there's a spark I guess. On the other side of the mountain, we found the Stanley park, a little park that appeared to be a little clearing of grass, a gazebo, and a playgroup with a few families there. As soon as you dipped into the little trail in the woods along the field there was a little stream, and then suddenly a waterfall. It wasn't nearly as large as Trentham Falls, but it was still impressive. We walked down the nicely crafted stone steps to the base of the waterfall. I had loads of fun climbing around on the rocks and taking pictures. 

After getting my fill on the falls, we followed the trail that wound alongside the steam, through the trees. Along the path I suddenly found an echida, crawling around and looking for bugs. It was so cute, and so close, so naturally I went climbing around to get as close as possible. It was surprising quite unafraid, and went about its business, continuing to walk straight at me until it was only a few feet away. Only on a few occasions, when I broke a branch or something, did it flatten out and raise up all of the pricklies on its back. I named him Eddie and had a blast taking his picture, until I finally left, only because Elisa was getting attacked by mosquitoes while I played. It was alright though, because further up the path there were some blackberry bushes, so Elisa enjoyed picking and eating some berries. We decided that in our traveling partnership, I was the hunter and she was the gatherer--though I only hunt cute animals to take pictures of. There were also some fun trees I found that were fun to play with; one was hallowed and burnt out, and the other was massive, burnt around the base, and looked like it had a face on it. So cool. I rode the child-size bouncy horse thing at the playground for a bit, and then we left for home. 

The rest of the afternoon was nice and relaxing .We watched tv, had a tasty dinner with her family that her mom made, and then hung out upstairs for a while. I even dragged Elisa outside to stare at the starts with me for a while, even though it was rather cold out. Then we left so I could catch the last train home at 9:30. It was a lovely train ride, and I didn't even have to pay! Late at night the ticket office at the Woodend station is closed, so usually you wait for the conductor to check tickets and just buy one from him. For whatever reason, the conductor never felt like doing his rounds, so free train ride for me. Its only 6.40, but still, I was excited. I got home near 11 and relaxed at home for the rest of the night. 

The last couple days have been nice. My classes are going well. Genetics is still boring. In animal behavior we're learned about genetically linked behaviors like nest building in mice and aggitated swimming in guppies, and in Australian wildlife we we've been learning about amphibians like the the invasive cane toad and a recently extinct frog that would swallow it's eggs, have them develop in their stomach, and then vomit up baby frogs. Figure's they're extinct, doesn't seem like a reasonable way to procreate. It was nice, there was no 3 hour lab today for my wild life class because there are some labs that are done in two groups, so you only have lab every other week. Next week we're going to the zoo though, that'll be fun. My history class is still dull and boring as ever. I entertained the idea of taking a different history course, but none of the interesting topics fit well with my schedule, and I had secretly hoped that the lecturer might have just been having an off day. 

Like last week, the weather has been dreary and drizzly most days, so I've just been hanging out downstairs with everyone after classes. Tuesday we had two false fire alarms within an hour, walking down 7 flights of stairs was loads of fun. I also finally made it up the the 12th floor last night. I'm not sure why I'd never gone up there before, but let me tell you, I've been missing out. The view was breathtaking. My views from the 7th floor are just the tops of nearbye buildings, with the slight hint of a city beyond those walls. Up there, all you can see right out to the horizon is a sea of lights splashed across the blackness. It's beautiful. It just keeps going and going too. It was honestly the first time I realized that I am living in the middle of an amazingly large city. My version of Melbourne before that was maybe 10 square blocks, and even that was hit or miss. Being able to look out and see the whole massive expansiveness of it all really made me realize where I am. The view from the kitchen, oh my god, I'd stand up there and cook all night just to look at it. It's slightly under being absolutely perfect, there's a small roof of the neighboring building blocking some of it, but for the most part it's a beautiful view of the CBD, the stretch of the giant skyscrapers with all of their alternating office lights on. It was gorgeous. 

I don't have any big plans for the rest of the week. I think there's a picnic with MUSEX in the gardens Friday afternoon. I might go to the races on Saturday, there's a big G1 race and a whole afternoon of races at the Flemington Racecourse. It's one of the oldest and most well-known track in the country and is only a 10 minute train ride from the center of the city. We'll see if I make it out of not. 

Week 4: Waterfalls and Classes

So it's been a little while since I've last written. I guess with the start of classes, compulsory writing just seems silly, but I'll give it a go for the sake of some story telling.

I suppose I'll start with the last interesting thing to happen, which would have been my weekend trip out to the country. I caught a train out to Elisa's on Friday evening and arrived just in time for some dinner. We went and ordered some Thai food, I got some beef and vegetables (and pineapple! my new favorite food in everything) stirfried with sweet and sour sauce, it was tasty. While we waited for the food we took a walk down through town to go rent some movies for the night. I picked out Salt, since I'd heard good things and didn't feel like perusing for anything else. Elisa picked out Wolf Creek, a lovely Australian horror film. I made the mistake of telling her that I wanted to go to the outback, so she decided to make me watch a movie where some nice tourist girls traveling across the country get picked up by a guy, who starts off nice and helpful and ends up torturing and killing them. Apparently it's also based on true events, as the guy that they were traveling with was able to get away, though they never found the man. Elisa, her sister Nancy, and I all had dinner and watched the two movies. I was slightly put off by Wolf Creek, complaining that now I'm not going to know if someone I meet is just trying to be nice or wants to kill me, but I'm still set on going to the outback. Besides, I'm certain I know how to shoot a gun better than the girls in the movie, so I should be fine either way.

The next day we woke up early, around 9am or so, and I hung out for a bit while Elisa finished up her morning chores. Her mom made a delicious breakfast of either eggs and bacon or french toast--I went for the french toast. After breakfast and some more cleaning, Michael, one of Elisa's guy friends who I'd met at dinner a few weeks ago in the city, joined us and we were off to Trentham to find a waterfall to play in for the afternoon. Even after a wrong turn or two, (I'm quickly catching onto Elisa's lack of direction, and to be fair the sign for the falls was quite small and obscure) it only took about a half hour or so to get there. There was a  nice little paved path for the "lookout" to the falls, and then on the other side of the small metal fence was a much smaller, narrow goat path sort of thing that led down to the base of the waterfall.

The couple that was there when we first arrived left after a few minutes so we had the place to ourselves for the next hour or so. We had some fun taking pictures and Michael and I went climbing back up under the waterfall. It wasn't an exceptionally warm day, probably in the mid 70s, but we were still determined to go for a dip. The water was absolutely freezing, to put it lightly. It wasn't even the sort of cold that slowly doesn't feel so bad after you give yourself some time to get used to it, it was more than happy to remain at pneumonia-inducing temperatues, I'm sure. After braving the cold and navigating the big pointy rocks we ended up seated under the waterfall. It was deafening, blinding, probably power-washing a few layers of skin off, but still an absolute blast. I think we only lasted 10 to 15 minutes in the water before we retreated to dry land and warm sun.

We spread some towels out on the big boulder conveniently located infront of the falls and laid out in the sun to dry off and warm up a bit. As we were occasionally misted with some icey cold waterfall water, a few more people came wandering down the path to have a look at the fall. I was slightly concerned that our sun bathing might be taking away from the scenery for these poor folks, but that was before one of the woman's presumed husband decided to strip down to his tidy-whities and go for a stroll behind the falls so she could take pictures while he posed. It was slightly disturbing, but at least it made me feel a little better about our much more socially acceptable presence. Once we were all dry, we drove back into town for lunch. Elisa and I got some rather fancy and extremely messy BLTs while Michael complained and picked at some sort of bread and dips plate.

After the drive home, the plan was to meet up with Michael and Jay on the 3 something train into the city and then head to Zack's house for the rest of the afternoon. It was a lovely plan, but it didn't quite work out. Turns out they were doing some work on the rails between Woodend and Melbourne and we could only take a bus there, but the bus wasn't leaving for another hour or so. We walked into town, hung out for a bit to kill the time, and then got on the bus. Conveniently, we didn't have to pay anything for the ride all the way into the city, but it did take a lot longer than the train. By the time we got into the city, some time after 6, I decided to just call it a night and head home instead of accompany the group to Zach's, which would have involved another 45 minute or so train ride.

From what I recall, Sunday was cold and rainy so there wasn't anything too exciting going on. Monday brought with it the much anticipated (or dreaded) start of classes. Luckily, one of the few nice things about living at unilodge is that the location is amazingly convenient. Campus is directly across the street, and even though most of my classes are on the far side of campus, it still only takes 5 minutes at most to walk to them. My first class was Genetics, which was in a normal sized lecture hall with about 300 or so kids in it. There isn't much to say on the class, the professors, or lecturers as they're called here, weren't exactly interesting and neither is the subject, but it's a requirement for my major so I'll suffer through it.

My next two classes are both of my zoology classes which are back to back in the same little lecture room. I think it's the only decent sized lecture room in the whole zoology building, so there aren't many other choices. The first class I had was my animal behavior class. From the classes I've had so far it seems like it's going to be really interesting. I haven't really studied the ecology and behavioral side of things in any of my classes at Penn State, and it's nice to see a different perspective. The lecturers are all really cool and interesting so far, and the class itself has very little work, just like all of the other classes here. There's only one main assignment, a "news and views" writing assignment that basically entails taking one of the 5 assigned scientific papers from a study and condensing the information into 1000 words or less. Other than that, you're required to peer review three papers from students in the class, and then there's one written final exam on the theory of the class and not on cramming in information. I'm sold.

The next class I had was Australian wildlife biology. The professor was a crazy little lady that ran around and spoke rather quickly, but she was entertaining. This class also seems like it's going to be really interesting. The  weekly lab, or practical as they call them, usually involve going to the zoo or other parks and gardens nearby to observe and sketch the animals and birds that we see. Our first practical this week was in a lab room filled with a collection of preserved animals, birds, lizards, snakes, etc. that we had to go around an observe, sketch, identify, and answer a few questions on. Animals and drawing, what more could I ask for?

Unfortunately, my last class of the day wasn't nearly as successful as the others. It's my history class, called colonizing Australia, and should be at least vaguely interesting . As I quickly found out though, the lecturer can easily make or break a class. This guy spent the entire hour and a half of the class bent over the desk and reading off of what sounded like an extremely long, obtuse, and generally useless essay. It wasn't even like he was giving a lecture at all, and he would only look up from time and time again to change the slide to another picture of a map or something similar and then continue on in his monotonous chanting. It was extremely painful trying to listen to him--he kept quoting random historians and primary documents but I couldn't tell when the quotes ended and when his archaic rambling began again. I think by the end of the class someone may or may not have landed on Australia, but that's more of an educated guess than anything else. Fortunately, there are only two essays that we need to write for the class, so I think I'm going to try to stick it out and just get the work done.

For the most part, the rest of the week was spent going to classes, hanging out at unilodge, or stealing wifi from the university and doing enjoyable things like watching tv or downloading music that I can't do on my limited bandwidth in my room. It's generally been overcast, drizzly, windy, and in the 60s throughout the week. I know that those complaints aren't falling on sympathetic ears for those of you in the northern hemisphere still stuck in the throes of winter, but still, it's not nice. I've heard time and time again that this summer is one of the coldest and wettest summers they've had in decades. I guess that's better than raging forest fires, but still, I wouldn't mind some sun now and then.

One highlight of the week was Wednesday night. Elisa was in the city for one of her classes and I was invited along to meet up with her and a bunch of her friends from uni. We went to the night market first, which was really fun. It's at the victoria market, which is usually home to various vendors during the days that sell vegetables, meat, etc. But once a week in the summer season they have the night market with live music, food stands selling just about anything you could ever want, and other vendors selling silk clothing, jewelry, and other odds and ends. I had bratwurst and sauerkraut for dinner washed down with sangria, the most popular drink at the market it would seem, and then spent some time looking around at all of the vendors with Elisa. After we'd had a look at anything that looked interesting we headed off into the city to go find her friends again. We met up at bar called either Highlander or All the Tired Horses, I'm not sure which, though I prefer the horse version obviously. The rest of the evening was spent dancing with everyone to a lovely ensemble of 60's music.

Thursday afternoon I met up with Elisa again after her classes for lunch. We went to a place in the city called Crossways, I think. It's a Hare Krishna run place that serves a set menu of vegetarian lunches every day of the week. Apparently all of the proceeds go towards charity and the people that work there are all volunteers. Wednesday's meal was a big helping of tofu and vegetable curry and rice, cherry havlava with custard for desert, and then all you can drink koolaid, called cordial here, for a grand total of 5 dollars. I'd never had tofu before, and wasn't exactly impressed, but otherwise it was really good food. I'll be going there more often for lunches, that's for sure. After lunch Elisa had some time to kill before her next class so we wandered around the mall at Melbourne Central.

I'm not sure what the plan is for the weekend yet, but I'll probably be headed back out to the country to do some more sightseeing with Elisa. It's always nice to be able to get out of the city.

Week 3: O-week and Mamelons

This week was O-week, or orientation week, at my uni. Basically it was just a load of bbqs, various talks on getting situated at uni and in Melbourne, and club fairs and gatherings to meet people and the like. Instead of having loads of fun out socializing and enjoying the scene, I spent most of my time battling with the class enrollment process and the extremely poor system it's attached to. I'm sure it's a lot easier for non-exchange kids, but if you fall into that unfortunate category... sucks to be you. 

Essentially, the guy, Aaron, who helped me enroll in my classes after my miserable orientation day on Friday, told me that I'd have to get permission from the class advisor to be enrolled in it because of the prerequisites. The concept is just in itself, we have to have a chat, either face to face or via email, about whether or not you've had adequate preparation for the course and then voila, you're allowed in. The next step, turning your written confirmation and an accompanying formal sheet of paper detailing your student information and the class information you want, seems as though it should be as equally painless, but oh, it's anything but that. 

Originally, Aaron had told me to go to the EPC (the building with the lovely take-a-number-and-wait-an-hour room) and ask for him, and that he'd enroll me in the class. Monday afternoon I'd had a brief email conversation with the professor of one of the classes I wanted enrolled in. The email listed for the second class I was interested in didn't work, naturally, so I ventured over to the zoology building to just talk to the guy. I was told he was out sick and to come back the next day. Not to be deterred from some semblance of success, I went to the library to print out the email and at least get that class registered.Unfortunately, my experience at the library only served to reinforce my growing hatred for the uni altogether. After a lot of frustrated trial and error and finally a long walk to find a held desk I was informed that the network was having issues and that most of the computers in the building weren't letting student's sign on. Eventually I found a functioning computer on a lower floor and went to print out the email.

 Printing, though, would turn out to be another enterprise all in itself. A piece of paper posted near the computer I was on read, "network printer is directly upstairs." Fun fact, it wasn't directly upstairs, and it wasn't until I'd recived some confused looks from the help desk people (why, oh why they were confused when I asked where the printer was, I can't figure out, they work in a library, albiet full of faulty computers, but full of computers none the less) that I'd finally been directed down one hall way, across into another joined building, and then around into some other room. "Directly above," pfft. Once I found the printer, it took a few minutes of random card inserting and button pressing until I realized that I needed money put on my new student id card I'd gotten printed earlier that afternoon. A lot of internet browsing and then elevator-searching later, I'd found the basement of the building that housed a stupid little machine devoted entirely to putting printing credit on my card. Ten cents and roughly half an hour of confusion and wandering later I had my email in paper form. 

Back on the other side of campus with my printed email and filled out form, I was regretfully informed that Aaron was out sick as well that day. Convenient. Luckily, one of the question-desk ladies who'd I'd had some lengthy conversations with on last Friday concerning my non-existent packet took my paper work anyways. I asked about what I should do on the next day when I would need to schedule my last class, assuming the professor wasn't ill anymore, and never really got an answer. Oh well, at least I'd gotten one thing done. After all of that nonsense, I went out grocery shopping, made some food, and watched some tv downstairs with everyone. 

On Tuesday I headed back into campus in the afternoon to finish all of this class registering business. Luckily, the zoology professor was back and, after a short chat, I was headed back to the EPC to turn in my written consent slip. Turns out that, once again, Aaron was out for the day, but because no one had given me another one of the formal papers I needed to fill out to accompany my handwritten note, I was told to take a number and wait. I had to wait over an hour until I was seen. I can't really describe how maddening that was, considering at this point I'm pretty sure most of the people in that room know me by name. Then, just to add insult to injury, I watched as the blonde lady who'd been helping me each time, and who literally did know my name, was banging out numbers like nobody's business. My number was 403, and I'd been waiting since about 360 for my turn. Then, when she finished with 402, she decided to get up, go help a coworker at their station, file some papers, and maybe even go have a nice nap in the back room. When she finally decided to get back to her actual job and called my number, I showed her my paper, she handed me the form I needed, I spent all of five seconds filling it out, handed it over and was done. Yeap, one hours wait time for that. 

I remember coming back from all of that to find some people in the lounge watching the news on the earth quake that devastated Christchurch, NZ only a few hours earlier. I think my complaints went something along the lines of, "I've just had the worst day, well--I could have been in Christchurch--but otherwise, it's right up there." I was pretty miserable for the rest of the afternoon and just hung around the lounge and in my room until I got to leave to go catch a train to head out to Elisa's for some fresh air. Naturally, the trams decided to run exceptionally slow that evening and I arrived at the station barely 5 minutes after my train had left. To sate my frustration I got a smoothie and read a paper that someone had been passing out on my way in. I waited an hour, caught the 7 something train, sat on that for an hour, and arrived at Woodend around 8:20. Elisa picked me up and brought me home, where I was greeted with a big bowl of leftover raviolis and homemade meatballs. I ate until I couldn't eat any more and then retired upstairs to chat with Elisa for a few hours until we finally went to bed.

Wednesday morning we woke up around 10. Elisa made me a tasty toasted ham, cheese, and tomato sandwich for breakfast, and then had I an amazing shower that was hot all the way through. Oh, the simple things in life. By noon we were both set to go, so we loaded up and headed off. We stopped by a grocery store in town to buy some things for the picnic Elisa had planned We drove a short distance, not even 10 minutes, and were at Hanging Rock, our destination for the day. I don't feel like rewording the nice summary wiki has on what Hanging Rock is, so here you are: "Hanging Rock is a mamelon, created 6.25 million years ago by stiff magma pouring from a vent and congealing in place. Often thought to be a volcanic plug, it is not. Two other mamelons exist nearby, created in the same period: Camels Hump, to the south on Mount Macedon, and to the east, Crozier's Rocks. All three mamelons are made of solvsbergite, a form of trachyte only found in two or three other places in the world. As Hanging Rock's magma cooled and contracted, it split into rough columns. These weathered over time into the many pinnacles that can be seen today."

It was an absolutely beautiful day to go hiking, barely a cloud in the sky, about mid 70s or so, slightly hotter in the sun etc. The trek up wasn't bad at all, it was a little steep here and there, but you really didn't have to climb far. As soon as we started finding all of the cool rocks we basically left the path behind and found our own, more fun way up. Elisa kept telling me "if it't not roped off, you can climb it." So, with her enthusiastically and often times demandingly encouraging me to climb out onto this ledge or see if I can climb on top of that rock, I had quite a blast wandering all over every nook and cranny of that place. Climbing around there was loads of fun. All of the rocks were so cool, and the views were stunning. I just put up the pictures I took on fb, if you haven't already seen. 

Unfortunately, even though I had a mind enough to request it, there was no sunscreen in Elisa's house, so I got to feel my skin slowly baking away throughout the afternoon. My face and arms were all tingly and on fire, but I'll live. And, due to the requests for more pictures with me in them, I started training Elisa on being my photography apprentice. I'd originally given her my handy little digital camera to take pictures with but the batteries died soon on. No matter, we had loads of fun taking turns climbing things, taking photos of each other, passing the camera back and forth and so on. Elisa is slowly catching the fever that is playing with my lovely new dSLR camera, and now that she's figured out the on an off switch, how to change modes, and zooming, she's starting to quite enjoy it, and even asks me for the camera before I can offer it to her. 

After much fun was had on Hanging Rock, we finally ventured back down to go enjoy our picnic that Elisa had packed. We found a nice picnic table in the shade by a little pond and spread out our delicious feast. We had strawberries and grapes, pringles, crackers, some creamy/melty brie, sundried tomatoes, and a long sausage/cold cut kind of meat thing that I can't remember the name of. We made yummy little sandwiches with the cheese, meat, and tomatoes, and dined away. Eventually, some really beautiful blue and red birds started gathering above us, and before long I had them all eating crackers and salt and vinegar chips that they would take from our hands. It was quite entertaining watching them all fight and bicker over who got what cracker, and eventually we even gave one a grape. Lucky little bird. It was rather entertaining, the whole time Elisa has been looking forward to the picnic and food, whilst I was on cloud nine getting to hike, take pictures, and play with wildlife. Luckily we both appreciate the other's interests, so it's a nice compromise. 

Once our stomaches were fully satisfied, we headed out around 3pm or so. While we were up on hanging rock, I'd noticed the funny formation called Camels Hump (mentioned in the wiki description) across the way on Mount Macedon. I remembered where the turn off for the little trail was from the last time we'd been up Mount Macedon and pointed Elisa in that direction, since apparently climbing around on one mamelon wasn't enough. A short drive later, we were back at the top of the mountain, winding up another little trail. Much more fun rock climbing and picture taking was had before we were all worn out from the sun and climbing so we headed back into town for some ice cream.

Before I could even get out of the car once we'd parked along the main road in town, Jess was running across the road to give me a massive hug. Turns out she had just come into town with her boyfriend, Aaron, to get something to eat. We hung out with them, had our ice cream, walked around town, and even ventured into a pet adoption center to oo and awe over kittens and dogs. Over food and ice cream we began discussing the mental list that Elisa and I had been making about all of the things that we need to go see and do while I'm here. Jess and Aaron helped throw out some ideas, and by the end of it I think I've roped Jess into going out trail riding with me since both Elisa and Aaron refused to get on a horse. I'd found a place not too far from them that gave hour long trail rides on the weekends, and then Jess was silly enough to bring up a place she'd been to years ago that is apparently much further away but does day-long rides. She's going to go on both of them with me, whether she wants to or not. 

We left town around 5:30 or so and headed back to Elisa's house. We sat around, completely zapped of all energy, and watched some tv while Elisa's younger sister, Nancy, made dinner. She made some really delicious stuffed red bell pepper (capsicum, as they call it) with rice, beef, and then a boatload of other vegetables inside. After a few more tv shows and some hanging out upstairs, I had to catch the last train home at 9:30. I got in around 10:30 and had to catch some trams home, and then retired to my room for an early evening after a quick aloe bath for my face and arms. 

Today was considerably less interesting. I went back to campus for some more dreaded time in the EPC, since it turned out the class I'd waited an hour on Tuesday to get enrolled in wasn't showing up on my online schedule. Now, it turned out that there was a line to get a number, which involved talking to someone to determine if your business was suitable enough, and then sitting around to wait for your number to be called. At that point, though, I'd had it with waiting around and walked past all of the lines up the blonde lady I know so well now. She told me Aaron was here today, but not at the moment, and to come back in an hour. Of course. I did some meager wandering around campus, looking through the club fair stands, wasting some time with some unilodgers I ran into, and then headed back. I had to wait a few minutes for Aaron to finish up with someone else before he could see me, only to tell me that they were backlogged on all of their paperwork and that hopefully I'd be enrolled in the class by Monday. At least this time he gave me his email and office number in case I had any more problems. 

I spent the rest of the afternoon stealing wifi from the campus to upload my pictures from the day before without eating up all of my precious bandwidth in my apartment. I also did a bit more researching into horse riding and found some really interesting options. I think I'm leaning towards a weekend horseback excursion through the High country of Victoria. A lot of the places go through trails and mountains that can be seen in the movie "Man From Snowy River." They seem to cost about 400-500 dollars for the weekend of riding, meals, and rustic accommodation, and it'll require about a 3 hour train ride or so to get out there, but it's definitely on my list of things to do now. It was also half price pizza Thursday, so I've not got loads of cold pizza waiting for me in the fridge. 

Tomorrow I'm heading back out to the country to go explore a waterfall and whatever else looks cool with Elisa. More on that later. 

Week 2 and the Uni Orientation from Hell

Nothing substantial or exceptionally exciting happened throughout the middle of this week. I spent most of my time hanging out with the kids here at Unilodge, where I live.

On Tuesday a few of us decided to go down to the beach for the afternoon. Getting there was considerably easier than I'd thought--all it took was jumping on the proper tram right outside of my building and riding it down through the city for 20 to 30 minutes until you hit the water. The beach was called St. Kilda Beach, and apparently by Australian standards it's nothing to go on about. Every time I'd brought up going to the beach to Elisa last week she would tell me about how shit Melbourne beaches are, and that you had to go further up the coast to find anything worthwhile. She must be crazy, I thought it was a lovely beach. We hung out in the sun for a couple of hours, taking occasional dips into the water, walking along the shore, and hunting for cool seashells.

After a while we stopped in at a bar/restaurant on the beach and the others got beer while I sipped on some tasty pineapple juice. We wandered around about a little more and eventually found a nice plot of grass with some shade under a stretch of palm trees for an afternoon nap. We never really ended up napping, but it was nice sitting around and chatting. We caught the tram back home some time between five and six, so it got quite packed for a bit there, but we basically road the line from start to finish so by the end it was nice and empty again. I think I was supposed to be doing more things with everyone later that night, but the sun had zapped all of the energy out of me and I ended up falling asleep for an unanticipatedly long nap around 9pm or so.

Wednesday was rather overcast and eventually thunderstorms rolled in throughout the night. I spent most of the day inside, but at one point I did venture out to go down to the bank to pull out a bank cheque to finally pay off my bond. Unfortunately, when I gave it to the oh-so-helpful asian front desk girls they started asking if I'd already gotten my passport back. When I informed them that I had taken in out for perhaps 30 minutes last week to set up my bank account and then brought it promptly back to them, they began to look skeptical and quite lost. They haphazardly looked about for a little while before informing me that they couldn't find it. Throughout the process though, I was interrogated as to whether or not I actually brought it back, because they'd suddenly lost all recollection of the event. Dumb asians. I gave them the date that I had the passport out so that they could look through their security cameras for a better idea and left them to it.

Thursday was generally nice, other than the ongoing battle with the people at the front desk. I'd gone back down in the afternoon and got to speak with the manager/douche named Bradley. He swore he couldn't see anything on the tapes and continued to question me about whether or not I'd actually brought it back. I'm not entirely sure why they think that I'd lie about that, but they're all obnoxious. I even game him a window of about 1 and a half hours of when I would have been in the office, he's so useless. Luckily, a nice distraction from unilodge's ineptitude arrived in the form of a nice afternoon outing to one of the popular hang out spots nearby called South Lawn.

It's a really small little patch of grass in the center of the University of Melbourne campus where a lot of people like to hang out. We met up with a couple other unilodgers there and spent an hour or two out baking in the vicious, ozone-free sun. A fun game of both frisbee and a soft australian rules football being tossed about ensued. There were about 8 of us all spread out in a large circle hurling either of the two objects in any direction at any given time. The variation of ways to through the football was rather entertaining--there was the traditional american football overhand, british rugby underhand, and then the weird aussie rules punching and kicking. It was wicked hot out in the sun, but it was loads of fun.

We all went out for ice cream and then pizza afterwords. There's a little cafe called Intersection Cafe a couple of blocks from unilodge that has a half price pizza special on Thursday nights. I got a really tasty hawaiian pizza for 5 bucks. I love Intersection Thursdays. Everyone ate in the lounge and watched the end of Might Joe Young on tv. Later that night Kate, another junior animal science major from Penn State who I know from a few classes, arrived and we hung out for a little before I retired to my room to look over class information for the next day of orientation. Oooooh, orientation.

Friday morning I got a phone call around 9am from Katie, one of the Americans that lives here, saying that she realized that the asians downstairs had given her my passport. That was a huge relief, and a testament to just how dumb those girls are, passing out the wrong passport and then trying to make it look like I never brought mine back. Ugh, so stupid. Anyways, I quickly got ready, had some cold pizza for breakfast, and then left with some of the girls for orientation.

Our first meeting was a giant information session that everyone had to attend from 9:45 to 11. A really spastic lady that looked a lot like a gopher was giving the presentation. She was really annoying, the the entire thing was basically useless. Each slide was about something important that we should probably know about, but it never actually gave any information, just links or other sources where we should go to find out all of that information. For "fun" she threw in a few interactive slides where we had to answer some extremely hard trivia questions, and by extremely hard I mean not. The theme was "What do these mean?" with the first set being "Ta" for thank you, "Arvo" for afternoon, and "Hows it going" for--you guessed it, how's it going. At one point a traffic officer got up to talk to us about how much he doesn't like public speaking with some brief smatterings of general road safety like, don't drink and drive, wear a seatbelt, and if you're driving a car, be careful. Just in case anyone forgot.

After the meeting, chaos ensued. Essentially, everyone was supposed to split up based on their respective schools like, science, art, architecture, economics, etc. A paper had been passed around earlier detailing what "faculty" everyone was under so that you knew which of the 8 or so sessions you were supposed to go to. For some reason, I was put under vet science, along with maybe one other person out of the entire list, while Kate, who has the exact same major as me back home, was put into something about land management? Gopher woman started calling out different groups and instructing them to leave to their various locations around campus, and eventually I got up and asked which session I was supposed to go to, since vet science wasn't listed anywhere as an option. I was told that I was supposed to go to the vet science building, how hard could that be? Well, as I was about to find out, it was a lot harder than it should have been.

I left the building and consulted my map of campus that I'd been given. Apparently the vet science building wasn't even on campus, and was instead located in a very small little insert labeled "western precinct." On the map, then, there's an arrow pointing down Grattan St saying "this way to western precinct," but then once you look at the inlet, the building appears to be on the corner of Flemington St and Park Rd. And yeah, that was about all of the direction I had. I spent about 30 or so minutes wandering around, asking various people for directions, until I finally found the buiilding.

Once I got to the building, however, the woman at the reception desk looked at me like I was slightly retarded when I started to explain that I'd been sent there for my orientation. I was left to wait around in the little office while she made a few phone calls, I suppose, before coming back out to inform me that I'd been sent to the wrong place and that I needed to go right back to where I'd come from. Lovely. She tried to be nice and tell me about some short cut that would get me back to campus faster than the way I'd came, something about cut through a car park, down some stairs, take a right, then a left, and you should be home free. Oh, if only that was how things had worked.

I ended up spending the next 45 minutes or so wandering about lost in a lovely little residential areas. To give it some credit, the neighborhood was really cute and all of the houses were lovely, but I wasn't really in the appreciative mood at the time. There wasn't a single soul out on the streets either, so I just kept on a wandering until I acknowledged that I probably wasn't heading towards campus anymore. I finally found another main road and was informed by the first person I found that campus was way back the direction I'd just come. Cool.When I finally did find the damn science seminar, I was extremely hot and tired, my feet were sort, and I was definitely getting sunburnt--I hadn't planned on an hour and a half long excursion through Melbourne when I was getting ready that morning.

As I walked in, the presentation just finished. My friends told me that I didn't miss much, and that whatever information I had missed was in their little packets that they had been given, along with an appointment time for when they should go to schedule their classes later that afternoon. I went down to the front to collect my packet, the man checked my passport, rummaged around in the bin of packets for a while, and then regretfully informed me that mine wasn't there. Naturally. I was given instructions to go to a different building at 1:00. I had about a half hour before one, so I went off with the rest of my group to go find the where we were going to be given our free lunches.

Once we found the courtyard where lunch was going to be served, we realized that all we were going to be getting was a plain white box with a sandwich, piece of fruit, and juice box in it. You couldn't just get lunch though, because that'd be too easy, so we had to wait for the next 25 minutes or so while we watched some guy perform the most ridiculous box stacking, unstacking, and then restacking again. He'd spent the first 10 minutes we were in the courtyard taking all of the boxes, conveniently stacked in trays for easy transport, out of the trays and stacking them up on two picnic tables. Once he'd nearly finished that job, a group of other people showed up with big fold out tables and decided that the boxed needed to be put on there. So then we got to watch for another 15 minutes as they had to restack all of the boxes back into the carrying trays and then stack them back up on the other tables. It must have been a lot more fun than it looked.

By the time I was able to get my little box of shit free food, it was 12:55 so I had to leave and go find whatever building my packet and appointment time were in. Once I found the building, it turned out that no one there had any idea of what I was talking about. I spent the next half our or so being sent from one place to another, and talking to plenty of good-intentioned but also uninformed people. Eventually, I was finally put in contact with a woman who actually knew what I was referring to, but she regretfully informed me that whoever was meant to bring the packets to their building hand't arrived yet and that I should come back at 2.

At that point I was beyond frustrated and annoyed, so I just went back to my room to eat the rest of my cold pizza after tentatively tasting the sandwich thing I had waited so long to get earlier. A little after 2 I went back to the building, waited around for a while again because the woman I'd spoken to earlier had apparently gone to lunch, and was then directed to yet another building. Luckily it was the last building that I had to go to on this endless search. It turns out I didn't exist in the science system, due to the vet science folly, and didn't even have a packet after all. No one could figure out why I'd been registered under vet science, though, because that isn't even an undergraduate course.

Eventually, though, I was allowed to sit down with one of the guys there to finally go about enrolling in classes. Going off of the study plan that I had had to send in with the courses I had initially wanted to take, I was already enrolled in two of the classes that I wanted, Australia Now and Australian Wildlife Biology, and a third biology class that I didn't want. I was told that to get rid of the biology class and schedule my other two classes, one being a genetics class and whatever 4th class I chose, I would have to go to the department of each class and get permission from someone to enroll in the class, fill out some paper work, go back to that building, find that guy, and then have him schedule the classes for me. Next week is going to be so much fun.

After the huge headache of the entire morning and afternoon, I wasn't in the mood to socialize with everyone and spent some time up in my room until Kate came over. We decided that we wanted to go out to eat, so without much of a plan, we headed off to Lygon St, a big street a block or two away that is known for its endless array of restaurants. We wandered up and down a few blocks, bombarded with billions of choices of places to eat: italian, indian, chinese, japanese, thai, indonesian, malaysian, turkish etc. After a lot of indecision, I decieded to take her to this one cafe/pub place I had passed several times while going back and forth to the bank. It was only just around the corner off of Lygon, but it was exponentially quieter and less hectic, so I was a fan. It was also moderately priced, which was nice since a lot of the restaurants on Lygon are also really nice and expensive, and finding any meal under 20 dollars was quite a task.

I had a really tasty, "pick 3" kind of meal for dinner, so I had a some scalloped potatoes, really cheesy pasta, and then grilled chicken breast and vegetables, which ran me only 16 bucks with a drink. Not too shabby. After getting entirely stuffed, we headed back and hung out with everyone else in the courtyard for a few hours before going out to a place called Turf Club, which I had coincidentally found earlier that day on my tour around the city, for the MUSEX (Melbourne University Student Exchange Society) Orientation party for the night.

It's been exceptionally windy and its supposed to start raining and thunder storming at some point this afternoon, so it will probably be another chill, stay inside kind of day. I think I'm going to head back out to Elisa's for the day tomorrow, it's so nice to be able to get out and breathe some fresh country air and take a break from the city. Next week is O-week, which basically has a bunch of different seminars, talks, bbqs, and social gatherings planned at school to get to know people and such before classes start on the 28th. More on that later.

Week 1 in Melbourne and an excursion to the country

The rest of the week was rather uneventful. I continued to hassle with the headache of paying off my bond. I finally opted to open up a bank account at one of the major banks here in Australia a. to be able to pull out a bank cheque and b. so that I could have a card that I can use at the ATM without having to worry about obnoxious fees and the like. Once I got my bank account set up, the next fun hurdle was trying to get money put into it, but after a few days of confusion my brilliant dad was able to wire money to it. Otherwise, I occupied my time doing a bit more necessary shopping, hanging out with people downstairs in the lounge, and spending evenings with Elisa and her friend, Jess, who I met on Friday night. One fun thing that I have discovered about shopping in a city is that there is a fine line you must balance between buying in bulk to save money or not, because you don't want to have to haul it all back. Needless to say, I've been getting my daily workouts in, that's for sure. 

My weekend started Saturday afternoon after some skyping. I headed out into the city to take some pictures. I had been so preoccupied with getting settled and the like that I hadn't really had the time, but I was itching to get out with my camera. Instead of wandering around completely aimlessly, I decided to follow the same route down my street that Elisa had taken me down a few days before. It was a lovely day for walking about and taking pictures. A bit down the road I ran into a very boisterous bunch of Egyptians parading down the street celebrating Mubarak's resignation. I stopped into Federation Square, the big square place across from the Flinder's St. Station (the largest train station in the city), and listened to some live music being played by a band there. Then I crossed over the Yarra River and wandered down into some gardens along the river. After a little exploring I found a really cool little skate park and decided to hang out there for a bit to take some fun action shots of the kids. I left the gardens, then, and went across to the other side of the bridge to an area called South Bank along the river. There are a lot of really nice restaurants and things that line the bank there.

It wasn't long before I ran into a guy who was starting to set up for a street show along the walkway. Whatever it was he was planning on doing looked interesting, so I stopped along with another small group of people to watch. The guy's name was Callan, and he turned out to be quite entertaining. There weren't very many people there to start, so he was doing some funny modeling for me. I decided to stay and take pictures of the show. As it went on, the crowd kept growing and by the end it was quite formidable. His show included stunts with fire torches and things, at one point he was doing some impressive balancing and handstands while his shoes were lit on fire. For the finale of the show, he was balancing on top of a ladder while juggling two flame torches and a machete. Once the show had ended and the crowd had generously thrown some tips into his top hat, I went up and had a chat with him. He gave me his email to send him some of the pictures I'd taken, so I'll have to get around to doing that at some point. 

Oddly enough, as I was watching the show, Elisa texted asking if I remembered where south bank was--funny story. Her and her guy friends were en route to the city to meet up for dinner and drinks, but I realized that I hadn't brought my purse or anything useful out with me other than my camera. I hopped on the tram back up to my apartment to gather my belongings and the like and the headed right back down to where I'd just been. The boys had decided to eat at a restaurant along the bank called Automatic. I got to meet some of Elisa's guy friends: Zach, Jay, and Michael. They were all really nice and easy to get along with. I gave them (and everyone else that I've met since I've been here) a nice geography lesson about how New York is, in fact, not only a city, but also an entire state. It's quite a mind-blowing concept to wrap your head around, but I think after enough enthusiast insistence I had them convinced. 

I had some really tasty potato and cheese gnocchi that ran me 22.50, but it was quite delicious. At one point during dinner Elisa dragged Jay and I out to the front of the restaurant. Apparently there are a couple of large pillar things, maybe like a story high, that start shooting off fire shows every hour once it's dark out. It was rather impressive how warm it was, even though we were standing pretty far underneath them. At first they just spat out some small puffs of fire, but by the end of it there were some rather massive mushroom clouds of flames roaring out of the top of them. Many discussions about ill-fated birds ensued. I also discovered that here, instead of eating chicken parm over pasta, they eat it over french fries. Such a good idea. Also, they don't have tootsie rolls or reeses here (more things to add to the list of things I need to have shipped over). Funny story about that list, by the way. So far, the number one thing on the top of it is buffalo sauce. Much to my dismay and despair, I discovered one night at McDonald's that they haven't even heard of buffalo sauce here. The woman at McD's looked at me light I was slightly crazy when I asked for some. 

Despite my greatest efforts, Elisa and the boys demanded that I drink with them, even though the drinks were 8.50 to start. I don't think I'm ever going to get over the price of things here, no matter how long I stay. For some reason, though, everyone else kept buying me drinks, so I actually made off pretty well. After we ate there was a very engaged debate about whether we should leave to look for another (cheaper) bar, or stay put and drink there. Laziness won over frugality and we drank there for another hour or two. Elisa bought a round of Illusion? shots for the table. They were amazing. For starters, they were lime green (winner winner) and I think they consisted of midori (some green watermelon alcohol?), vodka, and pineapple juice. Don't ask how, but somehow watermelon + pineapple = apple slash super tasty. After the first round of shots, Elisa tried to stack the shot glasses, which resulted in a leaning/falling/broken tower of glass. They tried to hide the broken shot glass amongst the others, but our little asian waitress lady may or may not have cut herself on it when she tried to pick them all up. We heavily weighed finding another bar over angering the waitress even more, but Zach was generous and tipped her, so I think she was fine. After that I had two vodka sunrises (so pretty) and another round of yummy green shots--all courtesy of Elisa or the boys. I've taken up the practice of yelling at Elisa every time she pays for me: "you're killing me!... with kindness, but still!" etc. 

After dinner and drinks we ventured out to start walking to the train station around 11pm. The train ticket out to Elisa's town (about a 45min-hour long ride) only cost me 6.40, which wouldn't have even bought a drink back at the restaurant. Cuz that makes sense. Zach left us at the train station to head home, while Michael and Jay bought loads of onion rings from Hungry Jacks (apparently their version of Burger King) for on the train. Once we got to the Woodend station, Jay's sister drove us the short drive back up to their house. We ended up watching The Blair Witch Project at their house, Elisa and I had never seen it before. We mostly laughed our way through it. At one point Elisa was asking if I'd met any of the people appearing in beginning of the movie, insisting that they were in Maryland and well, I'd been in Maryland, so naturally I should have met them. I slept on a comfy pull out couch in Jays room. The next morning/afternoon when we all got up Jay made us pancakes before we headed to Elisa's house. 

I still haven't gotten used to the whole driving on the wrong side of the road bit, it still freaks me out. I also kept on trying to get in on the wrong side of the car. Silly australians. I got to meet Elisa's parents briefly before they left to take her younger brother and his friends out for laser tag for the day. Her house was really nice--it sat on a little bit of land with two small ponds (or damns, as they call them). They also had to cute labs, Max and Sephie, that were loads of fun to play with. After getting the tour of the house and property we settled down and watched How To Train Your Dragon. I sat on the couch squeezed between the two dogs, it was quite cozy. We lounged around until her younger sister, Nancy, came home so that we could steal her car. She showed me her town, Woodend, which was quite small and quaint like Clinton. After the drive by I pointed Elisa in the direction of the nearby mountain, cuz it looked pretty and she said we could drive to the top of it. 

We spent most of the afternoon driving around, blasting my music in the car, and occasionally stopping out in the middle of some country road so I could jump out of the car and take pictures. I told Elisa that I'm going to make her get out and explore her own country with me, luckily she's down with that. After braving some very narrow and windy little roads, we made it to the top of the mountain. Turns out there was a giant cross memorial for veterans, so we walked around and took pictures. At points I was climbing down over the little lookout areas to take better pictures, leaving Elisa safely up top yelling down at me to not slip and fall and die. She kept saying she wished she had a camera to take pictures of me taking pictures slash me falling to my death. One or the other. Fortunately, I survived the excursion, and afterwards we stopped at the little cafe on top of the mountain and had some tasty grilled ham, cheese, and tomato sandwiches for an early dinner. Down the mountain a little ways there was another road leading to a little lake that we got out and walked around, it was really pretty there. Eventually we headed back to her house where we hung out for a a bit longer until her parents came back with her car. 

Around 7:30 or so we left to drive out to Jess's house. The drive took 30-40 mins but I loved every minute of it. Originally the plan had been that I was going to drive Elisa's car around on the crazy back roads, but I decided to defer my driving opportunity to her to take in the sights and snap a few more pictures. It's quite shocking how many of the roads out in the country are just tiny little dirt roads that wind around--most of the drive to Jess's was unpaved. After a while, I took up the habit of hanging out of the sunroof of Elisa's car while she zoomed down the bumpy dirty roads to take pictures--it was well worth it. And then, just because Elisa's such a good sport, she would stop the car every time I enthusiastically yelled "SHEEP" or some other fun farmyard animal so that I could jump out and take pictures. Unfortunately, the sheep weren't nearly as excited to see me as I was to see them, and they usually ended up running away, but I had loads of fun. 

Once we got to Jess's house I got to meet her parents, they were fun. Jess and her mom are both artists, so there was lots of pretty art and sculptures in and around the house. Elisa and Jess and I hung out in Jess's room for a while. Mostly they talked and caught up while I would enthusiastically jump off the bed and run out the sliding glass doors in Jess's room to survey the outside. Firstly, there was a beautiful sunset over the trees right out the window, and secondly, THERE WERE KANGAROOS. I was so excited, my first kangaroo sighting! At first I saw two off to the side of the house, but then once it got darker, an entire herd? gaggle? group? bouncy bundle of fun? of them showed up in the backyard. There were probably 20 or so out there, so I had loads of fun trying to get up close to them to take some pictures. I was quite tempted to run out and frolic around with them, but then Jess warned that I find the biggest one in the lot and avoid it, or it might box me in the face. I decided against the frolicking, maybe next time, when there's more light. Eventually we had a lovely three course meal that Jess's mom had prepared for us: tasty pasta, grilled chicken over salad, and lastly chocolate pudding with cherries and cream on top. We stayed up a little while longer hanging out before calling it a night.

The next morning I was pleasantly woken up by some loud, slightly obnoxious bird sounds. Upon further investigation, I found that the back yard was filled with maybe 10-15 giant white cockatoos. So exciting. Jess's mom made me some tea and we had a lovely chat about the birds before I decided to take pictures slash chase them all away. Jess came out then, to inform us that her Valentine's day had taken a turn for the worse and that we needed to leave asap because her boyfriend's car had broken down on the way to his aunt's funeral, so she needed to go chauffeur him. I'll have to explore their 25 acres of fun and animal filled country later. Jess drove me to the train station back in Woodend because Elisa had had to wake up early and leave for work that morning. Another 6.40 dollars and not even 5 minutes later, I was on the train heading back into the city. The scenery on the train was beautiful, it was a great hour long ride. Once I was back at the city I caught some trams home--I'm getting so good at this whole tram business. Unfortunately, upon entering my room I proceeded to break the little plastic loop thing that raises and lowers my curtain, so I got to spend the next 20 or so minutes trying to fix it. Let me just tell you, it's a lot harder than it should be. 

After that was all settled, I had a lovely skype date with my friends in State College during the Sunday party, ate my ramen lunch, and then headed out to run some errands. I went to the bank first, to get my bank cheque for my bond. Unfortunately, I seem to be slightly retarded and didn't make it out to the proper organization, so I'm going to have to go back and do it again tomorrow. Oh, and when I tried to give it to the dumb asians (oh yes, the very same) at the front desk in exchange for my passport they seemed to be having a hard time of finding my passport. Needless to say, they'd better have found it by the time I come back tomorrow with my cheque or there'll be hell to pay. 

Then I trammed back down into the city to QV to go shopping for a bit. I really needed to buy some sunscreen because apparently the sun down here is vicious. I'd never heard of the UV index before, and I'm sure most of you back in the states haven't either, so here's a fun little lesson. Apparently the UV index runs on a scale from 0 to 11, with 11 being the most dangerous level of UV radiation passing through the ozone to give us all skin cancer. The reason why you've probably never heard of it is because it isn't really that big of a deal in the states, but down here in the summer the rating is usually up around 10 or 11. So, sunscreen was quickly added to my shopping list. I also stopped by the grocery store and bought a few things--namely one of those precooked chickens and a head of lettuce. Yep, you guessed it, I made a super yummy chicken caesar salad for dinner.

And now I'm off to find something to do for the rest of the night. Stay tuned for more later :)

Day 2: loads more successful than Day 1

As the title indicates, my second day in Melbourne went much, much better than the first. To start, I enjoyed a lovely sandwich thing that Elisa brought me around 1pm, hung out in my room to strategize a bit, and then headed out. First, she introduced me to the tram system--which still slightly scares and confuses me, but only because of the left vs right thing. I'm still thinking I'm very likely to get hit by some sort of car or tram because I keep looking the wrong way every time I go to cross a street. So odd. I'm also constantly running into people because they tend to walk on the left, and people on elevators yell at me cuz you're suppoesd to idle on the left side, not the right. It's all so odd. Anywho, I bought a day pass thing and learned how to validate it and all of that lovely stuff. It's really quite a convenient system, so I'm sure I'll like it a lot once I get to know it. 

Next on the agenda was my cell phone, or mobile phone as Elisa keeps telling me to call it, which actually proved to be a lot easier to go about getting then I thought. I bought the cheapest phone, some 50 dollar non-flip, non-touch, non-keyboard phone, but it does have a camera and all of that at least. Going back to texting on a number pad is going to suck, though. Oh, and their numbers are all quite confusing, like the amount of numbers in their phone numbers all vary between cells and house numbers and I don't even know the rest of the intricacies yet--something about adding a 0 or not adding a 0 or possibly adding a 61 to the start? Like I said, confusing. Anyways, it'll certainly do for now, and the prepaid bit of it doesn't seem too bad, basically I pay 30 dollars each time I want to "recharge it" and I get 200 dollars worth of credit, which is then used up in whatever intervals each minute or text costs. Speaking of which I should prolly look up those costs at some point.

After the cell phone, we went to QV, which is kind of like a mall set up, it had a food court upstairs and below a "Big W" which seems to equate nicely with Walmart. I got my trashcan, some silverware/cups/plate/bowl, hangers, and a few other things. Then we went to Woolworths or something like that across the way to get groceries, though at that point I was tired of carrying shit around and wasn't in the mood to really buy much of anything so I got the bare essentials: milk, tea, sugar cubes, apples, tim tams (amazing chocolate cookie things), honey nut cheerios, coke, and mac n cheese. Yep, I'm set. Oh, as a fun side story, it's been really interesting trying to use my card to pay for things. People don't ask you if you want to use credit or debit, they ask if you want to use savings, credit, or chequeing (yes, funny spelling and all). After many, many annoying bouts of trial and error I've finally discovered that my card will only work if I use credit and sign for it, apparently using my pin won't work. Good to know. Anywho, my arms got a lovely work out trucking all of that shit around until we trammed back to my apt to drop it all off. 

Feeling about 50 pounds lighter, we went right back down my street, Swanston St, and just went exploring. She took me to a place called Melbourne Central, another kind of mall that was in a beautiful, cool building. It was filled with lots of food places and stores and things, on the lower floor was a train station, and on the highest floor was a movie theatre. I can't wait to properly explore all of the stores, I absolutely love the style of the clothes over here. OH! and they even had a little pet store where I found the cutest little puppy on earth that I was extremely tempted to buy. So sad. 

After that we just kept walking down Swanston. Living in a city is so interesting, every where you go there's different restaurants and bars and cafes and stores and they're all just so interesting and unique and I want to go in all of them, and I was only on one street. So much to do... Anywho, the further down the street you go, you end up in the CBD, or central business district, which is where lots of the big skypscrapers and other shops and things are. There was one funny building that I go by a lot on the tram that has like, restaurants and shops on the ground floor, an audi dealer on the second floor, and a giant rock climbing venue with big glass windows so you can see all of the people and giant walls above that. So odd, but cool. Oh, and there's a really cool building that has a movie theatre kind of thing on the roof and bars below that, such a good idea. We walked down the street until we got to some square which I forget the name of and a bridge crossing the Yarra River until we finally decided to tram back to my place around 6 or so. 

We hung out in my room, listened to music, I taught her KenKen, played with my phone a little etc. until we decided to go get some dinner. So, back to Melbourne Central we went, and I actually don't remember the place we ate at but we got burgers. It was interesting though, I ordered a "plain grilled" burger, because all of the other variaties had weird healthy things on them like carrots, avacado, beetroot, and lord knows what else. I explained to Elisa that when we want to make a burger special we put more meat on it, or bacon, not veggies. Elisa paid for my dinner, even though I yelled at her for it, it was like 30 some odd dollars for the two of us. So expensive, ugh. Also, they call ketchup "tomato relish". Weird. Oh, and instead of calories on their nutrition labels they call it "energy" and use kJ, for kilojoules. Wtf? After dinner we chatted for a bit more and then she had to head home and I managed to get myself all the way home using the trams all by myself. I was so proud. I spent the rest of the night hanging out downstairs with a bunch of people in the lounge. They were pregaming to go out to a club, but I was still under the evil influences of jetlag so I opted to stay behind and sleep.