First cup of many- St. Kilda
Beach view- St. Kilda
"So by the looks of it, nearly everything on this continent can main, poison, injure, or kill me. 4 months, let’s start the clock. Time to survive college…" So far we’ve gone out and seen Kangaroos, had lunch in the city a few times, sang some "Australian songs" and mostly kept our heads down long enough to get through orientation. Tomorrow we head off to Melbourne where we’ll stay for a day before leaving again for Townsville the next day. Okay, so i’m not going to lie, I’ve been a bit hesitant to get this first post up. I’ve been keeping a pretty steady journal each day but there’s something much harder about posting up on the big WWW so that anyone and everyone can read it. Not that they will… but the point still stands. Anyways, we (a group of about 15 of us, 8 from Occidental college, 1 from Bucknell, 1 from Davidson, 2 from Scripps, 2 from Arcadia and 1 from George Washington) are staying in a Hostel in Sorrento (about 2 hours south of Melbourne). We flew in yesterday morning (the flight went well, complimentary bottle(s) of wine helped with the sleeping/jet lag process) and somehow managed to stay up until 8:30 pm before collapsing into bed. Becca, Tara and I went for a run this morning through Sorrento and saw some amazing views before the sun came up. There were a lot of dinghys parked out in the ocean and it was a very picturesque view. Australia is full of new things. One of which is the Harry Potter premier tonight. We are about to go out as a group to see # 7 at midnight on the 13th (a full 2 days early booya). Pretty excited for my classes for once (anything would have beaten properties of mechanical solids and dynamics). I’ll be taking a conceptual photomedia course, history of globalization, an anthropology course involving economics and environment and an indigenous people’s course (I’m transferring into this last one from biodiversity of tropical australia- not the worst class in the world, don’t know if I’ll switch or not yet) I’ve been asking around and I’m planning on taking a few extra trips while here in country. It would be great to have a chance to stop over in either Fiji or New Zealand on the way home. Also a Sydney trip is necessary and it would be pretty incredible to take a Townsville -> Darwin -> Alice Springs -> Townsville trip at somepoint. I’ve been throwing the idea around of working on a photo project while here and there would be some great subjects in central Australia. I guess we’ll give it some time and see where that goes.. Definitely need to get a job now and start budgeting if I plan on traveling this often. More posts to come, and I will definitely get some photos up on here as soon as I can access my camera cable which will be in a few days.