Thoughts on my first week in Melbourne
Thoughts on my first week in Melbourne:
In general it has been a good, if super busy and exhausting, week. I think I'll be able to settle into the patterns here well enough but I have yet to decide if I want to stay longer. I somehow think that I might be done living in Australia after a year. It's too early to decide this but I think this might be the case. I wonder where I will go from here?
- My first kangaroo spotting in the wildlife sanctuary behind my campus.
- Next: WHAT THE HELL?! WHY IS THE INTERNET CAPPED?!!! I hate how incredibly slow the internet goes here. Ugh! How will I manage this for a year?! How will I be able to download or stream all of my shows? Or at least some of my shows. Sadness!! (Sorry, had to get that off my chest since it's already driving me nuts)
- Australia is like some sort of twisted Alice-in-wonderland America. I almost feel like I'm back in America but suddenly something reminds me that I'm not such as a different accent or a different approach to something ("no worries, mate").
- The food choices here are amazing!! You can get everything you ever wanted to eat from just about any country around the world and there's so much emphasis on healthy foods and organic produce. It's wonderful!
- My classes are full of such an amazing variety of people from so many different backgrounds that I think it will be fun to talk to them but the classes themselves and incredibly work-intensive outside of school. I know they'll both be hard classes but I'll do my best.
- Transportation isn't too bad but I really miss the efficiency of Japanese trains. While I currently live near 3 different forms of transportation (bus, tram, train) I'm still always left waiting for something as it seems most modes of transportation in my area come every half hour. I miss Osaka's Midosuji subway like which comes like every 5 minutes and is always on time barring accidents or death wishes.
- And speaking of Japan I was somehow under the impression that there would be more Japanese people out and about but while I know they are around I have yet to find any and the only Japanese I've spoken was to a Korean girl whose English and Japanese were far more fluent than my paltry attempts at Japanese. So many people here are bilingual (or even trilingual) it makes me quite sad that I'm not.
In general it has been a good, if super busy and exhausting, week. I think I'll be able to settle into the patterns here well enough but I have yet to decide if I want to stay longer. I somehow think that I might be done living in Australia after a year. It's too early to decide this but I think this might be the case. I wonder where I will go from here?