« G'Day from Down Under! | Main | First Day of Class »
July 17, 2004
Marvelous Melbourne
Monash Abroad Orientation is finally over, and thanks goodness too, because I was starting to get a bit of information overload. At least they had a wonderful free pancake brekkie for us before they had a bunch of people talk at us for a few hours. But on Tuesday evening a few of us (Sharon, Caroline, Meghan, Vanessa & Krista) made our first trip into the city (it's about a 10-min bus ride, followed by a 30-min train ride to go from Monash to the city center). Melbourne sure is a marvelous city! It's a very pretty city, and there's so much to do and see. There are so many choices of things to eat too! A short walk from the Flinders Steet rail station there are tons of eateries, including everything from Subway and McDonald's to Indonesian, Vietnamese and Chinese cuisine, plus so much more! So we just wandered around for awhile, poking our heads into shops here and there, before eventually making our way to Big W (the Australian Wal-Mart) to get some stuff (I got some TimTams, hehe). I'm gonna love getting myself familiarized with the Melbourne city center.
Wednesday was registration, and it took a good four hours for me, blah. Of course, part of that was because I suddenly decided to change three of my classes. I had been registered for Contemporary Australia, Australia & its Regions, Friends & Phobias: Australia, the USA, Europe & Asia at War, and Experiencing the Australian Landscape. I kept the Landscape class, but I chucked the other three (even though I wanted to take them), in favor of Fluid Dynamics, Large-Scale Weather & Climate, and Climate Change & Variability. I think I'll have a more enjoyable schedule by immersing myself in atmospheric science classes. 
Then in the evening we all went to the Monash Abroad Welcome Dinner at this fancy restaurant ZINC, located at Federation Square downtown. Tickets to get in were $30, but IFSA paid for it, yay! The food was very good too, although not nearly as much as I was expecting, and there wasn't any dessert either. I wouldn't pay $30 to go back again, but oh well, it was still fun. After that we went out and explored Melbourne a bit more, including finding this cool jazz club called the Purple Emerald that we were at for a little bit.
By Thursday we were all tired of always spending so much money eating out all the time, so a few of us went down to Cole's to pick up some groceries. Food's fairly expensive down here, but at least groceries are cheaper than restaurant food. I guess I'll be living on sandwiches and cereal for awhile, but that's perfectly fine with me. And I did manage to nab some EasyMac too, it's such a new product to Australia that when I asked one of the clerks if they had any, she gave me this confused look and asked what EasyMac was. How can Australians, especially poor college students, have been living without EasyMac until now? Ditto goes for Miracle Whip, it's also pretty new to Australia and kinda hard to find. And I tried some Vegemite again at the snack session for new students here in Roberts Hall, and it wasn't as bad as the first time I tried it. If it's spread really lightly on toast it's actually kinda okay. It's still really salty though.
This afternoon a few of us decided to head in to Melbourne to walk around and shop a bit. We wandered all around the city center, mostly on Swanston, Flinders & Bourke Streets, and the six of us ate supper at this cool sushi bar. I still didn't order sushi (I got ketsu don instead), but Vanessa gave me one of hers so that I could finally taste sushi to find out if I liked it, since I'd never had sushi before at all. It actually wasn't too bad, I might have some again another time. After that we made our way over to the Crown Entertainment Complex on the Yarra River, and it's super cool. Outside there are these huge torch/cauldron things that sporadically shoot up these ginormous balls of flame, and it gets surprisingly warm a long way away. Inside it's a big mall, casino and cinema complex. Vanessa, Meghan & I went to see "King Arthur," which was a really good movie (Sharon, Caroline & Krista decided to wander around Crown and go to the casino for a little while instead). The plot was a bit predictable, but isn't every movie nowadays? It was still cool seeing all these battles with the Romans, Celts, Saxons and Arthur's knights, set back somewhere around 400-500 AD. Movie tickets at the Crown are $14.50 though (around USD$10-11), so we won't be going there for movies again, even though it was the nicest theater I've ever been in.
I got lots of cool night photos of Melbourne tonight down around the Yarra River, and I guess I'll just have to bite the bullet and go to an internet cafe sometime so that I can upload some photos to my website, as it's looking doubtful that I'll be able to do so from Monash, argh. And I already ran out of my internet quota (I've hardly been doing anything so I don't know how I maxed it out), so I had to purchase more tonight. I really really hate the way Monash does internet services. So far I'd say that that's my biggest gripe about Australia. It's making me love Gustavus internet (or even dial-up with Chibardun back home) all the more. But on the plus side I finally managed to get MSN Messenger and iChat working a couple days ago. Slowly but surely I'm getting more and more stuff running. I think I'll get over some of my internet depression by having a couple TimTams now. :-)
By the way, thanks for the comments you've all left on my blog, and the emails I've gotten. I really do appreciate hearing from you all.
Posted by Jared at July 17, 2004 12:12 AM