Sun Snoozing at the fabulous St. Kilda Festival

sun snoozing
Posted by: dirtyflamingo.

Our first day in Melbourne we attended one of the biggest Melbournian festival- St. Kilda Festival. St. Kilda is a fabulous suburb/neighborhood by the beach. It has tons of fun restaurants and cafes. Especially the super cool vegan/vegetarian restaurant Soul Mama at the old St. Kilda Sea Baths that overlooks the ocean. It's like Thayer Street x 6 with a beach and affordable restaurants.

"Yes, Master?"

My first day of post-graduate studies went as follows:

9:30am: Time to wake up and have brekkie before my first big day of school
9:45am: Eat a hot bowl of Unclee Toby's Oats and toast with hummus while waiting for weather.com for Melbourne to load (which took most of breakfast).
9:55: Realize that I have no bath towel because last nights laundry load was done by Bill and stored in his room. And I don't have a key...
10:00am: Brainstorm about possible towel substitutions
10:05am: Decide to use a brand new tea towel (sigh)
10:20am: Tried to figure out which contact lense goes in which eye (both eyes have the same prescription strength- tough one)
10:30am: Head over to Menzies building on other side of campus, roughly a 20 minute walk
10:50am (10:45am acutally because my watch is 5 mins early): Arrive at Menzies building and take the escalator to the west wing on level 2- room W204
10:46am: Finally locate what I thought was the entrance to W204 but cannon open it. There must be some mistake so I zoom to the library next door to triple-check my room number on my.monash
10:55am: Get confirmation that it is room W204
11:00am: Wait outside locked door of W204
11:05am: I discover that the door I had been waiting was the wrong one and the door to the classroom had been open the whole time
1:45pm: Intro to Translation Studies is over. My 2-4pm tutorial is canceled and my first day of school is over.

Just like that. No more school until Thursday at 1pm. Grad school is hard!

Dim Sum and Yam Cha

I woke up this morning and heading to common kitchen for some of my usual breakfast fare- crunchy cereal, soy milk, half a banana and toast with hummus. Then Bill reminds me that this morning there was to be an O-Week trip to a Chinese Restarant for some sort of chinese food. Something called Dim Sum. "Ah, Dim Sum is greasy chinese food...". I had read about this Dim Sum thing in my Peoples and Cultures course at Northeastern but I didn't really remember what I had read...

Dim Sum or Yam Cha is the equivalent to Spanish Tapas that you eat at tea time, whatever time that may be. Usually around brunch time I suppose. We get there and it was like a buffet on wheels. There was a waitstaff wheeling this little dessert carts around the restaurant with all sort of tasty looking things which weren't vegetarian of course. We sit down at our table and while we are waiting for the rest of our party of 20 or so to arrive we just watch the various servers pause and zoom by our table with dim sum asking us if we wanted any "insert unpronouncable name here".

When the rest of our party arrived, the eating fest began. Small dish after small dish was set before us, each with about 3 dim sums on each plate. And all very fried. There was chicken feet, stuffed oysters, vegetable rolls, deep-fried toast, stuffed prawns, puffy sesame seed globe-shaped bread, dumplings, egg custard pastry, fried maki rolls...and the list goes on. All this is at like 11:45 in the morning. The most interesting Dim Sum I had was the sweet bean curd, which was basically a bowl of sweet syrupy stuff with lumps of really soft tofu. The syrup was tasty. Lumpy tofu, not so much.

I actually had authentic chinese food! It exists! Dim Sum rules!

My Mornington PeninCHula flies

Today Howitt Hall had an outing to Mornington Peninsula Beach-except for here its pronounced pe-NIN-chu-la. From the looks of it Mornington is very popular with the senior citizens of Victoria. 8 out of every 10 people we passed on the bus belonged in a retirement community. Anyhow this beach was more of a bay than a beach. There was water and seagulls and sand and really hot weather. But there was a dock with sailboats and there was no wind to blow away these pesky flies that Australia seems to have.

These flies just seem desperate for attention. Once they find you they stick with you for good. The just buzz around your head, explore the inside of your ears and practically try to crawl around on the surface of your eyeball. So you can imagine how uncomfortable and painfully long this 3 hour outing to the "beach" was. Don't these flies have other more productive activities they can participate in rather than pester Melbourne's citizens?

Its the begining of the end of summer here and its still hot. But there seems to be a lack of air conditioning here. The bus ride back was like riding in a sauna. I fell asleep on the bus ride back to the uni and I wasn't sure if I had drooled excessively in my sleep or I had just sweat that bottle of water I had just before boarding the bus.

It was the latter.

I'm In a Sunburned Country

I'm in a sunburned country and our first day in the big city of Melbourne Bill got sunburned. HA!

I made it to Melbourne and it's the best place ever! (Ok, Madrid is still the best place ever, but Melbourne is a close 2nd). I've been here for a week so far just about. 2 days ago I moved into the halls- Howitt Hall, the tallest halls on campus. I'm living on the 12th floor with the best view. I can almost see Melbourne from my bed. I'm right in the middle of O-Week (orientation week) and today is my first adult pyjama party function. Get this- during O-week the university has a "policy" that says that "some of the events during O-Week must be alcohol free". And the Pyjama Party is not one of them. I still can't get over the fact that they actually serve beverages at school functions. We're all adults here I think.

I must say, finding my own little click here has been a tad bit difficult, but then again its only the 2nd day of O-week. The 11th and 12th floor residents are either post-graduate students (like myself and Bill) or 4th year seniors. My floor is very quiet and Bill's floor (11th floor) is mostly really mature post-graduate or PHd students. Not the most social atmosphere. So then most everyone else is either Asian and/or first year students. I have not problem with either. But the age and experience gap is just sooo big between 1rst year undergrad and 1rst year post-grad. Some of the kids on the lower floors are 17 and 18! Anyhow, I still love it here so far.

Monash University rules!

(more later...must attend Pyjama Party and drink tasty Australian party punch)

Goodbye America, Hello Australia

Boston skyline
Originally uploaded by deernose.

The day has finally arrived! Well- basically. I'm finally moving away!!!! Woohoo!

I can list dozens of things that I have disliked (even hated...) about my 2.5 on-and-off year stint here in good ol' America. But I guess the most important list is of the things I did like. Once I'm gone, the bad memories will become distant and only the good ones will stick around.

Bill's friends are some of the most coolest, most friendliest people I've met since I've been here. I can't name all of them because the list is long. You guys know who you are and you're great people. Please come and visit! :o)

My lasting impression of northeast is that i don't like it and never will. I just can't stand all of this snow!!!

Anyhow...goodbye America, hello Australia