For background on this series of blogs, see this intro post.
Commentary
This day was one of those vivid memories I referred to in my intro blog. Walking out of Flinders St. Station into downtown Melbourne was one of those holy crap type of moments. Before this trip, my only time being out of the U.S. was a fishing trip to Canada and I had never lived in a big city. Now here I was, a college student, living on my own, in a huge city, in a foreign country, thousands of miles away from home. And on top of that, I was hanging out with someone from Boston (Erin), someone from Canada (Aliza), and someone from the UK (Vicky). It was a whole new world. Haha.
I obviously got to meet a lot of Australians while I was studying abroad, but one of the other really cool, and unforeseen, things about the experience was meeting people from around the U.S. and around the world.
The Journal Entry
Today was a pretty good day. I got up at 7 and got ready. At about 8:15 I started over to orientation. They had breakfast for us again. It was muffins today. Orientation started at 9:30. We just went over how to enroll for about an hour. After that was finished, we went to our faculties to get approved. That went really quickly for me, but Elizabeth had some trouble. She didn’t get pre-approved for her math course, so she had to go to the math department and get approved. Then we had to go back to the science dept. After that we came back to the dorms. Elizabeth and I worked on timetable stuff for a few minutes, and then I talked to my parents for a few minutes. After that Elizabeth, Vicky, Aliza, Erin, and I ate lunch at the cafeteria. After that I came back to my room to enroll and noticed one of my classes was missing. I left to go talk to the science dept. and got that straightened out. After that I went to go look at pre-paid phones. I picked up some pamphlets and came back to my room. I can’t find any plans that I like. I’ll have to look at it a little more later. At 3:30 the group I’ve been hanging out with left to go into the city. Monash abroad had an activity for us tonight. We went into downtown and did an African drumming class thing. That was really cool. After that we went and got food from a grocery store for a picnic by the river. We got back right before the group left. We just went down next to the river and ate. That was neat. After that we went back to the train station and a couple of the girls got churros. We sat in the station and visited for about a half hour while they ate those. We all got laughing really hard about how Aliza says the words “out” and “about”. While we were sitting there, she also told us that she had to tell us something, and it sounded really serious. She just wanted to tell us she had been in a movie before. That was really funny. After that we came back to the dorms. It’s so fun hanging out with Vicky and Aliza because you get to hear the different phrases they use than we do in the U.S. That’s really fun. They both say “Z” like “zed” instead of “zee”. That’s pretty crazy. Here in Australia they say “way out” instead of exit. Well, I better start getting ready for bed.
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