BetweenThen and There

Once again, I apologize to my frequent readers for not blogging for a few days. And I can't lie - it's not as if I didn't have time. Honestly, I've had a lot of time, mostly because lately - for some unknown reason - I've been pretty insomniatic. But I've been spending the time going out and chatting and making friends with some Aussies, so I hope you'll forgive me. :)

So, what's it been? About a week? Yeah, that seems about right. Let's see, what did I do . . .

Saturday was a pretty normal day. Just basically sat around, didn't do much. Worked on my Japanese, did some work in other classes, yatta, yatta. Not very interesting. But Sunday did turn out to be something interesting. I had just finished going to the grocery store (which is about as exhausting an activity here as it is at the UW when you don't have a car), and Tamara - a German exchange student - comes and tells me that the college has arranged a trip to go see the closing ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games.

A brief aside here for what is the Aussie-Doozy of the Day: The Commonwealth Games. Granted, this is not a uniquely Australian thing, but it is something that I've only heard of by coming here, as the games were being held in Melbourne. They're very like the Olympics and, for the countries who participate, are as exciting if not more-so. Basically, it's competition between all the countries who have any current connection to England. Naturally, even though USA was technically founded by England, if I remember correctly, we went through quite a bit of trouble to kill that relationship. Something about . . . Redcoats and minutemen and . . . some guy named George. Maybe you've heard of it.

Anyway, I had a lot of Japanese I had planned to do that night, but I figured . . . why not. Sure, I'm here to study and to take classes but, just as important, I'm here to experience Australian culture. What better than an Olympic-like games festival to test the waters?

All-in-all it was pretty cool. Some of us went and walked along the river to see all the lights and the crowds and sample what this was all about. They had 3 giant screens displayed so that the crowds around the downtown could watch the closing ceremonies taking place inside one of the stadiums. It was actually pretty spectacular. They had bands playing lots of songs that were important to Australians, Melbourne naturally being the focus.

After the celebration of the ending of the Melbourne games, there was a kind of passing-the-torch ceremony to introduce where the games will be held in 2010 (they're every 4 years just like the Olympics). New Delhi, India caught the torch and did it with flair. They put on about as big a show as the Australians did, obviously advertising to get people to come and give their city and country the great prosperity that hosting games brings. And it worked. Lots of very interesting and beautiful music, great costumes, lots of history, and some amazingly beautiful Indian women . . . build it and they will come, eh? Actually, I think it'd be cool to do that. If all goes as planned, I'll have been graduated for at least 2 years by then, and that'd be a great way to spend a vacation.

Speaking of vacations and seeing sights, I may actually want to try and find some more money. Granted, I have enough money - probably just enough - to get me through all the normal everyday stuff . . . but I obviously want to do more than that. STA travel has some great deals on trips. 2-day/3-night stay in Sydney for like $19/night (AUD), 6-day/7-night all-inclusive ski-trip to New Zealand for about $900 . . . how freakin' cool would that be?
Granted, it all costs money. I wish I knew exactly how much I had . . . my bank is being an ass and won't let me transfer funds to my Australian bank because they require me to be present in a branch to transfer money. But how the hell was I supposed to have an Australian bank acount BEFORE I left? Honestly, some people just don't think things through when instituting policies.

I found a third-party website that'll transfer the money (cheaper than my bank would've), but I need to get a phone first, cuz they need to call and get info from me. I haven't really gotten around to that yet. I didn't wanna buy a phone until I had money here. But oh, well. Either way, I guess I'd better start thinking about applying for scholarships.

The only other thing I did this past week worth noting is I went to the bar on Tuesday night, as opposed to the usual Thursday, at the behest of a few people I've met on the DC++ network here. Tuesday nights have drink specials just like Thursday, but FAR more relaxed. I just got to hang out and drink beer with Aussies and locals and it was a lot of fun. :)

I can't wait for this weekend, though. I signed up for an inter-college LAN party that will last the WHOLE weekend. It's gonna be a blast. Tonight, though . . . fun with friends. :)

Shenanegans

Holy crap. I just slept 14 hours. That's not so surprising considering the craziness of the past couple of days. I guess I shall start at the beginning. (... isn't that such a stupid phrase? Anywhere you begin a story is clearly the beginning. Fucking English.)

On Wednesday night, an event happened known as centurion. Many of you may already know what this is, but, for those of who don't, people take 100 drinks in as many minutes. The dorms at the UW hosted an event like this once, but with things as docile as Coca Cola or Milk. Here, it says right on the poster to bring 8 beers or 8 premixes. The fact that there's a bar on campus combined with the knowledge that Australians seem to hold drunken revelry in a regard similar to the Irish notwithstanding, it still surprised the hell out of me they get to hold an official even such as this on campus.

I didn't go to it, since I had planned out my homework for the week in a way that would let me go to the Thursday night bar night and then hit the city for the weekend if I wanted to. And even if I had, drinking was not required. You could just as easily go and watch all the self-described "big drinkers" puss out. One girl from my floor went, Lana. She's a 17-year-old native Australian from somewheres South of Melbourne. She didn't do the whole centurion thing, but her and her friend Catlin - from another tower, 19-year-old Australian native - came back from it all wildly excited. Apparently a bunch of the people who went there were going to this bar on Brunswick street - a street reknowned for it's selection of bars, restaurants, and shopping. Kind of a lot like the Ave back home, 'cept better and longer.

Anyway, they wanted to go out and party more with their friends and, through heinous amounts of peer pressure, they convinced me to go out with them. And, in typical fashion, the two women complained to all the men that they were bringing that they wanted to go now and we needed to hurry . . . and then we waited for them for 45 minutes. lol

Unfortunately, we took so long to get ready and stuff, by the time we got ('round 10) there most of their friends had left. There was a pretty decent band playing, but they were in the Radiohead/Coldplay category of music, so nothing really danceable. And it was smokey. I think that's gonna be a problem with most of the bars here, though, just like it was in Seattle before the ban. You don't realize how cool that ban is until you have to live without it.

We had a few drinks, but then we left the bar looking for another fun bar. Instead of just going to another one of the 100 bars on the very same street that we were on, we decided it'd be a good idea to just walk to the city and look for one. That's something like going from the Ave to Eastlake looking for another bar. We couldn't really find any that were open, and we walked around a lot of downtown. Finally, at about 2 am or so, we found one that was both open and looked fun, more-or-less right in the center of Melbourne. But here's the catch - unlike the other bars we'd been to in Melbourne the past couple of weeks, these guys both carded and cared about someone being under 18. Which means Lana was fucked. And Catlin only brought her La Trobe Uni ID, so that didn't count as proof of age. So, ironically, Andrej - another guy who lives on my floor who's from Norway - and I could've gotten in on our foreign IDs and the two native Australians were out of luck.

At that point, there wasn't much left to do but go home. And at that time of night on a weekday, a cab was pretty much the only way it was gonna happen. Turned out to be about $10/person, which isn't terrible considering it was about a half hour trip. Especially for me, since I can convert it to American money. ;) (about $7.50 if you're interested)

Due to the Wednesday night shenanegans and coming home so late, I totally didn't go to any of my classes on Thursday. Luckily, there was only two, so I made up for it by reviewing the slides (both those lecturers read right from the slides anyway) and doing the readings I was supposed to. But because I'd stayed up so late on Wednesday (as well as Monday and Tuesday) my sleep schedule was all fucked up. I mean, I woke up at 2:00 on Thursday. So . . . I just stayed up all night, went to my classes the next day - not falling asleep in any of them thanks to Coke and Red Bull - and then . . . slept 14 hours. lol

And that's it, until the next adventure. Maybe I'll write again later tonight about all the people I've met.

Aussie-Doozie of the Day: The money here is pretty different. I mean, not just because it's worth less and it's different colors and stuff, but they even have different denominations. Here, lemme show you:

US

• Bills
• 100 dollars
  
• 50 dollars
  
• 20 dollars
  
• 10 dollars
  
• 5 dollars
  
• 1 dollar
  
• Coins
• Quarter
• Dime
• Nickle
• Penny

Australia

• Bills (which they call notes)
• 100 dollars
• 50 dollars
• 20 dollars
• 10 dollars
• 5 dollars
• Coins
• 2 dollars
• 1 dollar
• 50-cent pieces
• 20-cent pieces
• 10-cent pieces
• 5-cent pieces

It's weird. But when you look at the systems compared like that, it actually makes a little more sense. Except for that weird 2-dollar coin, both the bills and coins follow the same basic reducing pattern.

Owning and Being Owned

Tuesdays are fucking awesome. I don't even need the damn alarm clock - my first class isn't 'til 5 PM! :D And even then, it's not really a class. It's my CCNA lab/weekly module test. I rocked the first one today - got an 85%. The required passing is 70%. Booyah. Course, the questions I missed were because I didn't study enough. I'm not gonna make that mistake next week. Now that I know where all the course materials on the web are, I'll be sure to kick ass and take names on the next one.

If only I'd faired so well making my curry today. *sigh* The stove is a piece of shit. I know, that sounds like a defensive copout, but how else does one manage to burn white rice on the low setting? Seriously. The two small burners on the left (they're actually hotplates) have two settings: off and hellfire. And sometimes off doesn't work so well. And, of course, I found that out the hard way. I feel like such an idiot for burning rice. lol

Well, anyway, I suppose I'd better get to sleep. I've got a quiz on my hiragana (Japanese chars) in the morning. Wish me luck!

Aussie-Doozy of the Day: I made my curry with capsicums. That's right: capsicums. Know what those are? Bell peppers. Aren't Aussies crazy? :)

Damn You, Sandman

I was up late writing in my blog last night, partly because I needed to finally write a real entry in the damn thing, and party because it was one of those occasions when I just get insomniatic. Around 5:30 am I finally got tired enough to go to bed, and I set my alarm - I know I did! - and got ready to fight myself awake 3 hours later.

I woke up refreshed at 1:04 pm. The alarm was off. Apparently, in an unconscious stupor, I got up out of bed, walked across the room, turned the alarm off, got back in bed, and fell asleep, dreaming away two classes and a lab. Oh, well. Shit happens. I looked up the lab I missed online and I completed it and turned it in via email, so hopefully the TA has a bit of mercy on me. I don't think the labs are really graded all that much anyway.

There wasn't too much that went on today. The highlight, though, was during my CCNA lecture. The professor had to bring his kid along. After giving his son a pointless instruction to sit down (yeah, like a 6-year-old is gonna sit through a two hour networking lecture and work on shining his halo), he hands the boy a soda and proceeds to lecture. The little tyke just basically wanders around awhile, playing with the fold out desks and the spring in the retractable seats. Occasionally he bugs his dad for some attention, and he just gets told to sit down again. It's all pretty standard bring-your-kid-to-work stuff - try to get your work done and get your kid to at least behave a little bit with a minimum of interference - until about a half an hour until the class ends.

Suddenly, the kid starts doing these weird (and very entertaining) dances up and down the front of the room. Well, I dunno if you could call it dancing so much as wildly thrashing about while moving forward, but it was great fun either way. The professor just laughs it off, thinking the kid is trying to show off. Although, after one or two of these dances, we begin to notice that the kid's hand is on his crotch. Ah. Right. The soda. The child needs to use the bathroom. The dad is not really watching too closely - too busy lecturing - and he fails to pick up this little hint.

15 minutes later, one of these dances comes with high-pitched moan and an angry pout. Ah, the Dad seems to realize what his son wants now. He grabs his son and leads him outside quickly while the rest of us snicker amusedly . . . and returns way too soon, but without the son. I guess maybe he thinks his 6-year-old can find the nearest bathroom on campus himself with a few simple directions. A tiny, but rapt, knock at the door a minute later tells the now-laughing group of us that this is not the case. The dad goes outside to his son . . . and again comes back way too soon. Yes, dad, a re-iteration of the instructions is just want he wanted. Another minute later, another knock on the door. This time the professor tries to ignore it as much as he's trying to ignore our strained giggling. And the knocks just keep a-comin'. Eventually, the kid just comes right in . . . and we see from the look on his face and the stain in his pants that there is no joy in Mudville; Might Casey has struck out.

I guess the only other thing of note I did today was try an Australian candy bar for the first time. Nestle is apparently a giant around here as far as the vending-machine-quality candy market is concerned, much like Hershey's is in the US. I tried a bar called the Aero, a straight-ahead pure milk chocolate bar so-named for the tiny little air bubbles they put into the chocolate. I honestly don't know what the air bubbles do short of adding a gimmick, but it was chocolate, and therefore good. I suppose it was a little different from your standard Hershey's, but who's to say whether that's because of the air bubbles or the different name brand.

Aussie-Doozy of the Day: The don't have Rice Krispies. Well they do. It's the same box, same logo, same Snap, Crackle, and Pop on the cover. But they call it Rice Bubbles. . . . I'm so confused.

The Fortnight Milestone

Now there's a word I've never used before: fortnight. For those of you not into ancient-setting RTS/RPG games, or who aren't history buffs, a fortnight is two weeks. It is a milestone because, give or take a day or two, that's exactly how long I've been in Melbourne now.

For all those who read this (assuming there might actually be more people than just Caryn), I apologize for being remiss on updating this blog. The past 2 weeks have been something of a rat race, but I think I'm pretty much all caught up in my classes and settled in. So, hopefully, I'll have a chance to update this on an almost-daily basis.

The first couple of weeks here were really rough, to be quite honest. The university I'm attending is a lot different than I was expecting it to be in a lot of ways. That's not necessarily bad (well, not in all cases anyway), but it creates a much longer adjustment phase. For instance, on their website it said the university comprised of roughly 26,000 undergraduates, putting it on the level of the UW. Apparently, that statistic was the total number of graduates studying at all their campuses (of which there are 8 of varying degrees). Granted, the Melbourne campus I'm studying at has the highest representation of this number (I'd guess about 15,000), it still makes it a smaller campus. That means that a lot of the usability a really large campus like the UW Seattle provides disappears. For instance, the entire university pretty much shuts down at 5:00 PM on the dot, nearly universally. And on weekends, the one library on campus is open 8-hours combined.

During my first few weeks here, especially when I had no Internet in my room, that was a tough pill to swallow. As a UW student, I'm used to being able to go to the library whenever I want, no matter the day or time. When living on campus I'm accustomed to be able to get something to eat at least *somewhere* anytime of the day or night, what with the infamous Ave being a stone's throw away.

The way Internet is done here also threw me for a bit of a loop. The room connections aren't automatically on. Well, they are, but you have to arrange for an IT person to come and enter the proxy information for you so that you can bypass the firewall. For this, they charge you $40. I agree that if it's necessary for someone to come and make a house call, then yes, they should get paid. But when I saw what the guy did, it's easily something that could've been handed out on a flyer. People who don't know much about computers or the Internet still would've needed help, but those that know how to manipulate connection settings when given clear instructions should be given the chance to do it themselves and save a little bit of money. Save the $40 connection fee for the people that want to be able to play games online, where it's necessary for them to set up a local account on their server for you so you can get a direct connection to the Internet. That's definitely something that most people probably couldn't do on their own. Also, I was a little freaked when they told me that they charge $0.09/MB for downloads, but apparently they only charge you for information loaded by your browser; other downloads don't seem to count. Either they intended that, or they're just don't know how to charge people for that. :)

It's not to say that any of those changes is bad. It's just very different from what I was used to, and I needed time to adjust. Now I've learned to use the trams and busses to get to the grocery stores, so I can stock up on food and cook my own meals, which is actually preferable to eating on campus at all. The food on campus is your typical on-campus fare . . . more-or-less decent food with enough variety to keep you interested for awhile. The prices are actually really cheap. More often than not I can get a meal for about $5-$6 AUD, which translates to around $3.75-$4.50 USD.

On the plus side, my classes seem to be pretty good, for the most part. Thus far, the teaching isn't on the level I expected from the smaller class sizes, but it's probably at least as good as most of the UW. I spent more time in class, but the out-of-class work is less than what I was getting at the UW by an entire factor or two. All of the classes have the slides online - basically, if you go to the class and then review the lecture slides later, you're more-or-less good to go. They all have one bigger assignment to do, but there's more than enough time to do everything, especially now that I don't have to worry about work at all.

Oh, I should probably tell you what I'm taking:

-Management Information Systems
-Data Communications Networks
-Computer Organization
-Modern Applied Statistics
-CCNA 1 Training (Cisco Certification Class)
-Beginning Japanese

Out of all your classes, Japanese is easily the most fun. I love practicing it, and I do so everyday. I've even met a few Japanese people on campus that I get to talk Japanese with (currently, very limited and very slowly lol). I was a little nervous about the class (in all fairness, mostly because Kaarin kept trying to scare me out of it), but I arrived in the class a week and a half late, and I can remember more vocabulary than anyone in my class. It really is so much fun! Man, I hope I don't start getting into Anime . . . lol

Another plus, is that I've gotten to go out and party quite a bit already. :) I believe I mentioned last time that there's a bar on campus. Can you believe that? They have music ever Tuesday/Thursday, Tuesdays more aimed at just relaxing and watching a show, Thursdays aimed at getting festively drunk and dancing until you can't stand up anymore. It's a really nice thing, since I'm farther away from downtown Melbourne than I had predicted. Although I've been there, too. Most recently on St. Patrick's Day. Some people from my floor and some others that I hadn't met yet went downtown to a Club/Pub called ICON. It was *really* expensive - even in American money - but it was fun. A little dingy, really smoky (they aren't quite as progressive on the smoking laws here as Seattle is, but it seems like they're moving in that direction), but the definite plus is that they're more than happy to let anyone who wants to dance on the bar. And at least once or twice there was such an array of beautiful women up there that no one bothered looking anywhere else.

I've already started losing a little weight since I've been here (although I have no idea how many kilos I weigh lol). All I have to do is drop a few more pounds, get a little self-confidence, learn some great places to go in downtown . . . and then let my American accent do the rest. Not that I intend on being a player at all, but hey . . . it's always nice come home with a phone number, isn't it? It's just one of those little things that makes a night on the town worthwhile.

Speaking of phone numbers . . . I need to get off my ass and get a mobile phone (they don't call them cell phones here). The pre-paid phones are pretty damn expensive here, though, so I've been stalling. On top of that the phones seem to be a generation or two behind the ones back in the US. So a phone I'd normally get free is like $100. I wanted to wait until my money transfer went through to get the phone, but I need the phone to get the money transfer. So I guess I'll just bite the bullet and go buy one.

Well, I guess that's a not-so-brief summary of the going's on so far. I guess I'll end off with the Aussie-Doozy of the Day:
The phrase "It's just an ant" has no bearing over here. Check this out. Trevor (one of my neighbors on my floor from Darwin, Australia) and I found one of the brown bulldog ones in the hall . . . it was fuckin' enormous.

Ed Robinson Would Say "Never is Enough"

For the 2nd time in as many Thursdays, I got drunk in a bar with Australians.

I'll elaborate tomorrow when I'm more sober. :)

Ozzy-Doozie of the day:
There's a fucking bar on campus. Doesn't that just blow your mind?

G'day!

3 days later, it finally settles in: I'm in Australia. I'm living, breathing, studying, eating - and probably soon to be drinking heavily - with Aussies.

So far, it's been a bizarre form of culture shock. I can tell that as soon as that wears off I'm gonna love this place and everything's going to be great, but the Australian culture and environment is quite literally as if the American and British cultures played chicken and neither one of them gave in. There's a smattering of each everywhere, plus a bit of uniqueness rearing its head once and again. What that means for me, as an American, is that everything is just close enough to the same where I feel like I don't have to adapt, but just different enough that I do.

I mean, just looking around . . . I know I'm not in Kansas anymore. Even the landscapes let you know you're in a foreign land. Everything is different, but the differences are so *subtle*. It's like when a best friend gets a haircut after not having done so in awhile. They look different, sometimes so much so you have to double-take, but there is definitely something familiar.

Anyway, I arrived safely on the 4th, and after a good 45-minutes of customs, immigrations, and bag collecting, I went out to see if the airport pickup guy was there. He wasn't, and I had to have someone at the information desk call him up. Turns out I was silly and put date that I was to be picked up in the American mm-dd-yy format instead of the european dd-mm-yy. So that was mah b. :)

I'm living in a college on campus (much like a dorm back home) called Chisholm, and it's pretty nice. I get my own fairly spacious room, and true to the information on the website, the floor I'm living on is *exactly* 50% Aussie, 50% international (consisting of me, a Swedish guy, and a Japanese girl . . . at least I think she's Japanese). It isn't as catered as I once thought, so I have to buy my own food either at an on-campus eatery or from a grocery store and cook stuff in the kitchen, but the exchange rate works out in my favor so the majority of items come out to be as-expensive-as or cheaper-than items back home, usually the latter.

I've set up an Aussie bank account and, as soon as my bank gives the ok, I'm going to use a third-party Internet service to transfer the money over. Doing it electronically gets me a better trading exchange rate, and leaving the banks out of it sidesteps any fees they'd love to throw at me. It'll be good once that happens - I've been using my debit card for everything. That's working out pretty well, but the exchange rate is then different everytime I use the money, since it changes on an hourly basis. I'm going to save some money by transferring in bulk and then using purely Australian money for everything.

After a day of running around to different departments and co-ordinating things, I've got my classes settled, I think. I never thought I'd say this, but I officially miss the UW's online registration system. lol I guess the way it is here is the way it was before the UW had that. It's not really all that bad - and actually it gave me a chance to meet a few of my teachers - but it makes the process take all day instead of maybe half an hour. But I attended my first Australian class today and things are all underway and seemingly going as planned. I'm taking 4 CSE classes, a Stat class, and Japanese. That many classes at once would be unheard of at the UW, but it's structured so that it works out to a normal load here.

I'll leave off with something I'll try and do every entry: the Aussie Oddity of the Day. Basically, it'll be a short discussion of the differences I notice between here and there, be it cultures, environments, government . . . anything I notice and feel like talking about.

Today's Aussie Oddity of the Day:
I have seen animals on campus here at La Trobe that I've only ever seen in zoos and pet shops. The best example of this: cockatoos. There are about a half dozen flying around the campus at any given moment. And they are LOUD! The first time I saw one it scared me half to death, diving out of a tree and making this horrible loud shrieking noise as it gave chase to another cockatoo.

Melbourne, ftw

For those of you who haven't been caught up, the Feb 22nd date for my flight came and went without so much as a sound or a word of concern from the powers that be. It had come into question whether or not I'd be able to go at all, and whether this little blog - along with my dream of studying in Australia - would die before its time.

My flight was moved to March 2nd (today), and I've spent all last week strapped to the torture bed, watching the pendulum swing lower and lower, each arch awakening fresh the terror that I would not be able to board the plane. The stench of death was in the air.

But then, just as the pendulum arched for it's final swing . . . it stopped. As dead as it wishes for it's victims.

Yesterday, in a last-ditch effort to save this trip from the bowels of the nether, I gave the people in DC a final phone call. The guy who answered was the same guy I'd talked to most of the time I'd called. In between the dispersement of the same old generic bullshit that he'd mutter in times past, he accidentally gave some information that was actually helpful. He informed me that what I was calling was the pre-lodgement inquiry line and that it was not a line for inquiry about visas before you were "lodged" in Australia, as I had thought, but it was a line for inquiries before the lodgement of an application. So then, it appears that I had been directing my inquiries to the wrong people all this time and no one had bothered to tell me until this gentleman - obviously as frustrated with me as I was with him - told me, in not so many words, that what I was asking was not his job.

After that conversation ended, I promptly looked up the number for the POST-lodgement inquiry line. One brief-but-rude conversation later, and I was transferred to the supervisor, whom I left a voicemail for with my email address.

What occured next is nothing short of a fucking miracle. Hours later that day, I received an email from him saying that he had discovered that the cause of my visa being upheld were pending medicals, and he said that they seemed to have finished reviewing and clearing my medicals. Procurement of my visa would then be imminent.

Sure enough, 9 minutes into the start of the Perthian business day . . . I got an email with a link to download and print my eVisa. Just like that. I peeked behind my computer screen to see if there was a Jack-in-the-Box like thing hiding behind the link waiting to punch me in the face. There wasn't. I got my visa.

I have no idea what that guy did or what he said to whom . . . but damn, does he get shit *done*. After explaining my full story to him via email, he was even very sympathetic to my plight and is currently investigating whether or not the issues that I've had are grounds for asking for some reimbursement for my flight-change fees.

Well, anyway, the drama is over. Or who knows, maybe it's not. Maybe I should call up TNT and haggle over the movie rights. Either way . . . the next time I write in this blog, it shall be from the comfort of my college room in Melbourne, Australia.