Sunday Session

My koala friend at Yanchep! 

posted by Will181198 @ 8:33 AM 0 comments

The beginning...

Well this should serve as an easy way to communicate with y'all back in the States without having to re-tell all of these stories a million times over....

As many of you know we departed Newark International Airport on the night of the 21st with a nice ong 27 hour flight time ahead of us (there were about 12 or 13 fellow Eloners on these flights with me). Once boarding began for the first leg of the trip we realized that our flight wasn't the 20 hour direct flight to Kuala Lumpur like we thought it was....in reality we were flying to STOKHOLM first and then on to Malaysia before finally taking the last flight down to Perth. So we set out on the 7 and a half hour flight to Sweden where we had a short hour layover before re-boarding the same plane and flying 11 hours to Malaysia. We had a 2 hour layover there where we all had the goal of getting some real food to relieve us from the nausiating airplane food.

We joined up with a few more Eloners and some Tulane students at this point for the final 5 hour flight down to Perth. Probably the most disturbing thing about the flight was watching the time change on the overhead screen and realizing trying to wrap our brains around the dozen time changes we were going through. Finally landing in Australia was a huge relief but of course trying to understand that it was 3pm in the afternoon of the 23rd was not an easy ting to grasp.

Once we made our way through customs and gathered our baggage we met Jaimee and Lorissa, two of our advisors for our time here at Curtin. We waitied to get our hands on some Australian currency before boarding a coach bus and being taken to the Comfort Inn in Downtown Perth. We stayed there for our first two nights with some other American students from Kalamazoo, St. Thomas and Tulane. After struggling through some dinner that first night in the hotel we all slept very soundly.

The next morning we woke up really early simply because our body's still didn't quite understand what the time was yet. We began exploring Perth by mkaing our way uptown a few blocks to the two major malls in downtown. The malls here are more like city blocks where only pedestrians can walk. Stores don't open till about noon on Sunday so we walked around until they did and ended up getting some lunch at a nice outdoor bakery.

In general, probaly the most frustrating thing about Australia that I've discovered so far is the extremly short trading hours (as they call them) stores aren't open past 5pm on any day of the week except Thursday nights when they stay open till 9. Many restaurants stay open till about 9 and pubs and night clubs till about 1 or 2. They just recently put a referendum up for a vote to extend trading hours in Western Australia but the voters turned it down to keep stores only open till 5.....quite annoying and quite a change from the US when most stores stay open till 9 or 10 every day of the week.

Anyway, later on Saturday Curtin arranged for the Americans to go to an Australian Rules football game. We saw the Fremantle Dockers take on the Melbourne Demons in the Subiaco Oval. Football here is extremly different from the game we are used to in the states but the passion for the sport is atleast equal to if not more intense than that of American fans. I'll atempt to explain the rules of the game in a later post....

After the game our advisors gave us intrsuctions on getting back to our hotel in downtown Perth so that we could go out and get some dinner and do a little drinking at Australian pubs. We left the game a little early and hit up an Irish Pub where we all enjoyed some beverages...myself a Kilkenny beer which was about as thick as anything I've ever had in my life. A smaller group of us broke off and made our way towards the train station lookin for somwhere to get a bite to eat before heading back to sleep (since we were all ridiculously tired at this point). We walked and looked at a few places and ended up asking two native Australians what a good place to eat would be and they told us to follow them to Clancy's Fish Pub which ended up being pretty good.

Another side note about restuarants in Australia is that the service here is quite different, most restaurants you are given menus and then you go up to a register and order and pay at the same time. They then give you a number to put on your table so they know where to bring the food. You then go to the bar if you want any drinks (beer, soda or wine) or just go back and wait for your food. Then once you're done eating you're free to go instead of the hassle of waiting for a check in the US and tiping your waitor or waitress. No Australians tip anybody...which makes for much cheaper meals. Don't feel bad for them though because the minimum wage here is somewhere over $12 an hour. Lorissa used to work at a department store and she got over over $17 an hour! If only I could get that much at Target at home...

Anyway so after eating at Clancy's we were incredibily tired (mind you at this point its only 8pm but out biological clocks were crazy messed up) so we made our way over to the train station and rode it back to the hotel for the night.

The next morning it was time for us to pack up and go move in to our rooms on Curtin's campus so at aroun 7:30 we piled into a bus and rode over to the Kurrajong Village where the George James House is located. There are about 12 or so other Elon students living in the same area as me and the other half are over in Vickery House and Erica Underwood. Our flats are set up like apartments with a kitchen and couches in the living room. There are six single bedrooms and between each pair of bedrooms is a bathroom for the two people in that pair to share. I'm sharing with some guy named Thomas whom I have yet to meet so I'll let ya know how that goes in a few more days...

After moving in we were quickly sent off to square away our schedules and classes before many other students returned to campus and to get more orientation done. Lorissa took us all our to Carousel (a shopping center aobut 10 min from campus) so that we could get some of the essentials for our rooms so that we could shower and sleep in them that night. The following day was much of the same, meetings and campus tours and such before we left to go to Yanchep National Park on Wednesday...

posted by Will181198 @ 3:37 PM 0 comments