in melbourne!

Wow. After way too many hours of travel, here I am! My last post was from San Francisco. Since then, I have been in Auckland, New Zealand, and have arrived in Melbourne (finally!). In the live for customs another IES student identified me as a fellow IES participant and after chatting across lines for a bit we realized we have a friend in common - she went to high school with her, and she's at Grinnell with me! We then proceeded to clear customs (even with my declared home-made candy) and meet up with about ten other overseas students, the vast majority of whom were with the IES program, and living at the RMIT student apartments.

I'm living in a student apartment, with an Australian apartment-mate. Her name is Charlotte and she seems to be really nice. She is at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) studying something. She's from the third largest city/town in the state of Victoria, and the outskirts of her town have been hit by the bushfires. I have seen no evidence of the fires; the sky seems clear to me! Anyway, we share a small apartment with a bathroom, tiny kitchen, and two bedrooms. My room has a flat-screen tv. I have no idea what to do with it (watch cricket? and aussie rules football?), but oh well! We also have a balconey, with a view into an inner courtyard. The RMIT student apartments are a renovated old hotel, so there is an outdoor pool. Its all brick on the outside, with iron grill work on the balconeys and cute shutters and all of that. It seems like a pretty cool place.

Tomorrow, we leave to go on an IES orientation trip on the Great Ocean Road - basically driving southwest from Melbourne. Among the activities planned is a surfing lesson! It looks like it will be fun - apparently there are kangaroos and wallabies living wild where we will be staying and its completely normal to see them. Look for pics of them next post!