Orientation

To keep things a bit more chronological, I’ll start with two photos I took in the beginning of February. On that day it was raining a lot in Melbourne, this supposedly was the rain from the tail of the cyclone in Queensland. Some houses in Melbourne were even flooded by this rain. I hope Australia won’t see any more natural disasters; it feels like they’re getting them all right now.

Last week I had my first days at RMIT University. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were all about orientation. The day before orientation started, I decided to make the trip to the centre of Melbourne because I had no idea of public transport and I knew it would stress me out if I would take the first trip on my first day. It’s all pretty easy: I take a bus and a train and then walk a bit to school. The biggest problem with new transport is getting off at the right stop. On my trip back home, the bus driver didn’t even know where my stop was and I still managed to guess the right one, ha! They also have these ropes in the bus, which you have to pull if you want it to stop. I had never seen that before so I wasn’t sure if this was the stop “button” or the emergency brake… So I tried to travel Bourne-style: watching the movement of everyone in the bus, checking if they pulled the rope to make the bus stop (which they did).

The orientation days were good; all the exchange students were there, around 200 people from all over the world. If anyone ever wonders about the best pick up line, for these days it was “where are you from”, and everybody was an expert in saying it often. We mostly spend our time in this lecture hall where we were given lots of information about RMIT, visa’s, health insurance, rules in Australia, being safe while swimming, trips, parties and Footy.

On Thursday it was time to do our enrolment and timetable our courses. I now have great respect for the fact that Holland has study programs that are set and that you don’t have to pick your own courses. It’s awful. Especially as an exchange student I didn’t know if the courses I chose were the right ones since there is only so much information you can get from the website. It turned out that I couldn’t do some courses that I really wanted to do because they were full or that they could not be combined with other ones. This all meant that I was running around school a lot, trying to talk to the right person, sending out lots of e-mails and calling teachers. While writing this, my timetabling (putting your courses on a schedule) is still not completed (nearly there though!).

The last day of orientation, we had a “great race around Melbourne”. We had to complete a number of tasks as soon as possible, like collecting a signature on a certain spot or taking a picture with the team on another spot. The group that came back quickest with all assignments done best would win. When our group did the last task and heard that there were two teams before us that also did their last task there, we decided to run back to the school (quite some blocks away from where we were). This meant we all came back exhausted and sweating our asses off since it was a super warm day. But, it was all worth it. At the orientation party, after a nice shower, our group was announced the winner and this was our price:

I will now end this post with the following:

Hello!

I am finally settled and able to post something properly. It has been almost two weeks since I first arrived in Melbourne but it feels quite a bit longer.

My flight was all right; flying for so many hours is never super fun. Not even when you have around 148 movies to see on that little screen in front of you. Arriving in Australia, it was very nice to step outside into the sun, realising that my jeans were a bit too warm for that kind of weather (yay!). Unfortunately, my bag didn’t arrive when I did. It was stuck in London, and according to the lady at the Qantas desk, this was not uncommon. The lady also said my bag would come the same day. It didn’t. It arrived three days later after lots of phone calls and was brought to the house.

The only apologies I got for "mishandling" my baggage.

From the day I arrived I mostly spend my time trying to find a room. In total I responded to around 35 ads on the Internet and we looked at 7 rooms in person. I think we saw the whole scala of possible rooms: living with an adult man, living with an adult woman and her young child, a room shared with 2 other backpackers, a room in a house that was very, very dirty and a room in the house of a very special Chinese lady. She told us that she had a room 1A that could include an additional room 1B for a higher price. She would be using room 1B if I didn’t want it. I got all excited, I thought 1A and 1B would be quite big for just a little bit of extra money. She then showed us room 1A, with little room to move around in. We saw that she hung up curtains in the middle of the room, forming a square. That was room 1B. As it turned out, she created rooms in her house by hanging up curtains.

Finding the right room was actually quite stressful. I didn’t know if I would find the right one and if it would be on time. Seeing so many rooms when none is perfect (some didn’t feel right, others required a minimum lease I didn’t want and so on) is sometimes demotivating.

But, as I am writing this, I am sitting in a room in a nice house in Box Hill South, around an hour’s travel of my university.

I share the house with 7 others and the ones I’ve met so far are really nice. Now I’ll have to work out how to use the public transport, how to get to the centre of the city and where to buy my groceries.

Coming Wednesday I have orientation on which I’ll receive more information on my courses and school.

Another thing I would like to share is how awesome the cafes are. You can get every kind of coffee you want, even with skimmed or soymilk and there’s always a big showcase with lots of jummy looking cakes and pies. The coming months I’ll probably post much more pictures of food, coffee’s and cakes and here is the first one:

My first Australian latte