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