Arriving in Australia

Hello again!

I have been in Brisbane, Australia now for three days and things are starting to get really exciting. I'll try to break this up again as to not completely bore you.

Landing


We landed in Brisbane around 10 am and we basically had no idea what we were doing. The school has a free service that picks you up from the airport and takes you to your temporary accommodation (since we don't have an apartment yet). Naturally, the three slackers from Madison did not plan to utilize this in advance so we showed up at the airport with no plan. Thankfully some Asian dude (from Canada, weird I know) was planning ahead (typical Asian) and called a shuttle for himself. Again, in typical Madison fashion, we mooched. Luckily he was cool about it and the driver was more than happy to accomodate us. He was an old Australian man who clearly loved picking up delinquent students who don't have a clue about anything and telling them everything they need to know about the city in a brief van ride. He was so helpful, telling us about the transit passes we should get, and where the good neighborhoods to live are, and where to travel in Australia. Before piling in the van, however, I had my first awkward encounter with Australian "lingo". We were standing around waiting for Alex to get his stuff and the man looked at me and says "Did you need to use the loo before we leave?". I looked back at him and for some reason said "Why yes, I should freshen up a little bit". Soo many problems with this: 1. I don't talk like that in real life so I just sounded like an idiot 2. No one should say annoying shit like that and 3. I don't even know how to freshen myself. Regardless, I quickly walked to the bathroom (loo) shaking my head at myself. I didn't have to pee, so I just stared at myself in the mirror for a little bit. I re-did my "messy" bun in an attempt to freshen but really I just re-messied it. I went back out and thankfully we were starting to load our things into the van, hopefully no one noticed my awkwardness. The man dropped us off at the hostel we are staying at until we all find apartments. We ditched our bags and went off to do some city exploring. Turns out Brisbane is a pretty cool city.

My new city!

City Encounters


Not a whole lot to say here except that I already love Brisbane. It is clean and modern and really safe. After checking in we explored the downtown area. There is a huge mall area with outdoor shops and food stands. It was just buzzing with people. Things are pretty similar to the US, but there are some differences. There is a "coles" grocery store, a Target (it's is kinda set up like a department store which is weird), Kmart (which is, apparently, the nice place to shop) and various other mall-ish type stores. People still run to make it into the cross work before it stops flashing, they still walk while texting, and they do a pretty good job on walking on their side of the sidewalk. You know, in America when there is a crowd you typically stay on the right side just like you were driving. Well, same concept here except that they drive on the left side thus naturally they walk on the left side. I caused only a few disturbances in pedestrian traffic before I quickly realized I needed to follow the rules of the sidewalk. Stressful.

Campus Life


We spent our second day in Brisbane exploring the campus, and it is beautiful! The buses drop you off right in front and it instantly becomes a walking campus. It's basically it's own separate little community, not like Madison where it is mixed into the city. Although it's a big school (about 45,000 students) it's not very big distance wise. Here is a map so you have an idea of it's surroundings

And look, here is me with a sign! (Typical tourist)

Next week is Orientation week and school starts on the 27th. More posts to come!