Week 1

I've never done the blogging thing before, but inspired by a ton of free time and realizing that it takes forever to write long "update" emails to all my family and friends, I've decided to give it a go.

Bryan and I arrived in Melbourne a little over a week ago and have had a great time exploring the city and getting settled in. Before I give some details from our trip so far, I have some general thoughts on Australia:

• The people here are as advertised, unconditionally nice, welcoming, and funny.
  
• I'm mildly obsessed with the one liner's they use here, such as "give it a think", "no worries mate", "you're a good bloke" amongst about a dozen other that I won't bore you with...yet
  
• Their terms for different sizes of beer needs to be universally adopted. A quick run down:

Stubbie = bottle
Pot = ~10 oz draught beer
Pint = 16oz draught beer
Jug = pitcher

And now on to our adventures in Melbourne to date...

Tuesday
The 24 hours of traveling from the time we got to LAX to when we landed in Melbourne was pretty exhausting, and needless to say, the first day in Melbourne was a struggle to stay awake.

We didn't have housing lined up when we landed so mission #1 was finding a cheap hotel/hostel to stay in for a couple nights. After striking out at 3 or 4 hostels which were all full, we found a nice/cheap hotel in the South Yarra area of the city. The room was tiny but we each had our own bed.

We got internet access at the hotel and immediately started scouring real estate websites in search of a sublet. Bryan took a commanding lead for "Trip MVP" when he found a great 2 bedroom place 2 blocks from the beach in the St Kilda neighborhood (which is the place to be in the summer here). Bryan set up an appointment with the owner of the place for the following morning.


After finding a cool Mexican restaurant down the street for dinner, we watched the Australian Open on our tiny TV until 930pm when we both crashed from our never ending day of traveling across the world.

Wednesday
Within 24 hours of landing in Melbourne, we somehow were able to lock up a place to live. Given that I was expecting to be staying in a hotel/hostel for a week or more, this was a huge win for Team Buter/Wolfert. Not only that, but the place was exactly what were looking for. Two bedrooms in St Kilda only 2 blocks from the beach.

After having the huge burden of finding a place off our shoulders, we explored the beach and the city and just enjoyed the great weather. Not surprisingly, summer here is gorgegous with temperatures in the low 80's most days and we've had 3 or 4 days in the 90's since we've been here. A tad bit better than the 20 degrees and snow/ice that covered chapel hill last weekend.


We celebrated our first full day in Australia by buying tickets to the Australia Open. The tennis complex is right downtown and is really nice. We walked around and watched parts of a few matches (although the big match we wanted to see was sold out). We ended up posting up in this cool lawn area where a gigantic big screen showed all the big matches. It was great people watching and very relaxing.



Thursday
We moved into our apartment Thursday morning and made the necessary trips to the grocery store to stop hemorrhaging money on every meal. Its kind of bizarre how things are priced here. A coke, coffee, or Gatorade are probably 2 or 3 times as expensive as in the US and wine is pretty cheap. At an Italian restaurant down the street, they had a special which included the entree with your choice of Cola or Wine....for the same price. Not sure how that works.

After spending most of the day getting settled into our new home, we went out Thursday night on Fitzroy Street (one of the main streets in St Kilda) which is just a block away from our place. There a bunch of bars and restaurants all along the street and so we bar hopped for a while before calling it a night.

Weekend
With our body clocks getting back to normal and feeling settled in at our apartment, the weekend was spent having fun, going to the beach and meeting some our fellow exchange students.

I've gotten into a good routine of running here and continued the routine by getting good runs in over the weekend. There always a bunch of people - and incredibly attractive women - running on the boardwalk so motivation to walk a block to the beach and run becomes very easy. Not to mention its also a great way to see different parts of the city.

Saturday served as the first day of legitimate social interaction with other people. At a certain point, Bryan and I began to run out of inside jokes and our attempts at Australian accents were becoming less funny to each other by the minute. Luckily, we met up with a number of the other exchange students saturday evening for drinks at Riverland Bar & Grille, which is a really cool spot right on the Yarra River (which runs through the central business district). The other exchange students seem like really fun people and so far have met students from: 3 from Duke, 1 from Cornell, 2 from McGill (Univ or Toronto) and 1 from INSEAD (Paris).

Despite beers here being quite expensive, we managed to have a great time and ended up at a fun bar close to the tennis complex.

We finished off the weekend by spending Sunday at the beach for a while, and then headed downtown to watch the Finals of the Australian Open at a public area called Federation Square. The area is actually where one of of the bars was the night before, and is a relatively new space where they have a huge big screen TV and sound system for locals to watch big sporting events. It was a great environment and an awesome setting with the sunset in the background (see pics). There must have been a couple thousand people there cheering for either Federer or Murray very vocally. Lots of Scottish flags were draped around Murray fans.


Monday and Tuesday
Monday was highlighted by a trip to Chinatown for some dip sum (think chinese topas) and meeting up with the other exchange students for drinks at some "local" pubs off the beating path. It was great change of pace to be in some cool, old pubs even though it was extremely obvious that we were not locals.

Tuesday marked our first trip outside the city. Bryan and I, along with 4 other exchange students, rented a big van for the day and headed down near Bells Beach. For the "Point Break" movie lovers out there, this is where they filmed the famous last scene. Bryan courageously volunteered to drive, which on the surface doesn't seem like a big deal. However, as you may know, they drive on the "wrong" side of the road here. Its unbelievably disorienting. When we rented the van, Bryan went to get in the driver seat and as a creature of habit sat down in the passenger seat. He quickly realized he was on the wrong side of the car to drive. Laughter and fear of the 2 hour drive ahead ensued.

After picking up the other exchange students, we made the trek down the "Great Ocean Road" to Bells Beach. It's one of the best surfing spots in the world (from what I'm told) and all the big surfing companies have huge stores there. Luckily we stopped at one of the stores on the way into town to realize that Bells Beach is really dangerous and that Torquay Beach would be a much better spot for us. Luckily, Torquay Beach was only a couple minutes away. We rented a couple surfboards and wetsuits and headed to the beach. We spent the rest of the day playing in the waves and attempting to surf. Surfing is really fun, but incredibly hard and exhausting. I'm confident in saying that I am not a "natural" surfer. Something to do with being 6'10" and trying to have a low center of gravity just doesn't work.


Melbourne is a great city and I'm really excited to spend another 3 months here. I'll do my best to give an update at least once a week, and will try to include as many good pictures as possible. In the meantime, I found out my old teammate Brad Bridgewater is playing pro ball over here in Melbourne and am planning to meet up with him tonight or tomorrow.

Cheers Mate,
Paul