As I stumbled onto my 7:00 am flight to LAX on New Years Day, having only recently left the bar on NYE, I felt a mixture of excitement, nerves and nausea. I was just beginning my day and a half long journey to Australia. I awoke on the flight to LAX just as we were descending and after I collected my baggage I was left wondering what I was supposed to do during my 12-hour layover. The answer was sleep, shop, skype and eat. Also a side note for those of you planning to study abroad: if you think you packed too much, you did! And you will literally be stuck paying the price for it in expensive airline fees. Anyway, after wasting away my day I finally got to meet the other students on my study abroad program at the airport gate.
I spent the next 16 hours on a flight to Melbourne, and after arriving down under was shuffled onto a bus by our Aussie guides, Maz and Cat. We stopped for our first Australian meal, an endless buffet of pizzas and pastas, and then continued onto our orientation destination in Sorrento. For those of you who have ever been to Cape Cod, you can kind of picture Sorrento. It’s a little beach town where Aussies come to spend their holidays. The beach was gorgeous and on the first night we went to watch the sunset. If you know Jenny this will come as no surprise, but that first night she was climbing the cliffs near the beach, fell, split her chin open and twisted her ankle. Yikes! I wasn’t there but I was her roommate and found out that night when Cat came to get her stuff for the hospital. What a start to the semester!
After two days of icebreakers and bonding, we left Sorrento and headed to Melbourne for the day. Melbourne is an amazing city and we spent the day simply being touristy. Graffiti is legal in the city and so there was a ton of amazing art on the sides of buildings and down little alleys for us to take pictures of. After we had had enough of the heat and were tired of walking we headed back to the hotel, but not before stopping at the liquor store to pick up some goon (wine). That night was an interesting one spent playing drinking games, telling stories and eating Chinese food.
The next morning we left for the airport to catch our final flight to Brisbane. Later that day we arrived at Bond University, got our rooming assignments, and settled into our new homes. More to come!