Sydney Life

I'll be in an internet deadzone for a few days, so I'll just do a quick post while I can!

So since I’ve been in Sydney for about a week and still living with my host family, I guess I should show off some pictures of the sort of antics I’ve been up to while I’ve been here. My host family, which I cannot describe how awesome they are, have taken me out with them to family dinners. One thing I learned about Chinese families are that they’re the same everywhere, and I guess you could extend the generalizations to everyone’s family. Grandparents are always warm and friendly; fussing over their grandchildren while making sure everyone’s having enough to eat/is comfortable. It’s these touches that always make a person feel really comfortable in an unfamiliar environment. I’ll try to avoid it being a generic photo dump, but I’ll show off some pictures of a typical journey from my host family’s house to the campus. The campus itself is really nice – being a history/philosophy major going to school that evokes traditions of Oxford or Cambridge is just awesome. There are also super modern/slick looking buildings around as well. One of they crappier things is that internet on campus is actually limited – you have to pay if you using over 100mb. That means if you open up any document online, via databases like JSTOR, then you’re pretty much screwed because they’ll bill your account. Comes with the territory I suppose.

So everyday I either hitch a ride with my host family or walk myself to the train station. It’s pretty cool because a lot of the train stations look really historic, while some of them are pretty new and modern.

After going from Wahroonga to Redfern, I take a short walk from the station to the campus. The area that I wake through is a little dodgy, with a few homeless people and sketchier elements walking around. But otherwise, pretty nice area. While looking for a place to stay, I ended up looking at a bunch of places around this area, and some of them were actually quite terrifying. Regular houses in Hamilton (for my Canadian readers) look like upper-class mansions compared to some of the places here. But, this is an old area so I can’t knock on it too much, it’s just the places aren’t particularly well maintained by its residents.

I’ve also managed to get an apartment with a motley crew of exchange students. We have two American, one British, one Italian, one Japanese and one Canadian (me!) living in a pretty huge three bedroom apartment. We’re sharing rooms, but that’s okay because it’ll be just like living in residence again – not exactly a problem since it’s a relatively short stay and pretty cool to have such a diverse group living under one roof. I talked to the British dude (from Manchester) about the Smiths and the Japanese dude about Pride Fighting. It’s awesome that in the “new” world everyone is so connected and things that are normally locally known are actually really common or at least people have knowledge of them. We all went to Bondi Beach the other day, which was fantastic and lots of fun. The waves are super strong, and the salt was awesome for my skin (get jealous!).

Hopefully I’ll do another post about my new flatmates soon, just because they’re all pretty interesting characters.

Cheers,

Rick