School: Or, How I Got My Parents to Send Me to Australia

Unfortunately for me, Australia can't, by definition, be all about the beach and the sun and the koalas. There is also that little matter of my college education to consider. The University of New South Wales is located in Kensington, another suburb of Sydney, like Coogee. It's a little closer to the downtown Sydney, here's a map for your comprehension purposes, you can see downtown in the top left, Coogee on the bottom right, and UNSW due west of Coogee.

UNSW is a big university, even by American standards, with roughly 40,000 students in total. It takes me about 35 minutes to walk to campus in the mornings, so mostly I just take the bus. Going to college or "uni" in Australia is quite a bit different from going to college in the U.S. for example:

1. In Australia, you don't really go away to college, as you do in the States. Most students in Australia live at home with their parents while they're in college, and then just move into a place of their own. Most campuses don't have dorms either, another staple of the American college experience.

2. In Australia they don't have fraternities or sororities, however they do have toga parties...interesting, no?

3. In Australia they don't have a university sports team or mascot. Once a year they do have the "uni-games"
where students compete against each other in different athletic events, but nothing like it is back home. I wish UNSW had a mascot, maybe the wombat, that'd be awesome.

4. Most students here call their professors by their first name, rather than Dr. Soandso or even Professor Whatever.

5. In an interesting way, students in Australia take college less seriously than we do in the U.S., but at the same time their college seems more demanding. I'm not sure how to explain it, but I've heard no mention of a bell curve, nor extra credit or anything like that. At the same time, though, they don't have attendance quizzes or daily homework in any classes that I've heard of.

6. There's no dining hall at UNSW. Not a big thing, but it's kind of a staple, along with dorms, of the American college experience. Numerous cafes are scattered around campus but they're the same as you'd find in a mall, arranged in a food court kind of way.

7. Finally, the grading system here is nothing like the one back home. On an assignment, say a paper, you can receive a High Distinction (HD), Distinction (D), Credit (C), Pass (P), or Fail (F), which I've listed from best to worst. The HD and D transfer, at least at UNC, to an A back home, a C is a B, a P is a C and an F, well an F's an F, no matter where you are. Either way I can't be bothered, my grades won't count on my GPA back home...If you're keeping score at home that's, Alex:1 Higher Education: 0

The Jervis Bay Extravaganza

Alex: Hello?

Tom: Hey, what are you up to?

Alex: Umm, not too---

Tom: Wanna rent a car and go to Jervis Bay tomorrow?

Alex: I guess so.

Tom: Okay meet me at the bus stop at 8 tomorrow morning, kay?

Alex: (sigh) Sounds good.

Such began my Saturday’s jaunt south of Sydney to Jervis Bay, a small little area just down Highway 1/Princes Highway. I say it is “just down” the highway, but it’s really about 200 km, which takes quite a while to cover, given that you can’t drive very fast on the highways in Australia, because most of the highways go right through neighborhoods and small towns, constantly abating your speed. They don’t have interstate highways here in Australia, at least not the kids that we have in the States.

Anyway, I woke up at 7:15 on a Saturday, which in and of itself was a chore, and lugged myself and my backpack down the hill to meet Tom and another guy, Bobby, a Georgetown student from New York, at the bus stop. From there we hopped on the 373 bus and rode it into town to the Avis Car Rental in Kings Cross, or at least very near there. We asked a nice looking Australian woman in which direction we should go, and she proceeded to point us in the exact opposite direction of our destination, wasting a good half hour of our time. Thanks for nothing, lady.

We rented a cozy little Toyota Corolla (see pics). I know what you’re thinking, “why did he take pictures of the rental car?” Well it was partly because I like pictures, but mostly for evidence purposes should we destroy the car or die, the latter being a real and serious fear of all of us as we strapped ourselves into our little coupe, prepared to begin our driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road adventure.

And what an adventure it was! Tom crept the car out of the garage and out onto the street, where things got serious. It took us a full minute to make that first turn out onto Williams St. What followed was a comedy of errors as we wove our way back to Coogee to pick up the other two who would join us, all the way cutting off other drivers, turning into oncoming traffic and, hysterically, flipping on the windshield wipers whenever he meant to signal a turn. I don’t mean to say that driving on the wrong side of the road is easy, far from it, but he seemed to have particular trouble with certain aspects of it, namely the drifting away from the center line, his brain not used to being on the left side of the road, I guess. This caused us to almost clip the side mirrors of at least a dozen parked cars, often enough to warrant me becoming the resident yeller-at-Tom whenever he began to drift. Needless to say, Bobby and I shared more than one frantic glance which seemed to say, you do realize we’re never going to make it out of this alive, don’t you?

Once out of the city, things began to calm down a bit. The five of us chatted idly as we drove, flanked on both sides by picturesque scenery: the beach on the one side, rolling hills and valleys on the other. Bobby told us a hilarious pick-up line, that goes something like,

"how much does a polar bear weight?"

"i dunno, how much?"

"enough to break the ice, hi i'm Bobby..."

We drew into Jervis Bay a couple hours later, after having a local point us in the right direction on a couple of occasions. The path that lead from the car to the beach was tucked a few yards behind the beach itself, shrouded in vines, tall grass and canopied trees, making the eventual emergence onto the beach all the more breathtaking. Hyams Beach, the part of Jervis Bay where we were, was truly beautiful. I would later read on a souvenir t-shirt that it apparently has “the whitest sand in the world,” and I’ll tell you, I believe it. A light breeze blew across the sand as we walked down to the water, before making a b-line for the water, which was by far the clearest and bluest I’ve seen in Australia. It felt like the Caribbean, I swear. The water was very warm, its floor not coated in seaweed, as it is back in Coogee. The water was calm, with gentle waves and no steep drop-offs, and we were five of only about 50 people on the entire two mile-long beach. We all agreed that the end really, really, really justified the means in this instance, glad to have braved our near-death driving experience as it lead us to paradise.

We swam for a while, laid out on the beach, lulled to sleep by the rhythmic crashing of the waves, which echoed off of the thick forests that guarded the beach, then headed up to a beachside café for lunch. After, we followed another local’s advice and visited the ruins of an old lighthouse located in another part of the bay. We’d also heard that we might catch a glimpse of kangaroos at the lighthouse, if we were lucky. That alone was reason enough to go. We didn’t find any roos, but we found great views, high atop a staggering cliff, waves crashing hundreds of feet below (see pictures).

The day drawing to an end, we decided to head back to Sydney. I decided to try my hand at the wheel of our little deuce coupe. Driving on the left side, if you haven’t done it, is certainly unnerving, at first. You are much more attentive and observant than you are when driving back home, fully aware of every car, street sign and traffic signal. If my driving instructor could see me now, I thought to myself, as I drove down the Princes Highway, literally as if I’d never driven before. Hands at Ten and Two, I guided us without incident back to Coogee, much to the relief of all those aboard. With modesty and great respect to Tom, who certainly had the harder task of getting us out of the city with hardly any directions and no practice, I could tell the rest of the crew were glad to have someone else behind the wheel for a bit.

The familiar sands and waves of Coogee Beach seemed ho-hum compared to Jervis Bay, but what beach wouldn't? If you ever get the chance to, go to Jervis Bay. You won't regret it.

The One and Only Jervis Bay

Australia: Land of the Fee...

One thing that I hadn’t really anticipated being a problem in my coming to Australia was a monetary one. Australia isn’t cheap, far from it. Even adjusting for the exchange rate with the American Dollar, a 12 oz. can of Coke (the only true measure of economic equivalence in existence) costs $2.50, at best, in a restaurant, and usually more than $3. This fact was painfully evident during me and Nick’s first few days in Sydney, when we ate out for every meal, had no economical means of transportation, and spent much time trying to stock up on items we’d forgotten to bring from home (shampoo, soap, towels, pillows, etc.)

Forgive my being tongue-in-cheek, but with Australian currency, you really do get your money’s worth. The paper versions, for example, are not paper at all, but plastic, which you can’t tear (go ahead and try, you can’t), can get wet without any damage, is wonderfully colorful and rife with anti-counterfeit measures including areas of total transparency. The jingle-jangle version may be less interesting, but is wholly more enjoyable. Take, for example, the 50 cent piece. Octagonal in design, the 50 center is gratifyingly stackable (see pictures). My personal (and by all accounts, world) record, as the pictures prove, is five coins, reaching an astounding height of 6 inches. Go ahead and be impressed, it's okay.

That’s about all I have to say about money in Australia, just another part of this country you can’t seem to get enough of…

Tall Money

Home Sweet Coogee

Ahhhh…my first day in my own house in the beachside suburb of Coogee . And what a house it is! 190 Oberon St., at first, reminded Nick and me of a poor man’s Real World house: 5 bedrooms, a swimming pool of our very own, a large grill and smallish backyard, a pool house, it really has everything you could want, only being shared by seven college kids (see pictures of house in last post).

Sounds pretty good, huh?

Well here’s where the whole “poor man’s” part comes in: when we first arrived there was a lot of stuff already in our house, left over from previous study abroad students during their stay here. Food, broken fans, posters (one of Michael Jordan, another of Jessica Alba from Sin City), clothing, etc. The dishwasher didn’t work, and one of our refrigerators wouldn’t close all the way, which caused there to be a puddle of water in our kitchen every morning. The grill outside hasn’t been cleaned since 1923, I think, and the walkways around the house are littered with trash and broken glass. Further, the drain in one of the showers was all clogged up with hair, so it flooded the entire bathroom if you used it. Not to mention the cockroaches, yes they have cockroaches in Australia. A lot of things that seem mundane back home have a certain cheery charm here in Australia…like just talking with people, or shopping, or walking on the sidewalk. This doesn’t extend to cockroaches, sadly, as they are just as creepy and disgusting here as anywhere else. We spotted a couple of cockroaches in the pool house, the room to which Nick and I were assigned, so we opted to temporarily reside in one of the rooms in the main house which was, to us, safer somehow.

On our first full day in Coogee, Nick and I decided to get further acquainted with our surroundings…meaning we went to the beach.

Coogee Beach is, from what I have read, maybe the second or third “best” beach in Sydney. Granted, what is “best” to one person isn’t “best” to another, but by most accounts it is held in very high regard, behind only the world-famous Bondi and maybe one other. Coogee Beach is about a half-mile long from end to end, I would guess, with waves that are typically from 4-10 feet high, depending. I’m not really sure how to measure wave size, but that seems about right. Seaweed covers the sand in the more shallow parts, before you get further out. Most people just kind of float around, jumping through the waves, sometimes riding one in on a boogie board or stomach, as there is no surfing in Coogee, which might be policy, but is likely because the waves aren’t that good, by a surfer’s standards. A lot of people prefer Coogee to Bondi, as the former isn’t quite as crowded as the latter.

The weather since we arrived in Sydney has been extremely nice, with temperatures in the 80s and always sunny. It’s quite humid here, as well, which can wear on you if you are walking around in the sun for too long. The sun here, too, is very, very, aggressive, and is responsible for Australia’s booming sunscreen industry. You can’t go more than ten minutes watching television without seeing a commercial advertising for sunscreen, reminding moms to put it on their children, not just when they go to the beach, but when they go to the store, to school, out to play in the garden, whenever they are outside. You can get sunburned almost anywhere in Australia, probably even indoors.

Walking around, I began to realize I should have brought more shorts and t-shirts than I did, and not nearly as many jackets, sweatshirts or coats, of which I brought seven…dumb. Things are, as you might imagine, pretty laid back here in Australia, and not just around the beaches. Flip flops and bathing suits are worn pretty much anytime, even when going out at night, which is great news for me, as I <3 style=""> It’s only our 3^rd or 4^th day here in Sydney, meaning we have a further week and a half until class starts to do whatever we want.

Nick and I returned, slightly sunburned, to our house after grabbing a bite to eat near the beach and using the internet at a local café. Whilst on the Internet, I discovered I had a message from UNC’s very own Dani Bergmann, informing me that she, too, had arrived in Sydney, and letting us know her phone number and where she was staying. I responded that neither of us had a phone yet, but that we might drop by later in the evening.

After a shower back at the house, we headed to the North side of the beach (we live on the South side) where Dani’s place was…and what a place it was! If our house was a poor man’s Real World House, Dani’s is an upper-middle class man’s Real World House, complete with two decks, a pool of their own, clean, working appliances, and a DVD player. If my excitement seems to outweigh what seems deserved given what I had discovered, you’d just have to see our house, and meet our cockroaches, to understand.

Anyway…Dani and her roommies were having a reunion of sorts for all the kids who did the Lady Elliot Island (LEI) pre-session program for the last week or so. Nick and I didn’t really know anyone there, but we all (20 or so of us) went out to the Coogee Palace Hotel (in Australia "hotel" = "bar" most of the time), a three story spherical wonder of a bar with a dance club, lounge area, pool tables, sports bar and escalators (no joke). There I met a couple other UNCers on our program, Kat and Emily (who I knew previously thru my roommate, Andrew). So we all talked for a while before they closed the third story, where we were, at midnight. We were too casually dressed for the dance club part of the bar, so we went back to the house and grabbed the rest of our beer and about a dozen of us hung out, drinking on the beach, for the next couple hours. All in all it proved to be a great introduction to going out in our little suburb of Coogee, and I look forward to many more nights like it, in the future.

Nick and I stumbled up the long hill to find our house occupied by another human being, our first roommate, Lindi. Sufficiently inebriated, our first impression was less than mannerly to be sure, but we were tired, and vowed to have a more formal introduction in the morning.

Gettin' Situated

Nick hadn’t been so lucky, it turned out. His sentiments best summed up by his exclamation that the previous night was “both the first and last time I’ll ever sleep in a hostel.” I reminded him that unfortunately we couldn’t move into our house at “uni” (as Australians affectionately call college) until the next day, which would mean one more night in housing of our own finding. We paid for the previous night plus one more, and then set out to find some food, exchange our remaining American money, and go enroll at the University of New South Wales.

After wandering aimlessly around the city, we stopped and got a bite to eat at a little café in Taylor Square, kind of near downtown Sydney. This was our first real introduction to one of Australia’s lesser-known characteristics. We knew it would be sunny, we knew the people would be friendly, and that they would talk funny, but what we hadn’t full realized was how expensive this arid island actually is. My sandwich and Nick’s bruschetta (sp?) came to about $25. We both ordered Cokes, which came in those really old glass bottles that hold about 10 oz.; those were three bucks each. The only bonus of eating in Australia is that you don’t have to tip your waiter (I’m not making this up), supposedly because they already make something like $15/hour. You can kind of tell they don’t expect one, too, because they don’t really wait on you in the traditional American sense. There’s not the same routine as back home…----give you menus, ask for drinks/appetizers, explain the specials, bring the drinks/appetizers, ask for main course orders, bring main course, ask how everything was, come take your plates when you are done, then bring the check-----In Australia they are much more “food bringers” than they are “waiters” in most restaurants. Moreover, in most restaurants you have to go up to the counter to pay, the don’t bring you a check. In a dozen or so meals to this point we’ve only been brought a check one time, literally.

Anyway...after eating, we asked one of our waiters how we could get to Randwick via bus, since walking was proving to be very taxing. He kindly explained (they do everything kindly, though) how to get to the right bus stop and which bus to take. Unfortunately, even finding the bus stop proved to be a chore, taking us a further half hour. We rode the bus for about 15 minutes, swerving in and out of traffic, past busy midday traffic, past Centennial Park and a great, white stadium they have there…I’m not sure if it is the Olympic Stadium from back in 2000 or not…I’ll check on that for you. We hopped off the bus once we started seeing businesses like “Randwick Chemist” or “Randwick Kangaroo Store”, figuring we had to be close. We knew from our previous trips to UNSW’s website that they had a tall, central building with UNSW emblazoned high on one of its sides, so we tried to find a vantage point from which to find this beacon. We did, and primitively traversed the streets until we came to UNSW’s campus. It is by no means a picturesque campus (like UNC’s) especially because it is decidedly in-town of a city of about 4 million, but they do the best they can. Once you get inside the gates it really feels like a college campus in some small American college town: lots of trees, cool looking buildings and open lawns. Well done, UNSW, well done. We found our way to Matthews Building, the previously mentioned 16-story building that had served as our guiding light on the way to campus. The top floor houses the Study Abroad Office where we got enrolled in our classes.

Generally speaking, Australians are a very priority-oriented people, considering that my university advisor suggested that I not take classes on all the days of the week, instead loading up on one, two or three days and leaving “more time for the beach”, as she told me. There were a few other Americans doing the same as Nick and I, and we chatted with them as we all waited.

As it turned out, as the nice people at the Study Abroad Office told us, we could in fact move into our house that night, one night earlier than we had been told, which was most definitely music to Nick’s ears. As I said before, I’d had a fine evening sleeping at the Pink House, but Nick wasn’t quite so lucky, and was more than happy move out a day early from the hostel. This of course meant sacrificing the money we’d already spent on our booking for that night, but being the good friend that I am I let that slide.

We went and checked out our new digs--see pictures below--then returned to the Pink House, checked out, said farewell to King’s Cross, and sped across town to 190 Oberon St., our home away from home for the next 5 months.

Click the picture to view the album. :)

Our House

Ahhhhstralia....

Note to self: If I should ever decide fly back to Australia, I need to do make sure to do so in first class. It’s almost impossible to convey, to an average human, just how long the flight is from Los Angeles to Sydney, something in the neighborhood of a month seems about right. We (Nick and me) had left Austin very, very early in the morning, our stomachs filled with one last bit of Austin: a couple Matt’s el Rancho breakfast tacos from the Airport food court. We arrived in L.A. around 10:30, as I remember, and had 2-3 hours to kill until our 12:30 flight to Sydney, the aforementioned one that takes a quarter century.

Qantas Flight 8 was to be our home for the next 15 hours of our lives, even longer, in technical “time”, if you account for all the crazy time zones and whatnot. To their credit, the people at Qantas do their best to make you comfortable. You can request drinks at any point during the flight, a snack if you want, whatever. They also sprinkle in the planned service of food and beverages (2 meals and maybe a half dozen drink services), and even a desert of a green Popsicle which Nick had and liked, but I passed on.

Just as an aside, I would like to mention that both Nick and me celebrated our 21^st birthdays on board Flight 8, so you should really have congratulated us already if you haven’t had the chance. I mean, of course, to say that as soon as we boarded the plane, we were of legal age to consume alcohol, which is really the only difference between a 20 and 21 year-old person, as I see it. We had wondered, prior to our departure, whether or not they would serve us alcohol on the flight, or if, perhaps, they could only serve it over international waters, or maybe once we crossed the halfway point and were closer to our destination than we were to the U.S. As it turned out, all of our worries were for naught, and they let us drink as soon as we took off. As you might imagine, our ceremonious first drink was a Foster’s, which is, if you haven’t heard, Australian for “beer”. Nick sampled the wine; I stuck mostly to beer, one G&T and an experimental brandy. The combination of a pressurized cabin and the mixture of alcohol in my stomach had me feeling lightheaded after a bit, so I meekly retreated to water for the remainder of the flight.

The flight to Australia did mark the first time that I have knowingly freaked out on board a plane. Somewhere in the first 6 hours of our flight, the pilot came over the loudspeaker and exclaimed, in a frantic tone, "Flight attendants return to your seats immediately," and said nothing else. He said that last word, immediately, so emotively that you had no idea what to think. He didn't say if we were headed into a patch of light turbulence, or if we had just commenced a 30,000 foot nosedive, and it was high time to start believing in Heaven...we had no idea. For the next 10 minutes or so after we frantically re-buckled our seatbelts (like it would really help), no one on the plane spoke, we were all just waiting for something to happen. It reminded me of when Anne Frank and her family were hiding upstairs when the Nazis came and searched their house. No one dared to make a sound. It was creepy. Eventually the pilot came back on and didn't even mention it, he gave no explanation for what happened, I think he just announced the beverage cart was coming back around. I bet the pilot just got bored and decided to have a little fun at our expense...ass.

We passed the time playing our PSPs and watching movies on the in-flight TVs everyone had in the headrests of the chair ahead of them. After Babel, Borat, and The Departed, I was pretty tired and did my best to get some sleep, 7 hours into the flight yet not even half way there…siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. Reading and watching some TV passed the rest of the time until touchdown, around 10:30 local time in Sydney, where it was 75 degrees even so late at night.

We’d considered exchanging some money into Australian Dollars while in the airport in L.A., but decided to be dumb and chose not to, so when we got to Australia we had to use an ATM and pay a squirrelly-looking man to drive us in his bus to the hostel where we would spend our first night in down under. The Pink House as our hostel was called, was located in an area of Sydney known as King’s Cross , known for its rampant prostitution and drugs, a fact that would have certainly deterred our booking the room, had we known beforehand…oh well. I’m certain Nick wished we hadn’t booked the Pink House, or, at least, that we hadn’t booked that room in the Pink House, as we shared it with 6 other people, 3 of whom snored…loudly. I was tired and fell asleep almost immediately and slept soundly until about 10 the next morning.

Introduction

Now, I know what you're thinking...Alex, blogging again??? Sigh...I can't stand listening to him in person, much less reading what he thinks online. Well, tough! I'm making a travel blog and there's nothing you can do about it. Besides, this one actually has a purpose to it: Since I'm down here in Australia and whatnot, I thought some of you might want to have a way of keeping up with what I'm up to at your own leisure, as the time change makes it difficult to talk to most of my friends in real-time. I'll update this as often as possible, some posts will be long, others short, including pictures when possible. It should be a grand 'ol time for all.

With that said, I humbly present you my Aussie Travel Blog. Enjoy.