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.