Time flies

The last few days have flown by. It feels like I've been here at least a week if not two, mostly because my days have been so productive that they seem so filled. I last left you with my arrival in Adelaide, which went really well. That day was spent getting a bank account and getting more aquainted with the city, just really walking around and seeing things. Adelaide is certainly a city, by no stretch of the imagination anything else. When first built, the plan for Adelaide was set, it was to be set only with north-south and east-west streets, and they kept true to this. The actual downtown, which outside of North America is usually called the Central Business District (CBD) is surrounded by parklands, and then bordered by large four-eight lane streets respectively called North Terrace, South Tce, East Tce and West Tce. Inside and especially near the North Terrace, is downtown, and also the Uni of Adelaide and Uni of South Australia. Right now I'm living virtually on campus in temporary residence at a hospital. No, I don't have a patient next door. Its more like a dorm room, actually, exactly like a college dorm room. So within a five minute walk I can be at school, and also be at the busiest street in the city, and near the shopping centre of the city. Everything was very well thought out. Rundle mall is a girl's paradise mostly due to the fact that every fifth store is either a shoe store or a hair product store. Half of the street is completely shut down to cars and pedestrian only, where today, on Sunday, you see people performing magic. The rest of the street thats not shut down to traffic homes some other cool stores, more up my alley if I had the cash to spend. Outdoor adventure stores, a bike shop where I'll probably be buying my bike, just need to check out one other shop in the city and see what they have, and an array of restaurants with delicious beers and food. The one thing though that they do very well in Australia is making sure you pay for everything, absolutely everything. Internet, for example, is not just paying to get connected, but instead you pay for a certain amount of Gigabytes per month (I'm writting this on ms word instead of online to say minutes). I asked a girl today if because of that MSN and other chatting services aren't very popular, and she said that no, she uses MSN all the time, but also pays her partner $80/month (who knows what the partner is contributing) to do so. I'm pretty sure you can get unlimited access for like $69/month with a full two year contract from what I saw, but still, its a VERY foreign concept. But, the advantage is that you buy a little modem that sticks into your USB port, and with that, you can go onto the internet anywhere in the city and surrounding suburbs, as long as your in range. Sadly for me, my computer is too old to travel more than 2 metres from a wall, or you have to unplug it and it shuts off immediately. But its a very cool idea to be able to do something like that. I'd assume you could bring your laptop down to the beach and chat with your friends whilest there, amazing.

Friday morning I woke up way too early because of adjusting to the time change, and after going for my first run in Australia, and showering and eating breakfast, I decided to go down to the International Student Welcome Centre. I was very reluctant to do this, mostly because a Oreintation week sounded kinda weak. Well I went down, and went on the compulsory Welcome session that everyone's supposed to go on, and actually met some really cool people. Later that day after the tour was done, we arranged for everyone to meet at a bar at 8pm (it was Friday after all) and then Saturday we all went to the beach, which takes about 20 minutes via Tram to get to. Its not a GORGEOUS beach, but it is still damn nice and the water is warm. Not that I'm complaining because it does a good job of keeping you cool, but Adelaide is surprisingly quite windy, so staying in the nice warm water was alot better when you were underwater, not standing up with your body above. We also didnt make it to the beach until about 5pm and were there until 11, so that probably had good reason as to why it was chilly. It was very picturesque in that we hung out on the beach, went for a swim, got hungry and got something to eat, then found a beer store and bought some beer to take down to the beach. We were unsure about how that would go so beforehand I asked a guy from Adelaide if it was possible, and he said absolutely. While drinking on the walk down to and while sitting on the beach, not a single person looked at us cross. My do I love this country haha. Its very refreshing to be somewhere where mostly everything is easy going, except for the cost of living. But even then, I've been talking to people from Europe and they say its cheap, so I guess we're just very blessed in Canada.

Of this group of people that I hung out with, there's two other Canadians. Pam, from Calgary, and Sara, from Victoria/UBC. Then there's three people from Denmark that are all of the same exchange program from their home university in Coppenhagen; Simon, Lena and Annemette. Annemette actually lives in the same building that I'm living in for the semester, not the temporary but permanent living (signed the lease today). Then there's a girl from Rochester, NY named Renae who has an American accent which I find hilarious but only in my head and two other guys, Hannes from Germany and his roommate from Holland. I still am not even sure how to spell or say his name, but he's a really nice guy. Everyone actually that I've met so far is really cool, mostly because they're outgoing enough because we're all here in the same boat and don't know anyone.

I just moved some of my stuff into my new place, mostly all my clothes and can probably transport the rest in one more trip (its not that I have THAT much stuff, although I do recognize now that I have too much, its that I unpacked most and didnt want to pack it all up again). I had gone around with Pam and her parents apartment hunting on Friday before the bar, and had seen a lot of nice places, but everything was quite expensive. So as everyone can predict, I went for the bare minimum cheapest place. I had seen it before but didnt know neccessarily what room they were going to give me, I just knew that some were bigger than others. So when I went in to drop my stuff off today, I was actually quite surprised. Its actually a pretty sweet room, and its outside of the city just on the other sides of the parklands so that has an appeal to me as well. There's a communal kitchen thats really nice and a common area with all brand new furniture and a new flat screen tv, and two seperate patios and a place for bikes, all very secure. The rooms come furnished with your own bathroom and utilities are all payed for, all for the steep price (and remember, this is one of the cheapest) of $716/month. Now I budgeted for $1200/month with food so this is going to be VERY doable being that I won't have any other costs, except unfortunately $58/month for internet and cellular. As I said, living is not cheap in Australia (the dollar here is 0.85 of a Cdn dollar, so it sounds a little better when you do the conversions, $606/month and $50/internet+cellular).

Well thats about it for now, I'm torn between going for a run or going for supper. I need to move into my place so I can actually buy food to cook instead of buying the cheapest food a can (I had lunch for $3 today, sushi, not that great but filled you for the price of a soft drink).