Mom, you would be proud...

My first few days in Melbourne have been full of fun, making friends, and a lot better food than the peanut butter sandwiches and instant noodles I ate every day last week.  I'm one of around 260 international students at Monash (Only a few Australians have arrived), and I've spent a few hours sitting in a big auditorium listening to some ladies talk about public transit, the Melbourne area, school, registration, work, and all that great stuff.  I'll admit, I fell asleep a few times.  But when we're not in orientation, we've been having a blast just getting to know each other, hanging out, and going to the city.

Melbourne is a beautiful city.  We've taken the train and a bus into the downtown area a couple of times for dinner.  The public transit is easy and good as long as you're just going into the city.  It gets pretty expensive to take a bus anywhere else.

I learned to play Aussie Rules Football today, as well as Cricket.  Cricket's definitely a little more boring.  I have to laugh at Cricket.  I wondered what was up when I saw the same teams playing three days in a row on the telly.  Come to find out, the game lasts all day for five days straight, and the teams break for lunch and tea (dinner) together every day.  I can't imagine either standing in the field waiting for the ball for that long or running back and forth between the two wickets all day like that.

Soccer is more my type of sport.  We have a soft court right by the dorms that's used for basketball and soccer, so after playing a little footie and "wielding the willow" (batting at cricket), I joined a team with one other American, two brits, and one of our mentors from Dubai, and we played some 5 v 5.  There's a huge group here from Loyola University, and a few of the guys stepped up to play.  We won the first game by a good margin, but got beat when they put a fresh team on the field against us.  Looks like we've got some good matches coming up in the next few weeks.

Everybody's great here, really friendly and outgoing.  I've made a lot of friends from all over the world, and we make fun of each other for our different accents and stuff.  It's pretty funny to hear Aussies or my British friends make fun the Americans by trying to talk like us.

I think international orientation is pretty much done.  The Aussie first-years should show up this weekend and we'll have some more fun getting to know a bunch of new people during regular o-week.  I've got my classes set up and my preferences for my tutorial times put in.  It looks like I'm probably going to have classes all day Tuesday and Thursday, and then possibly a four-day weekend, Friday through Monday.  If all goes according to plan.  I'm excited about the classes I'm taking too.  They should all be really interesting, and probably challenging as well.

I've met some surfers and we're all ready to car pool down to either the surf coast, Mornington, or Phillip Island whenever the next swell comes.  Just so you guys know, it's kind of the summer doldrums down here right now, but we're looking at a 10-foot swell at 17 seconds for the middle of next week.  I don't know if I'll be able to slip out of orientation for a day, but I guess there'll be more.  Especially once the summer flatness is over.

So not many adventures yet in Vic.  I've just been making friends and kickin' back for a while before school starts.  But I'm starting to plan for a weekend down in the Otways once school starts up, so that's definitely something to look forward to besides my classes.