Greetings from Melbourne

I’ve been here in Melbourne for 2 and a half weeks now, and I apologize for my lack of blog updates. With the length of those New Zealand entries, I wrote about a ten page paper, so I needed a little bit of a break. I’m back in action though.

So I arrived in Melbourne on April 29 and moved into my home for about 7 weeks. Our rooms are located in a hotel which has single rooms for students. Here is my bed (above), my desk (above), the view out my window (above), and my “bathroom” (above). Note how my toilet is IN my shower. That took some getting used to. This living situation isn’t exactly ideal for two reasons. First, I’m about a 40 minute train ride from the city of Melbourne. It’s kind of like going to study abroad in Philadelphia and living in Lansdale. Second, our room key only gives us access to our floor, so if I want to visit my friends on the other floors, I have to call them and they have to come let me in. Yuck.

I’ve only been into the city a handful of times since it is a pain to get there. I’ll post some general overview pictures of Melbourne in this entry and tell you more specifically about my exploits in the next ones. (sorry for the picture formatting, I'm not sure what's going on).

So here are some pictures of the downtown. The Yarra River runs through the city (above), so there are skyscrapers on both sides of the river. When the sun sets, there is a nice glowy effect on the buildings (above). There’s some pretty cool old architecture, like this cathedral (above), the Flinders Street train station (above), and the Royal Exhibition Hall (above), where the World’s Fair was held several times. Unfortunately, there is an extensive tram network whose power lines give everything downtown a rather ugly appearance (above).

In the downtown there’s an area called “Federation Square” which my guidebook called the “architectural eyesore of the city,” but I think is really cool. The buildings are made up of these reflective panels (above), and there’s one building that scrolls messages that people send in (above). My friends think that it looks like the agrocrag (Guts, anyone?), so they decided to do a re-enactment (above). Besides looking like a part of a Nickelodeon game show, Federation Square is home to several museums, restaurants, and shopping areas.

Last weekend we visited a suburb that gave us a great view of the whole city. Here’s a shot of Melbourne through the St. Kilda harbor (above), and here’s a panorama that I made in Photoshop (above).

So far, Melbourne is my least favorite place. To me it’s just like studying in any city, there’s nothing here that is really “Australian” like there was in Perth and Hobart. It’s kind of frustrating hearing about my friends being home when I’m not doing anything spectacular here at the moment. In a week I go to the Great Barrier Reef, so hopefully that will break the monotony.