The next few days (including Laura's first day of school)

Throughout this whole process, the 'moving to Australia' part really pulled focus from the 'doing a PhD' part. It was only in the last few days in Canada that I really realized I am about to take on a very large amount of work. My first meeting with my supervisor, Alex, was scheduled for Thursday (Feb 23rd). Not going to lie - I was very nervous.

I suspect I will do a whole post at a later time about the process and steps involved in a PhD in Australia. For now, I will try to keep it brief. When you do a PhD, you enter this sort of strange hybrid world where you are both a student, but also kind of doing a job. Your supervisor is like your teacher-boss. They help guide you through your program and research. Its generally agreed upon that your relationship with your supervisor really makes or breaks the grad school experience. Throughout the application process, I did as much vetting of my supervisor, the program, and the university as I could from half a world away. I have been in contact with Alex for over a year now. Still, its nerve-wracking to meet the person you are about to work very closely with for the next 3 years.

Monash is a large school (~55k undergrads), with multiple campuses. The campus I'm on (Notting hill) is about a km from their main campus (Clayton). The school year in Australia runs with the calendar year, so the undergrad school year is just starting. Of course, that means it was orientation week on the main campus, complete with free barbeques, and live music. Justin came along on the trip to campus to offer moral support and generally check things out. We walked through the Clayton campus, which was beautiful. Lots of foliage and funky looking buildings. Notting hill is a bit more industrial park-ish, but overall its not bad.

Despite my nervousness, my first meeting with Alex went really well! We talked for about an hour about basic logistics and he showed me around the building. Then we went to lunch with his 2 other PhD students. They are all Australian, so I thrilled them with my stories of what freezing rain is and how pipes can freeze if it gets cold enough. After lunch we made a plan for next week. Then he gave me a welcome present! It included a bunch of different traditional Australian snacks: Timtams, wagon wheels (which are different from North American wagon wheels), Shapes, Cadbury Freddo, and of course, vegemite. Plus some Canadian maple syrup (for a taste of home). I was genuinely touched, it was very sweet.

I met back up with Justin on the main campus. He was enjoying all the Orientation week festivities, including free food and entertainment. We were both still feeling a bit Jet lagged, so after scoping out the campus bookstore we called it a day.

On Friday (Feb 24th) our one thing to do was buy me a purse. Normally, when I go on a trip, my purse would obviously come with me on the plane as a personal item. For this trip, we were packed so strategically my purse didn't make the cut. Luckily I did have the presence of mind to pack cotton totes. I remembered from our backpacking trip how helpful they are for things like day trips & groceries. But I really wanted a purse. It was supposed to be a 33 degree day, and we were finding the heat to be pretty challenging to deal with, so we decided to check out the Chadstone shopping centre, apparently the largest mall in the southern hemisphere. It was pretty wild to see all the different stores. The top most level was all luxury brands: Cartier, Chanel, Gucci, Louboutin, Fendi - stores so fancy they have velvet ropes, line ups and people working the door. The further down you go the more, shall we say, approachable the stores get. There were lots of Australian brands, which was fun to see. I successfully found a purse. And somehow during this trip we managed to get on the right bus, going the wrong way. Twice.

Saturday (Feb 25th) was our first day of apartment inspections. How renting works in Australia deserves its own post, so I'm sure you will all hear more about that later. That was our one thing for the day, so after some morning inspections we jumped on the tram (aka streetcar) to St. Kilda's beach for BeerFest. Thankfully, it wasn't as oppressively sunny (we have both been finding the sun + heat to be really exhausting when we are outside for too long. But don't worry, we still sunscreened up & reapplied.). We checked out a bunch of craft beers and lawn games, ate some food truck food, and somehow managed to work in our nationality to every conversation we had. Justin won a hat playing a frisbee game, so that was exciting. Obviously putting all those disc golf hours to good use. Afterword we stuck our toes in the pacific ocean and walked along the beach for a bit. Its the first time that either of us has touched the pacific. Kind of ridiculous that we had to come all the way to the other side of it to touch it. It was colder than expected, but still not as cold as the Atlantic.

Here are some random thoughts about our experiences in Australia so far:

- The tones that phones make while they are ringing kinda sounds like our busy signal. This inevitably makes me think there is something wrong with the call

- When renting an apartment, fridges aren't generally included. You have to get one separately. Its so strange. - Again, there will surely be a whole post dedicated to renting in Australia, so stay tuned for more weirdness there

- As of today, we are still not sunburnt. We have, however, used more sunscreen in the past week then I think we did in all of last summer in NS

-Air Canada found my headphones! I've already bought new ones, but I'm still working to get my old ones back

- The people watching in Melbourne is fantastic. Doesn't matter where we are: Campus, the mall, the beach, transit. There are always interesting people around

- Australians love bean bag chairs. They seem to be completely acceptable as a type of adult furniture here. So strange

- We did try the vegemite. We looked up how you are supposed to eat it - just a little bit of vegemite spread on heavily buttered toast. We both didn't mind it, but I think we were too light on the vegemite and we actually just like buttered toast