Getting Here and Settling In

After three flights and a total of 34 hours traveling I arrived in Sydney on Saturday at 6:30 in the morning.  My last flight was 14 hours long and filled with screaming children whose families were headed back to Oz (this is the shortened version of Australia, not Aus) after spending the winter holiday in the states. My original plan was to sleep through the entire flight so that when I woke up I would be well rested and ready to go.  Instead I watched 3 movies, 2 TV shows and only slept for 3 hours.

After getting through customs (which I thought would take a lot longer than the 15 minutes it actually took) I got a shuttle to my new apartment building.  The shuttle ride was about an hour long and I learned that people drive like crazy on the streets of Sydney.  In fact on my first day out in Sydney I saw a motorcyclist get hit by a bus (he was okay thankfully).  My hope is that everywhere I need to go I can walk to, catch a bus, or ride the train because I really don't want to try driving here.

My new apartment building is called Urbanest and is a block away from most of UTS.  I'm living on the second floor with a view of the courtyard from my window.  I  have five flatmates, but I've only met one so far.  They're either extremely busy or really antisocial.

My Apartment Building

Artwork in the Courtyard

I spent my first two days here shopping for things I needed and exploring the city by foot. The closes grocery store to me is in a mall, which won't be good for my bank account.  The other problem is there are a lot of high end stores here. I walked by Coach, Longchamp, Michael Kors, Hermes, two Louis Vuitton stores, and Prada all within 15 minutes of my building. On the bright side KMart and Target are just as cheap here as they are in the states.  My first grocery store trip was a mess because I've never had to cook for myself before and had no idea what to get.  And it took me forever to find peanut butter. Food won't be too much of a problem for the first couple of weeks because orientation includes lots of free food and my jet lag keeps causing me to sleep through dinner time.

On my second day here I decided to go to the Royal Botanic Gardens.  On my way there I got extremely lost and ended up at the Opera House.  I got some great pictures and when I finally made it to the Gardens I got even more pictures like the one below.

The Gardens are beautiful and they are also the perfect place to go running.  There are paved trails weaving though out and stunning views of the harbour.  In hopes of running more I've already started looking at some races to run.  One run is across the bridge shown above and another one is the famous City to Surf where you run from Sydney to Bondi beach with 85,000 other people.  Both are above 5k and I haven't run more than that in a while so it should be interesting.

I think thats all for now.  Orientation started yesterday but more on that in my next post. So far the school is incredible. I can't wait to see what the rest of orientation has to offer and I'm even kind of excited for classes to start next week! Also, I signed up for Surf Camp!