After landing and getting off the plane we walked all the way to the other end of the airport where they checked our passports. Natasha got through just fine. Me on the other hand I thought things were going good but then the guy hit some button another guy came over took my passport so I followed him. He had me wait at a counter for a while then all of a sudden came back with my passport. Now this wasn’t a big deal at all but it was just very strange because between this whole process besides him telling me to wait at the counter and saying ‘ok’ at the end when he handed me my passport they never spoke a word to me, told me what was going on, why they took my passport somewhere, nothing nothing at all. I found this to be very strange but didn’t want to think anything of it so we moved on to the baggage claim to collect our luggage. Not long after the carousel turned on tash and I both got our luggage and we got through customs very quickly. We thought customs would take a long time to get through but nope instead waiting for our ride took forever.
We waited an hour before a little old man who we could barely understand finally greeted us. He had a thick accent that was a mix of Australian and something else. We had to wait for another student before we could leave so we had to wait a half hour. Finally the other student came and we were off in the jam-packed van heading to our apartment.
The ride to the apartment was very interesting. First off it was very humid and raining off and on (it reminded me of Hawaii) The ride was very scenic and beautiful which was a nice distraction from the insane amount of traffic and the feeling of almost being killed. 5 minutes into the car ride I was just hoping to make it alive to our apartment.. The driver seemed like he wasn’t really paying attention and at one point almost rear-ended another car (that was a little scary). It almost seemed like people driving on the other side of the road and car was more foreign to him then it was to me every time I looked over and thought no one was driving that moving truck or car.
After about an hour car ride we finally arrived at our apartments. We went to tash’s apartment first where we met her just awoken roommate Tyler who is from New Jersey and studying engineering. We dropped her stuff in her room and then headed to my apartment building. We have two apartment buildings between the two of us so its just a quick walk over to each others rooms. We both are in the 3rd floor of our buildings so getting the luggage up the stairs was a bit challenging but we managed. In my apartment I was greeted by Suzy from France who also had just woken up. There was another roommate but she was out on a run. I quickly came to find out that Suzy did smoke so the first order of business was to go see if I could get switch into a different apartment. This lead us on a journey over to the university. It was just a quick walk to the center of campus that took us about 10 minutes. Unfortunately Macquarie Parklands is completely booked so I am currently on a waitlist (Macquarie Parklands is the apartments Natasha and I live in so we will see what happens with that) Anyways this was a nice excuse to get over to campus and get a feel for it. We headed back and went to go to Natasha’s room where we quickly found out that the RA who gave tash her key gave her the wrong one so it was back to the same spot on campus. This was really funny but not at the same time due to the fact that we just came from the place where we could have gotten the right key. (at first tash thought there might have been some ‘special’ way these keys worked) We were not to happy about this second trip back but we saw it as getting good exercise. We got the key and headed back. What should have been only a 10 min walk back turned into a 40 min walk because we got lost and ended up walking in circles. We finally found our way back home. At this point we were starving and thirsty so we changed out of our ‘winter’ clothes into shorts shirts and sandals, grabbed our wallets and headed to the Macquarie Shopping Centre. After walking through the first level of the center not really feeling like any asian cuisine we went with the very Australian lunch of Subway.
Now that we got some food we ran some errands getting some necessities like body soap looked into buying phones grabbed some snacks for breakfast the next day and got pillows. The lady who sold us our pillows was very nice and gave us about a 30% discount. She loved our accents and America because everything was so cheap there. She felt bad for us so she gave us a discount to help us out, it pretty much made our day. We went back to Tash’s place where she unpacked everything then we went to my place and I unpacked everything. I took a quick shower then we watch maybe all of 30 minutes of finding nemo before we got tired so I headed back to my place. I ended up talking to my two roommates Suzy and Minna whos from Finland and is studying politics. We had a nice chat they are very friendly and nice I figured out how to fix the tv cuz it was all fuzy and then I went to bed.
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