"Alex from Kentucky"

I'm coming up on two months in Melbourne, and Easter break is just around the corner.  Australia isn't that religious of a nation (especially compared to the US), but for some reason they still schedule their "non-teaching" period to coincide with Easter, an autumn event for Aussies.  As can be seen by my lack of posts, the work is picking up in classes and the reading is becoming fairly lengthy.  My fifth week of class has begun and I'm steeped in reading and papers.  Ah, the life of a humanities student: ideas, papers, tests, and grades.  This next week will be a doozy as all mid terms seem to be.  Not looking forward to the two papers and one test all happening on a Thursday a week and a half from now.

So in order to catch up on the month of March, I'll provide just one vignette for the sake of brevity:

During the second weekend of March, my host Rotary district had its annual conference where all the various club members within the district are invited to attend.  For three days the conference holds sessions that spread the word to all its members about what Rotary is doing locally, nationally, and internationally and bring them up to date with where Rotary is and where it's going.  All the ambassadorial scholars were invited to attend which included six others and me.  The event was well done and the speakers and entertainment they had lined up were excellent. However, the best part was... the venue was Tasmania.

Honestly (I must admit this because that's the first step to recovery), I had no clue before my trip to Melbourne that Tasmania was a state of Australia.  Had you asked me about Tasmania before, my mind would have immediately fixated upon Looney Tunes'  Tasmanian devil and the location of the island would have been a complete mystery.  To my ignorance's allay, this conference trip brought me up to snuff on the location and nature of Tasmania.  The plane ride there was a short hour just south of Melbourne to the town of Launceston in the northern part of the small island.  Tasmanian gets substantially more rainfall than the mainland and hence there's more greenery.  Launceston (pronounced lawn-ses-ton) is the third oldest city in Australia and is a quaint town with quiet streets and easy-going locals.  The trip provided a nice contrast to the bustling streets of Melbourne .

I won't go into the ends and outs of the conference, but one particular day bears mentioning.  The last day of sessions had quite a bit of entertainment scheduled, and as one of the final acts before the closing ceremonies took place on stage, Rotary invited a female improv duo to perform for the conference similar in style to "Who's Line is it Anyway".  These ladies romped down the aisles and assumed the stage, asking everyone in the audience to stand up.  One of them explained that she was going to ask us all a few questions and if our answer was yes, we had to sit down.  She began with easy questions that only singled out a few people, but then she asked a biggie, "Are you married?"  A sequence of scoffs and chuckles emitted from the audience as almost everyone in the entire theater sat down.... except for the Rotary Ambassadorial scholars.  The others and I were just about the only ones standing, and for some reason, I found it necessary to throw my arms up in the air and give a few little fist pumps to show my pride for staying in the race.  Suddenly the attention was on our little group and one of the ladies pointed at me and said, "Yes, the young gentleman there who expressed so much joy at not being married.  Come up on stage!"

A bit shocked but kind of excited, I shuffled past a few people in the adjacent seats and headed up on stage.  Now, the conference was fairly large, so around 500-600 people were staring back at me from on stage.  The woman proceeded to ask me my name and other questions about myself.  "Where are you from?" she asked.  I replied Kentucky which threw her for a loop.  Here we were in Launceston, Tasmania and some unmarried bloke she picks out of a room full of Melburnian Rotarians is from Kentucky?!  She asked me more questions like what and where I was studying, about what was in Kentucky (horses and Derby I gave for short answers), and she asked me what a pet-peeve of mine was (I grappled with this for a bit but answered when people say "ummm" too much).  She thanked me for my answers and then told me I could return to my seat.  With the information I'd just given her about myself, she produced an improv rap about, "Alex from Kentucky" and incorporated all the answers I'd given her from our short conversation on stage.  The rap was hilarious, but even funnier was that for the rest of the day, Rotarians I'd never met before would come up to me and say, "You're Alex from Kentucky!  Nice to meet you."

The final night of the conference, the district threw a big gala dinner party with around 800 guests all under a large outdoor tent, with a nice Tasmanian rain pouring down for most of the evening.  There were stage performances of operas singers and a live band, but the most hilarious part of the evening was at the end when people began to do a bit of dancing around the stage and suddenly the district governor (THE head honcho) gets on stage with the band and a slew of young women join him and dance all around him as he does his thing on stage.  At this point, I was confirmed in my belief that Australians are a laid back bunch that know how to have a good time.

As I flew back from Launceston, an unexpected feeling came over me.  I felt like I was coming home.  I hadn't felt this feeling in a long time, and I took comfort in it.  It told me that I'd finally reached a point where this foreign place had become less foreign to me.  I knew what I was doing when I came back here, and that's a good feeling.  Leaving a place you are familiar with, exploring an unfamiliar place, and then returning to the familiar seems to be the theme for the year.  And I like that.

University Starts

This past Thursday marked a month since I first arrived in Melbourne, and how the place has changed.  Well, not exactly.  The weather has lightened up a bit and now starts out quite chilly in the mornings (this morning it was 9 degrees Celsius), and rises to about 23 degrees in the afternoon, then falls back to a chill at night.  Autumn is creeping in I guess but Melbourne has a way of fluctuating quite quickly so it's still quite summery for the most part.  The change has more to do with me really than Melbourne.  Now, I know the area somewhat and when someone talks about Carlton, Fitzroy, Parkville, or Brunswick, I have a good idea what they mean (those are all suburbs surrounding the University of Melbourne).  The tasks I found daunting and confusing a month ago, like getting around by tram, understanding Australian slang, or looking right, left, then right again when crossing the road are now coming more easily, and words like bloke, mate, brekky, and footy have found their way into my vocabulary.  In short, I'm beginning to think I'll get used to this place.

Last week was my first week of classes, and it felt like the first day of college all over again.  I hadn't really anticipated the change of attending a small college for four years and then switching to an enormous one like Uni Melb.  The largest and most palpable difference I find is simply the numbers of people that are everywhere.  Waiting for my first lecture, I was in a sea of students, many of them first-years.  Some (mostly girls) were all collecting together and chatting away and others were stoically awaiting the doors to open for the lecture hall.  When the doors opened, we flooded into the theatre, resembling a levee breaking, and as I entered I felt more like I was attending some large production with a keynote speaker rather than a lecture.  Of course, this is really all quite normal for most people, and it's me who's finding this all a bit unusual.  The second challenge is navigating my way around campus.  It's like a big maze with some pathways leading to a dead end and others that look like they'll take you where you need to go, but then end up hanging left suddenly and you're not where you wanted to be at all.  So as I get used to Melbourne and navigating the city, a new challenge of familiarization rears it's head in the form of university.  Getting settled takes time.  All in all, the first week showed me I still have some adjusting to do for life at a big university, but I know I'll land on my feet.

International Conversations

What I love most about traveling abroad is the people you come across, and the stories they share with you.  Travel doesn't just bring you in contact with the locals, but also with the internationals that are visiting the country as well.  Tonight I spent the evening with a bunch of Germans, a woman from Poland, and an Iranian.  What a mix, huh?  I met my German friends at the graduate session on Australian culture, and one of them called me later to arrange a hang out at a place on Brunswick street called the "Comfortable Chair".  This was a perfect place for hanging out and talking without having to scream at each other in order to be heard like you sometimes have to do at a bar.  The group sat down in some cushy couches on either side of a big coffee table and just exchanged conversations the whole evening over a few drinks.  Of all the different conversations that night, the ones I had with the Polish woman and the Iranian man were the highlights.  We ended up discussing American politics and I commented that I was a bit surprised at how much they knew about the election.  She said to me, "Well, you all are the angel of the world, okay?"  She was insisting I stop acting so modest, but it did legitimately strike me as odd that they should know so much of my politics and I know so little of theirs.  Then I began to speak with the Iranian man who told me of his strong desire to go to Colombia University, and how he was accepted but his country wouldn't give him the simple papers he needed to get in.  So instead, he came to Australia and is doing his Ph.D. here.  He expressed frustration with his government and commented on how the people of a country get very badly represented by the governments in certain cases.  The whole time I kept thinking the same thing about my government is true.

I just find it refreshing to meet these people, discuss politics, life, anything, and come away thinking we aren't so different from one another.