All in Good Company

I took a Geography class in Winter term last year.  I had been waiting to take that class since I had arrived at OIT and read the class description.  It said “blah, blah, blah, Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific”.  Sold. 

It took  over 2 years for me to be able to fit it in to my schedule, however, and I was afraid it wouldn’t happen at all.  However, in the end, I was able to sign off on both it, and my final requirement on my International Business degree at the same time – I was thrilled.

My teacher was an interesting woman, from Slovakia, and I just liked hearing her talk about all the places we covered – she seemed to have traveled everywhere before, like there was no where she hadn’t seen. I fell off in daydreams quite a bit, imagining that someday I would be the same way.  It wasn’t till the very last 2 weeks of the term that we started talking about the South Pacific, though, and then I started talking to her about Australia when I found out she was heading to Perth for spring break!

To cut to the chase, she put me in touch with a friend of hers that lives in Adelaide.  Over her Spring Break trip, she had had dinner with him and he offered himself and his wife’s “city knowledge” to Chad and I when we arrived, and said we must go to dinner once we arrived. Chad and I really we in no position to turn down a dinner invitation, and we were excited to meet some locals.

 Lo and behold, Barry is a New Yorker, and his wife is from Tasmania! They were incredibly generous to treat us to a most delicious Italian dinner with wine and desert!  I enjoyed some of my beloved iced coffee, and Chad was in heaven with his new-found love: carmel bananna crème pie; Deliciouso!

To kick start us on our new Wine Adventure (Now, living in the heart of wine country, I am determined to try lots of wine and become a ‘wine-o’!) they even bestowed us with a bottle of “the best white wine ever” and a red wine that, according to Barry’s circle, is referred to as “Heaven” – Oh boy, that one is waiting for a special occasion!!  I feel spoiled already!

Adelaide At Last

It was comforting from the plane to see a remarkable difference as we descended into Adelaide. There were plenty of green hills and houses all had yards.  It wasn’t blatantly busy – you couldn’t see the crowds competing for sidewalk space.  It was a good sign.

I had never been met at the airport by someone holding a sign bearing my name, so I felt a bit important to walk up the ramp and see “Chad & Melissa: Radiology” on an 8 x 11 card.   It was nice to finally meet someone from the hospital we would be working at for the next year. Up to this point, it has only been emails with the Head of Medical Imaging. He had been so kind as to arrange for Liza, the Chief of Radiology, to pick us up and haul us back to the city, and to our hostel.

She gave us a few points about the city, mainly that it was not nearly as big as Melbourne, was more spread out over a wider area, and was actually considered as the “hillbilly” city of Australia.  Music to our ears!!  The “city” center, was in fact, only 1 square mile wide and surrounded entirely by parks on the outskirts. The rest of “Adelaide” was spread out over the hills and along the coast.

Then Liza quizzed us about our program, and what we had done in hospitals so far.  OIT’s program is so unique, that most hospitals that are unfamiliar with the University don’t quite understand that coming into this, we have absolutely no real clinical experience.  Trying to explain this to our future supervisor made us feel incredibly dumb.

Most Univerisites have their students rotating through the hospital in synch with their classroom coursework over a 4 year period, whereas with OIT, we do all of our classroom coursework first, then spend our final year just concentrating on clinical work (hence, our purpose for being here in Adelaide at all!)  But, explaining this to a supervisor who has never dealt with American students, let alone ones from a program like ours, is one of the most humiliating things I’ve experienced here so far. “Well, we haven’t actually done any exams on actual patients” “Well, we haven’t worked in any other modalities, only rotated through” “Well, we haven’t done any of that before” “No, we’ve never performed that, either”.  I felt like we were broken down to basically sounding like we knew nothing.

We were let off at 109 Carrington, in front of our hostel – our new temporary home for god knows how long – and thankfully it was superbly impressive compared to our Melbourne dwelling.  We had an enormous bed to spread out of, and as Chad gleefully cried out as we opened the door “we have TV!”, with even our own little fridge.  I was able to connect with my sister and both of my Mums via Skype for a few quick words, too, which was nice – all of them a bit giddy that they were talking to someone “on the other side of the world”.  But then our focus quickly turned to that little voice of panic in our heads whispering “How much money do you have?  What are you going to do about accommodation?  WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO LIVE!?”

Melbourne: The Departed

This morning we woke up to a cold dreary morning with dark clouds hanging above. I stepped out of our room into the open-air hallway and watched my breath appear in front of me. It was 6:30 in the morning local time and the city was already awake and bustling.

The men’s bathroom in our hostel consists of two rooms; one very large room with about 8 side by side shower units made of plastic, and another smaller room with two toilets and a large metal trough that worked as a urinal. Windows lined the wall above the toilet, some of the panes missing glass.  Melissa came back from her showers each morning complaining of the same less-than-desirable surroundings, and ever suspicious of the holes drilled in each shower around pelvic level. And that there was never any soap to use after going to the restroom (yet she seemed to be the only one who noticed!).

Walking around Melbourne was an absolute culture shock. Traveling from Klamath Falls to Utah to Los Angeles to Melbourne was a whirlwind of change and nothing really prepared me for Melbourne. People are everywhere and the Asian influence is massive here. Most of the men, local or other wise, walk around in suites and are primped as much as possible. The skinny jeans trend has not skipped Australia by any means either.  I don’t think I am ever going to understand that trend.

One of the most shocking things has been the prices! Everything is expensive and I mean everything; water bottles to jeans to food. It seems that everything is about double the price as the states.

Ok, so far it seems like Melissa and I might be bashing Melbourne but in reality the city is an amazing collection of cultures meshed together; old buildings nestled in between massive modern sky scrappers. An example could be seen on the RMIT campus. What’s left of the original colonial prison (or gaol as they call it here) sits right on the university campus. In fact, Melissa and I watched a group of students kicking a soccer ball around inside the historical structure’s courtyard. Seeing the kids kicking the ball against a historical buildings wall seemed almost insulting. Melbourne is a massive combination of unique sites, amazing buildings, interesting people and fantastic food. 

Melbourne: Our Arrival

As we arrived at the Sydney airport, the aussie next to us remained optimistic that we could make our connecting flight to Melbourne, but I remained doubtful. And I was right. After spending an eternity shuffling through customs, and a bout of panic that Chad’s luggage had gone missing, we maneuvered our 200 lbs of clothing through crowds of every nationality on our way to the “transfer” department.

Hours later we were told the obvious – that we weren’t going to make our connection flight –  and we were herded on board a bus to drive us 5 miles or so to an entirely “different airport” to catch our new flight.

When we finally touched down in Melbourne, it was… to put it lightly… an experience. It was quite different than I had expected, than I had envisioned.  My ideas of lush leafy-ness, and green grasses along street-lined shops was replaced with towering skyscrapers, busy streets and grimy gutters.  Graffiti was rampant along crumbling buildings.  Thousands of people were roaming the sidewalks, bundled up as if it were almost Christmas back in the states. Children of all ages in uniforms littered every corner, as though school was taught curbside.

Exhausted and sore from dragging our luggage through airports for – technically – 2 days, we wearily slogged in to our hostel, and to an incredibly rude awakening.

I had looked through many hostel websites, trying to find both value and comfort for our 4 days in the city.  I had stumbled upon “Hotel Discovery’s” website by happenstance, and was surprised at the pictures of the rooms and the amenities.  It had looked surprisingly decent. However, after a horrific elevator ride up to the 4^th floor - in which I was sure we would plunge to our death after the jolting and grinding of the mechanics – and a walk down a freezing open-air hallway (It is WINTER here, mind you) I opened our door to find what I can only describe as a spare closet of sorts.  Some metal frame, with some sort of square springy thing (could be described as a “mattress” if you squinted, I suppose) sat in the middle of the room, about the size of my ‘double’ bed from childhood.  A small wooden chair, a garbage can, a mirror, and a wrinkled sheet of paper with some paint on it bolted to the wall added to the ambiance.  It was absolutely dreadful.

Loathe to drag our luggage another foot, however, we dropped it on the floor, and fled as fast as we could to find food.

Wandering the streets of Melbourne is reminiscent of New York, or what I imagine New York would be like (although we see how that worked out with my notions of Melbourne!). Towering buildings surround you, the streets are littered with cafes and their chairs and tables. You get shoulder-checked every couple of steps, and you have to weave through the little groups of people who seem to be oblivious to the rush of crowds around them. We somehow found ourselves inside the mall, which we learned to be “Melbourne Central”.  We gawked at the outrageous price tags on everything and panic quickly set in on how we were possibly going to afford our new life.   A bottle of water costs $4, a Big Mac $7, a muffin $5, and chicken at Nando’s: $15.  Make it a combo and add another $6.50.  Want a new pair of US$100 Nikes? Be ready to cough up $165.  Need a new Quiksilver tee?  $59.99.  A cup of coffee to satisfy your caffeine fix? $5. Any regrets I had about packing so much that I had to cough up an additional $130 in “heavy luggage” fees vanished, and I found myself wishing I had brought more.

It was neat to see Borders – going out of business, of course – and I reminisced about my old job. We even found a GNC for Chad to reminisce over, too!

Aimlessly we wandered the streets, taking alleyways and backroads, not really having any concept of direction, until we stumbled upon the strangest thing of all; we turned onto a street only to be confronted with a line about a mile long winding back and forth into the street in front of some strange store.  Security guards and men in suits with earpieces in were pacing along the outskirts of the crowds.  Chad tried to stop and ponder about what they were waiting for, and I tried to scurry past them as quickly as possible. It took us a few hours, after the sun went down, to find ourselves back on the same street, with the same long line of people.  By this time, I couldn’t help but stop in front of one of the suited, earpieced men, and ask “What is this line for?”  “They’re waiting to get in to ZARA’s” he answered.  I looked at the store’s sign, ZARA’s- “What for?” I asked incredulously “just to shop?”  “Yea” he answered “It’s a new store”.  Absolutely dumfounded.

We ended our night by tucking in to a little coffee shop on our way back to misery (or what you can call “Hotel Discovery”)  It was the highlight of my recent life, with the most delicious iced coffee (sorry Dutch Brothers!) that has ever graced my tastebuds, and the best newspaper posting I have ever seen in my life – Clown Phobia Courses.

Homeless

So here we sit, in airports.  Waiting for flights, watching throngs of people coming and going, and guarding our luggage with our life. And then it sinks in – we are homeless.  All of our worldly possessions are sitting on a cart somewhere, in overstuffed suitcases.  Over 100 lbs of clothes each, and little else. We have no car keys, no address, no phones – utterly homeless.  It is a terrifying and exhilarating experience all at once.  We are embarking on the most amazing experience – the most amazing adventure – of lifetime.  Breaking new ground for our college, and accomplishing something that few get to.

“A year abroad” sounds no nonchalant.  It sounds neat, but really doesn’t resonate with a lot of people.  It doesn’t express the enormous undertaking underlying those words, it doesn’t express the gravity of what “a year abroad” means. But as Chad and I sit here reflecting on how we got here – how we came to be sitting in the crowded hub of the LAX international terminal – it really takes my breath away.  It really is an accomplishment!  It really is something to marvel at! 3 years in the making: we were told “no” numerous times, and resigned to spend our final year unhappily working in the west US.  But somehow, what started as a tiny little spark of an idea, a simple query about working in Australia, became a possibility, a reality, that fell into place piece by piece at the very last minute.

And so, as things went, our walls became bare.  Boxes became full. Our garage became stacked, and our mattress became one filled with air.  We said our goodbyes, and shared some final days with family and old friends. Hugs were given, and tears were shed.  It may only be “a year”, but to say it means nothing. We really don’t know when we will be back, or be able to see all of our loved ones again! We don’t know for sure what our year in Adelaide has in store for us.  Hell – we aren’t even sure where we will be sleeping tomorrow night! But I guess that’s what they mean by “Adventure” – never knowing precisely what lies around the corner.  And you know what?  I really wouldn’t have it any other way…