It has already been a month since we arrived in Australia! It is crazy how fast this time has gone. Well, our schedule has been quite filled with some adventures, work and a wide array of tasks to get us settled.
The first week was mainly transitioning from the US to Australia and getting settled in our new life. We were hosted by our amazing friends Marion and Josh that we have known for over 6 years now! Marion is French from Lyon and Josh is Australian from Kalgoorlie, a mining town in Western Australia! We all met at the University of Missouri (Mizzou for those who know!) where we were all studying abroad (apart from Anthony of course as he was a local^^). Actually, Marion & Josh have basically the same love story as us (with the same timing) as we all met on campus in the US and the boys then went to Lyon to learn French (successfully! big round of applause) for a year where we all lived together. They moved to Australia when we moved to the US and then back to Europe. All in all, they are amazing friends with whom we have shared so much.
Back to our time here in Australia. We were hosted by Josh and Marion for a week in St. Kilda which is a pretty cool neighborhood of Melbourne. It actually reminded me of Berlin in some instances. Not sure how to best describe it, but it is basically quite hipster, with sometimes some borderline weirdos (Anthony you are going to hate that comment). St.Kilda is also super enjoyable as it is next to the beach, not pretentious, with some cool bars and cafes.
Oh! I forgot to mention: Melbourne was way colder than we expected! Yes, we had indeed been bragging to everyone back in the US that we were going from one summer to the next (when “Oh you poor people in the northern hemisphere are just going to boring winter ha ha”) Well too bad, because we showed up in Melbourne in our summer gears… and it was 8 Celsius degrees. Who’s laughing now!? We both went to buy a coat and some long sleeves (and posted some sunny pictures of the beach lol).
Actually, it was quite a disorienting feeling, having been on the verge of fall and arriving to a new place overnight to see cherry trees blossoming and waking up to very cold mornings.
At 17, when I first went to Australia to a host family, I had had the chance to change seasons and go from snowy winter straight to sunny summer. It is obviously a choking feeling but in a very positive way. Here I guess we were not expecting the opposite experience which one may say is, less pleasant!
Back to our sheep,(french expression – I always LOVE translating expressions straight from French to English as it never works! Anthony loves that too!), we found a shared house for us to spend the next months in Melbourne.
Looking for a place was not really hard, we used marketplace on facebook (that for some reason Anthony can’t access) and Gumtree (the equivalent of craigslist or leboncoin). We only had two visits, the first one being disastrous, the second one being where we chose to live. Let me go back to that awful apartment we went to. It was just across the street from where Marion & Josh live so we were like: “Great we are gonna be neighbors!!!”. Well, the place turned out to be a landfill of about 15 square meters for 350 AUD a week. We stayed, literally, 5 seconds in it, just the time to have a peek and say “thank you but it is not gonna work out for us” and turn away to leave. I remember Anthony catching up to me, (yes, I had gone down those stairs and out of the building quite rapidly) and jokingly screaming” Ruuuuunnn”.
Visiting apartments!
