G’Day from Sydney! I am traveling with Sam, Mandy and Nick and we are all staying together here. We arrived after a very long 22 hour flight on Monday to a rainy and chilly Sydney, but we bounced off the plane ready to explore. Since we can’t move into our housing for the term until next Monday, we are staying in Glebe at a hostel. It is a very nice place with everything incoming travelers could need and a lot of different people from all over the world! The area is great! There are palm trees all over and rainbow lorikeets, but its only a high of around 60 everyday.
Glebe is a great part of Sydney. Everything in this part of town is very accessible and it’s only a 20 minute walk to campus. We already hit a few great restaurants, like a traditional Polish restaurant (Mandy is Polish so she really enjoyed it!). The Broadway Shopping center is only 15 minutes away and has food, clothing, home goods, and chemist (pharmacies). We stopped by here to pick up some things that we couldn’t bring in our luggage from home. The stores here are all a lot smaller than back home. Target is about 25% smaller with a much less of a selection.
On our second day here, we went to explore campus. We have been waking off super early because we aren’t quite adjusted to the time zone. Campus is absolutely beautiful with all the green spaces, old architecture and study areas. The Quad is the first part of campus we saw and it a great way to be introduced to campus. We all explored and tried to find where all our classes will be held in two weeks. The university is much bigger than Drexel, or at least seems that way since the campus is not on city blocks, but instead has its own area of west Sydney.
Today is our third day here in Sydney and we decided to go see one of the most iconic sites in Sydney, the Sydney Opera House. We walked along the Harbor to the CBD (central business district) and stopped at the Queen Victoria Building, which is a beautiful old building that is a mall. We also walked through the Royal Botanical Gardens on our way there and saw a lot of unique birds! Then we came to the Opera House and got a ton of pictures of the area including the Sydney Harbor Bridge and of the bay around which has pufferfish. Up until this point, we didn’t see many people that looked like tourists, but now we sure did. Then we hit a pub that was recommended and we had an amazing meal. Ordering was odd. It had all typical pub food, but way better than we expected. We decided to end the day at the Australia Museum, which was very similar to the Academy of Natural Sciences. This was very exciting for Nick, Mandy and myself since we all just finished our Co-ops at the Academy. It had a fantastic array of biodiversity of Australia, which we took plenty of photos of to send to the Academy!
This was taken in front of the Quad on campus!
While the first few days here have been exhausting and we have been very touristy, we’re hoping over the next few days and into weeks to become more integrated to the culture and this beautiful country. Next week we will be moving into our permanent housing and begin classes the following week! So far, an amazing experience!
