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Villa, Australien

Having arrived in Melbourne last Thursday after a journey of 4 hours train, 22 hours flight plus about 15 hours waiting at the airport in Hong Kong we finally arrived here.

The first temporary accomodation was Victoria Hotel in the city centre, just a few minutes to walk to RMIT city campus. It's also very close to China Town were you can find good food for a lower price. However, we didn' t really like it too much in the hotel and we couldn't get a permanent accomodation so fast so we settled over to the Bak Pak Hotel in Franklin Street, just very close to RMIT. Nice people here, but it's absolutely a disadvantage if you cannot close the windows in winter. (Keyword winter: there is a cold wind here but a lot of Australians seem to ignore this. It's not uncommon to see someone riding a bike in short pants and a t-shirt while others are freezing wearing wooly hats. However, winter here is not comparable to temperatures we got in Europe.) We stayed at the Bak Pak for three days and enjoyed some beers in the Roo Bar in the cellar which had horrible beer prices, specially for back packers (5 Australian dollars for a pint). Doesn't matter, yesterday evening I had a run of luck as I won a crab race. The price is a trip to Sydney and a crab-race shirt you get blind of when you look at it. All of the time we were looking for permanent accomodations, but it's not so easy to find something as we thought. "Preferably female" is a usual sentence in shared accomodation offers. A phonecall usually ends with: "Sorry, we're full." There is a housing service at RMIT (but the database is not too up to date), a good billboard at Melbourne University and a shop window full of shared accomodation offers at the Readings book store (338 Lygon Street, Carlton). I think it's a bad time to look for accomodation now at the very beginning of the semester because so many people are looking for a room. Finally today I found a room in a 9 people shared accomodation in the Melbourne district Flemington, 59 Waltham Street. Some free rooms should fill soon. Somehow it reminds of good old [Villa unter'm Hund|extra/dornbirn]. It even has a Villa-style kitchen. Everyone who ever was there knows that this means there will be a lot of good evenings there. The 24 hour market is not far away. I don't have my camera here at RMIT now, but pictures will follow soon, I promise. Concerning studying: it's still quite chaotic here. For the first time we came to RMIT last Friday but we didn't manage to get a students card so far which gives us regular access to th computer rooms. The courses I chose (3 hours each): Monday: digital compositing (John Power) - this is mainly After Effects. Tuesday: free. Wednesday: animation and animation workshop (Felix Hude) - that's the only course I had so far. Each one will produce a 30 seconds to 1 minute animation. Tools are the brain and a pencil. Main thing here is: character first. Then the story. Character development is most important to Felix. It seems to be a very interesting course and I am glad to have a computer free course again where I can draw. It's not important how the result looks like, it can be stick-figures, the development is the point of interest. It's a very refreshing different kind of lessons we had here. Have you ever tried not to think? Just to walk around and think nothing? It's very hard. "You might look stupid, but that's OK." This was part of the first lesson. Thursday: time based production technology workshop (Aaron McLoughlin) - as an addition to animation and animation workshop. Friday: Concept development (Moira Corby, Marc Lycette, H. Dickson) - let's have a look, I just know Moira who was a guest lecturer in Austria. She's a real character. Marc is known to "Miss Partykeller (off duty)" Claudia who is now logging on girlscamp. Whatelse happened: we could start a best-spring-roll-in-town-contest soon - we're getting professional in this -, I got stuck in the lift today... but actually everything is just running fine. I hope Andrea and Peter in Sydney can say the same. Some short words about Melbourne. A very nice town with very, very much young people. Well, RMIT University itself got 67,000 students (that's 1 1/2 times the number of Dornbirns citizens) and it's just one of three big universities. It's very multicultural - specially there is a high number of Asian people living here. I went around a lot in Melbourne, but I didn't really have the time to have a closer look because it was just important to find some place to live first. So far. I hope I can show you some pictures as soon as I get my students card. Have a nice summer up in Europe!

Comments

daheimgebliebenheisstnicht-zurückgeblieben

Hallo Anatol.

Fein zum Hören, dass es dir gut geht. Der Zahni stellt hier fest, dass er genetisch ok ist (das Korrekturlesergen!) und der Bus hat bei ihm ein neues Daheim gefunden. Habt ihr schon das beste Rezept für Frühlingsrollen? Wenn ja, unbedingt posten. Genauso, wie viele Bilder von da wo du wohnen tust (Villahauswohnung) und da wo du schlafen tust (Uni) und von die geile Weibern, die wo da wohnen tun (nicht die, die in der Uni wohnen tun, das sind die Streber). Ach, wos uns grad einfällt: In Melbourne gibts ungefähr 80-90 verschiedene Arten von Giftspinnen, aber keine Sorge: zwi davon sind nicht tödlich und die meisten verstecken sich eh nur in der Uni, im Kühlschrank und immer da, wo man sie nicht erwartet (oft auch zwischen den Giftschlangen)... Hast du schon versucht, auf einem Känguruh zu reiten?

Grüße

Zahni & Thomas

Posted by referenzierte Objekt, 26/07/2002 3:46pm (22 years ago)