I made it through the first week! I already feel so comfortable with Sydney but I know there is SO much more to explore. Here are some of the highlights of my first week in Australia:
1) Monday: Night out at Side Bar on George Street. For some Australians, every night is a time to enjoy each others company and many take advantage of the opportunity to go out dancing, even on a Monday night. While I doubt I’m going to be a frequent Monday night partier, it was a great experience to get out of the house and explore the downtown nightlife in a new city. With almost 5 million people in the city, Sydney is by far the biggest city I’ve spent any real time in. So wandering around a city that never sleeps with new friends and “heaps” of new Aussies was a fun way to spend one of my first nights in town.
2) Tuesday: Dinner in Chinatown. Like any major city, Sydney has quite an impressive Chinatown. On Tuesday night, I ventured back into the city to explore the famed cuisine off Hay Street. After a violinist serenaded my group with Jingle Bells (yes, in the middle of July), we stumbled upon an underground Chinese food court. We each ordered from a different one of the 15 greasy Chinese restaurants and came together to enjoy our feast.
3) Wednesday: Salsa dancing at Coogee Beach. After class on Wednesday I jumped on the 370 bus that took me from my doorstep to Coogee beach. At the beach, I met up with my friends Charlie and Jimmy from Duke and had $5 steaks (bargain!) at a restaurant on the beach. After enjoying our juicy steaks (meat here is infinitely better than in Kenya, even if the cheapest option is still 5 times as expensive), we went upstairs for Wednesday night salsa dancing. Because we came late and had no idea what we were doing, one of the two salsa instructors left the main group to teach the silly Americans how to dance (we needed it). By the end of the night we were all pros (sort of…) and had a lot of fun making fools of ourselves.
4) Thursday: Experimental and Behavioral Economics. I’m an Economics and Psychology double major so when I found a class called Experimental and Behavioral Economics in the University of Sydney’s course catalogue, I jumped right on it. My first lecture did not disappoint. Similar to my first lecture with Dan Ariely (a behavioral economist at Duke), money was involved. The difference was that Dan took student’s money, while my professor in Sydney paid me money (one whole Australian dollar, it bought me a tenth of my lunch!). We played economic games, some of which supported standard economic theory while others refuted it. 
5) Friday: Shopping at Paddy’s Market. At the end of the day on Friday, I took a stroll past Broadway, down George Street, and past Central Station to Paddy’s market. Imagine a collection of all of the street vendors and fresh produce sellers that you would expect to be selling their goods on sidewalks, and put them all together in one humongous market. That’s Paddy’s market. Not only is it an awesome sight to see, but it also has food for a somewhat reasonable price. I bought everything from eggs to socks to an unidentified Australian vegetable and called the trip a success.
6) Saturday: Hiking through the Blue Mountains. I woke up early on Saturday morning to catch a bus and a train out to the Blue Mountains, a set of magnificent mountains about 100km west of downtown Sydney. Traveling with UNSW students, I hiked for the better part of the day past the famous Three Sisters rock formation and a lot of fun bouldering rocks. It was refreshing to get outside the city and appreciate some of Australia’s nature, especially as I think of all of my friends at Duke starting PWILD staff training. The Blue Mountains are not quite Pisgah, but they made for an awesome day trip.
7) Sunday: Rest. Today I did absolutely nothing. I went to a free barbeque, did my laundry, and relaxed. School hasn’t picked up too much so I am just enjoying being able to sit in my Eno hammock, read my book, and settle in to this new place called Sydney.
No comments:
Post a Comment