My Home in Melbourne

So a little about my new home: The RMIT Village Old Melbourne is a renovated hotel that has been modified into student housing. They are still doing some modifications to the old ballrooms to turn them into study spaces. There is also a swimming pool in the courtyard, a café, a patio, a small computer lab, and a “glass house” that has a TV and a pool table. The rooms are mostly two person rooms with a sliding divider wall between the two halves. I have covered my wall with a bunch of maps of the city (I love maps!) and I also put up an Australian flag (sorry, not in this set of pictures). The rooms each have a bathroom and a very small kitchen with a two-burner stove, sink, fridge, and microwave. They also have a balcony at the end. Mine looks out into the courtyard:

My roommate is also a study abroad student. She is studying commerce in Boston and is taking a bunch of gen-ed courses while she is here.

I finally registered for classes after some confusion with the newly adopted online registration system. Here is my schedule for this semester:

Monday: 9:00-11:00 Historical Performance Practice

Tuesday: No Class

Wednesday: 11:00-1:00 Baroque Ensemble

3:15-5:15 The Ethnography of Music

Thursday: 3:30-4:30 Conducting

Friday: 2:15-4:15 Music and Health

Classes run July 26-Oct 29 with a Spring Break Sept 18-Oct 3. There is SWOT Vac (study without teaching vacation) Oct 30-Nov 7 and then Exams Nov 8-Nov 26. So hopefully I will have a decent amount of time to travel around and get all of my studying done :).

I was planning on taking some more pictures of the city and the market and the uni today but it was drizzling again and so I decided against it. It has drizzled a bit almost every day so far. It is nothing like the rain we get in Charleston that is made up of these huge, fat raindrops that pelt down from the sky for about 30 minutes and then stop. It is much more like the rain I have experienced in Oregon and the Netherlands that mists on and off all day and is not even enough to require an umbrella. Often you don’t even need a raincoat but it is still enough when it is cold to make it annoying to walk around.

I have done some pretty exciting things the last few days. Yesterday, Katy Motsinger and I met up and got some delicious brekky at the Queen Vic Market. We wandered around there for a while and looked at a bunch of the stalls and I finally found an Australian flag that I now have hanging on my wall. Next, we went to Tim Burton Exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. It was a very well designed exhibit and had a bunch of his sketches, paintings and sculptures alongside his cinema projects. It is amazing how much he has done! We also got a delicious lunch in Chinatown and got a bit lost in the Arts district. We also came across some pretty incredible street musicians outside of Flinders Street Station.

Today I went back to the market for some groceries and then took myself on an adventure to Brunswick to see a folk music concert put on by the Melbourne Folk Club. The performers this week were Tonchi McIntosh and Sooty Hawk. I also discovered a bunch of Jam sessions around the city. Now I just have to work out how to get to them. It also looks like there are dances every Wednesday and some Saturdays. I am hoping to discover some more through going to the ones that I have found. I also found a couple of music festivals in other places in Victoria over the next couple of months. Hopefully I can find a way out to one of them.

So for tomorrow, it is off to the Zoo! Hopefully I will get some good pictures over the next few days. I have mostly just been absorbing the sites and sounds of the city so far but I would like to get some documentation to share!