The beginning of the end...

Hey y’all. Currently it’s 4:00am and I am hanging out for a few last minutes in my teeny room waiting for my cab to take me and all of my stuff to the airport. Though I’m not coming back to the States yet, I am about to leave St. John’s College, a.k.a. my home for the past four and a half months. It’s raining outside, which I think is very fitting for the moment; it’s a soft, quiet rain, peaceful and almost comforting, but at the same time quite nostalgic. Everyone else at college is sleeping, save my flatmate Andrea, who’s packing, so everything else is quiet and peaceful too. It seems like a good atmosphere for slipping out and saying goodbye.

I was looking back on some old posts, and I found one featuring things I thought I would never get used to here in Australia. Well, here’s how that turned out:

1. Having to switch on power outlets even after plugging things in. Each outlet has its own little switch, which I forget to press every time. – Okay, I still forget this sometimes. Exhibit A: the other night when I made fun of a friend for asking if I needed help making popcorn, only to need him to remind me to flip the switch so the microwave would turn on. But I have gotten better overall!

2. Ordering coffee. I'm not convinced that regular drip coffee exists here. According to the barista at the coffee shop I found today (who immediately knew I was either American or Canadian), most drinks are espresso based here, which is delicious but expensive. I still don't know what asking for a "long white coffee" will get me, but my hazelnut latte was good enough! – Drip coffee doesn’t really exist (except at Starbucks, which is too American to count!), though they will sometimes use a French press. And you wouldn’t ask for a “long white coffee;” it would be a “long black,” which is equivalent to an Americano, or a “flat white,” which is like a latte, and my drink of choice recently.

3. Using Australian currency. At both the coffee shop and the post office, the people working basically had to take the money from my wallet. The bills are awesome, so colourful and made from plastic-y material, but the coins are wicked confusing. You can't lose track of them like you can American coins either, since Aussies use coins for $1 and even $2 pieces. – Now, the $1 coins are my laundry money, and the $2 coins are for coffee (if I can pay for it in coins, I go ahead and buy it!). The designs on the coins are also really cool, some of them feature kangaroos and a platypus! I still have not seen a $100 bill though, apparently they are green and too big to fit in most wallets.

4. Passing on the right when you walk. I try to move out of the way by getting to the right side of the path, and end up zig-zagging as I remember that passing etiquette is the opposite here. – Moving to the left-hand side is more or less second nature now, and I almost get frustrated when people go the other way! Crossing streets will also be a re-adjustment – since they drive on the opposite side here you look right first when crossing, but in the States you look left first. Everything is all kinds of backwards!

Twenty-five more minutes and Michelle and I will be en route to Melbourne for a couple of days, then on to Hobart (the capital of the island state of Tasmania) until Tuesday evening. We originally planned to stay in the airport that night, but now it looks like we will return to the city for one last night in Brisbane before departing for LA on Wednesday afternoon. It’s funny, that flight leaves Brissy at 12:05pm on Nov. 24, and it lands at LAX at 7am on the 24 – time travel, how cool is that??

I hope you all are well! I will update about the past week and about this last Aussie adventure the next time I have internet, which will most likely be on US soil – yikes! Sending love from southern Australia!