Australia Trip: Pt 1
Before beginning, some people have already asked about my pic taking habits, so I should make a note of it. I developed a habit of setting my camera on a small tripod and letting it just snap away while I’m walking around. Needless to say, I came back from the trip with thousands of pics. Many of those were completely worthless because there was nothing in frame except the horizon. As well, I don’t take many pictures of people, so unfortunately, I have very, very few of the people I stayed with.
As many of my classmates know, I had been planning for weeks to go to Europe, but I needed to wait until after I signed my job offer because I did not want to cough up a whole bunch of money for a trip only to have something go wrong and have my prospective employers retract the offer. The day that I signed my offer, I headed home to buy my ticket, and on a whim, checked the cost to fly to Sydney instead of London and Frankfurt as I had planned. It turned out that Sydney was cheaper, still expensive, but cheaper, so I sent out a few facebook messages and emails to friends in Australia and bought my ticket.
I have two Aussie friends that I lived with in Germany and two friends with whom I went to high school, one of which was an exchange student from Columbia. Essentially, my message said, “I just bought my ticket. I leave tomorrow. Hopefully, I can stay with you for a few days. Please get back to me soon.” I bought my ticket at 6:00 PM Tuesday and left my house less than 24 hours later at 5:00 PM Wednesday. Luckily, I received responses from everyone before I left. 
One of the first things I noticed after arriving was that everything is expensive there.
This lunch cost me over $10 Australian, and with their dollar being nearly equal to the American dollar, it cost basically the same in American dollars.
Before leaving, I had gotten a response from my Aussie friend Chris. He said that I could stay with him and his family. After arriving, I took the train over to where he works. On the way home, I noticed that his car is a Subaru Legacy or, as it is called in Australia, a Subaru Liberty.
The explanation for why it has a different name is pretty interesting. That can be found here.
There is something very interesting about Chris’ neighborhood, the Sutherland Shire.
Every street is named after an American president. I have no idea why other than the fact that every neighborhood has street name schemes, such as names of the seas, rivers, mountains, animals, etc.
Tags: dollar, exchange, holiday, rate, Shire, Sutherland, Sydney, trip, vacation
