[the girls and i on the plane - michelle, heather, liz, me]
the plane ride, total, was pretty much 18 hours, and add in the layovers, and time difference, and we are now two days from when we left home. it's been an amazing time so far - the three girls (heather, michelle, liz) and i are pretty well situated. tom, in the lab, picked us up from the airport and we all crammed into his car and made our way to the claremont hotel, our home for the next 9 weeks. The living quarters pretty nice, though small; we all have singles and are in rooms close to each other. the view is pretty amazing as well. [a couple pictures of my room after unpacking]
after getting settled, luggage and rooms and all, we headed to Monash University (the "uni"), where Dr. David Abramson's lab is. there we met the rest of the crew, well, the people that were present, anyway. in addition to david and tom, we met roy, blair, prim, and some other people who's names i don't quite remember yet, but soon enough. the older people are soo cute, and everyone is just so nice!
on a side note, the cars all drive on the "wrong" side of the road on the left. i keep thinking we're going to crash into the other cars for some reason. crossing the street is a bit intimidating as well since we have to look both ways (not that we don't usually have to look both ways) and the cars don't really stop for pedestrians).
at monash university, the building we are in reminds me of calit2, with the high-tech feel. we got keycards and everything, so feeling pretty pro right about now. :P we're on the 7th floor so the view is pretty nice as well (i'll let you see when its not so gloomy out). anyway, almost first thing we do after getting introduced to everybody is go down for coffee with blair. and then do some setting up of networks and getting the computers all ready, and then it's lunch time! lunch was pretty exciting - there's a food court/ mall type building really close by with tons of choices. i can't wait to try all of them! but we settle on chinese take away (it's not "take out" but "take away"). there's a lot more asian influence here than i thought there would be - almost like at home in cupertino. i've heard many different asian dialects, but weird thing is, when they speak english, it's with an aussie accent, although i'm not quite sure why that is weird since we are in australia.
over lunch, blair and tom and one other introduce us to the cryptic crossword. it's quite the interesting. prety much, it's a regular crossword with clues and the like, but each of the clues are puzzles in themselves. i'm not quite sure how it really works yet, but we'll get it down soon enough, but pretty crazy. and then it was coffee time again! i haven't yet figured out if the coffee is a programmer's thing or an aussie thing, but i think they just really like caffeine. but the coffee is pretty good here, so i'm not complaining. :)
2 comments:
wow! you guys got to sit with each other on the plane! sooo cool! hope you guys are enjoying yourselves!
Interesting to know.
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