Traveling Around: Melbourne, Australia

Can you relate?

• learning a bunch a new words that are just abbreviations of words you already know in English.

• eating out at restaurants and finding that there are all cuisines on offer in the city, so diverse!

• taking a day trip to Phillip Island to find those fairy penguins, but also enjoy the lovely summer day full of sunshine.

• having an encounter with a mob of 15 wild kangaroos by yourself with no one else around.

• being amazed by all the different kinds of animals in the wild that many countries don’t have.

• being shocked by how much the temperature can change from day to day, sometimes with a 20+C difference!

• thinking that the prices for food at restaurants look expensive, but after converting the price into my host country current, realizing it is kind cheap here.

• wanting to catch up with a local (a person I worked with at one of my past international schools) but finding out it wasn’t going to work out do to that person being too busy during the holiday season.

• meeting up with a friend who just moved there and finding out all the details about the pros and cons of living and working there.

• renting a car and finding it not that stressful to drive on the other side of the road.

• going to a restaurant of your partner’s home country cuisine and talking to the servers and owner who were also from that country.

• checking out places that you didn’t visit the first time that you were in Melbourne (Luna Park, the bathing houses, Flinders Station, etc.)

• walking into the National Library and being amazed by the architecture of the place.

• not buying one souvenir, but taking lots of pictures of all the unique buildings, both old and new.

• being disappointed when arriving at a favorited restaurant to realize it was closed for the holiday season, then checking ahead of time if the next restaurants were open for future meals.

• seeing a near crash between car and tram, ‘trams can’t swerve’ said the sign!

• loving that the trams in the CBD are free to use for everyone, every day!

Currently, we have 31 international schools listed in Oceania on International School Community. 8 of them have had comments submitted on them. Here are a few of those schools:

Kwajalein Senior High School – 24 Comments
Woodford International School – 12 Comments
International School Nadi – 9 Comments
Majuro Cooperative School – 8 Comments
Port Moresby International School – 8 Comments

If you are on a trip right now, away from your host country, write to us here with your “Can you relate?” traveling experiences.  Tell us where you are traveling in the world, what you are seeing and how you are coping with any culture shock.  Once your Traveling Around experience is posted on our blog, International School Community will give you 6 free months of premium membership!