The Melbourne X-perience!!

At this point, we’ve been here for three days and have finally gotten a chance to catch our breaths.  We made this preliminary list of objectives, and have tentatively accomplished items 1, 2 (one singular cell phone), 6 (we’re not out of the hot water yet), and 8 (wore sunscreen yesterday, spf 70, and still got burnt).  The others on the list have yet to be achieved. 

Objectives:

1.     Find place to sleep

2.     Get cell phones

3.     Get jobs

4.     Make friends

5.     Ride a kangaroo/emu

6.     Avoid sharks

7.     Get hot beach bods/learn to surf

8.     Wear sunscreen

9.     Party hard

With number one taken care of for the time being, we feel quite a bit more relaxed.  Personally, my greatest fear going into this trip was that we would have to shack up on a park bench.  So far, so good.  The first three nights we stayed in a hostel in downtown Melbourne, and besides having to pay out the ear for one-star hotel quality accommodations, it was kind of fun to revisit the college dorm experience.  Today, we say good-bye to the hostel and are heading to a house share near the beach that we found on gumtree (Oz equivalent of craigslist).  The couple we are staying with seem fairly nice and normal, so I have them pegged as potential friend candidates (see item 4).  We had a chance to check out nearest point of the ocean from where we’ll be staying, and to be honest, we immediately had some serious misgivings about staying in Melbourne.  It was not a fine white sand clear blue ocean crashing waves beach, but rather a kind of rocky, murky, not a lot of waves beach.  But then we remembered that it IS a bay and we haven’t yet been to the beach in St. Kilda, so we’d hold out before making any rash decisions (like up and moving straight to Brisbane or something).  Also, we kind of fell in love with the city when we were out and about last night, so we’ll see.  The idea is to take these three weeks and plan our next move.  As in, finding jobs here, or heading up the coast.