[-43] Days Like These

I think it's days like today that I will miss most once I'm abroad. It was on a day not terribly unlike today, with not much to do, that my ambition to study in Australia was born. In many ways, Australia is one of the most exotic places you could imagine spending a semester. No, they do not speak a foreign language there (well, not if you speak English, anyway), but they have fun accents (which I hear can make them as unintelligible as if they were speaking a language you didn't understand anyway) and animals you can only find there. In one country, there is vast desert and an incredible, self-sustaining ecosystem that we call a coral reef (to be specific, the Great Barrier Reef), but which thousands of species call "home". Not to mention hundreds of things that can kill you.

On the more academic side of things, I'm curious about the development and evolution of music on an island whose society (as we know it) began as a penal colony, as well as gaining a less US-centric education.

But instead of spending this day becoming fascinated by a place I've never been, I spent it catching up with old friends and enjoying a place I've lived nearly all my life. Is it odd that I'm using these first entries of my "Australia Blog" to write about American life? Maybe, maybe not. This is where it starts, after all. Hopefully in the next few days I'll have some slightly more relevant information to write about. Things will become much busier in the next few weeks -- after all, you can't just pick up your life and move it halfway around the world for a semester without some significant preparation.