Not a long entry this time, just a couple of snapshots of the incredible history that awaits you in Lyon! The entire city centre is a UNESCO World Heritage listed site as it contains Roman relics, Mediaeval and Renaissance buildings, and of couse the rest of the city contains 19th, 20th and 21st century buildings as well. This is what happens when you “build adjacent to” rather than “building over”.
Haifa is the third-largest city in Israel, and is home to the Bahá’í World Centre, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We left Jerusalem at 7am, slept through the mountainous journey and arrived around 9am, only to be awakened by the majestic Mediterranean Sea.
After a scenic view and too much gasping and murmuring of wanting to come back and hang out by the beach, we found ourselves at the Bahá’í World Centre – Haifa’s main tourist attraction. The spiritual and administration centre of the Bahá’í faith is encircled in an unimaginably beautiful garden, with the golden Shrine of the Báb as its crowning glory.
Even though the shrine itself is under construction, I was blown away by the garden in which every flower and leave told a story of tender care and perfect poetry.
I want to go back. Now! Okay, okay, maybe not right now, but one weekend very soon you will catch me by the Mediterranean singing Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer. I can’t wait 
)
California? Oh I’m sorry, you must be mistaken, I’ll be living in rural Victoria for the next eight months.
Well it has been just over three weeks now and I feel settled in. Of course there are still a thousand things I don’t know, and every day I have hits and misses with communication and understanding what I am meant to do. At least now I don’t feel so bad when I get something wrong (like almost getting run over from looking the wrong way first each time I cross the road), and when I do feel like I know what I am doing, it’s a great confidence boost!
I have noticed that for some reason France seems to like squares. With this in mind, this update is divided into four different types of square I have encountered.
Town squares
Everywhere you go in Lyon, there are little open areas amidst the jungle of buildings. With fountains, gardens, benches and sometimes cafés, they are welcome relief from endless rows of historic buildings, which while magnificent can get a bit overwhelming.
This is something that struck me since my arrival. In Melbourne, I am used to big open spaces and lots of greenery, but for the first few days here I felt trapped in a concrete maze. Fortunately I was able to escape to the enormous and beautiful Parc de la Tête d’Or to get some air (the photo shows the grand main entrance gates), but even now that I am getting used to urban living I love the squares scattered everywhere. They make great meeting points! The idea that I might be surprised by different urban spaces had never really occurred to me before I left, but in a way it is integral to culture. (In fact I think my uni even offers a masters course on the link between urban spaces and culture.) Down Under we enjoy activities that take a lot of space, and we enjoy our own houses and our own space. The different layout here means people have different hobbies (rollerblading seems to be huge among kids and adults here, just as a way of getting around) and it also means getting used to the dull thuds and floorboard creaks made by other people in the same building and the constant noise from the street. You never feel alone!
Exercise book squares
The start of orientation meant it was time to buy some stationery, and I found myself in the Carrefour (giant supermarket) at Part Dieu right in the middle of la rentrée, the French version of the ‘Back to School/Work’ season, only bigger, because the entire country seems to take all of August off work and returns on more or less the same day. There were people and stationery everywhere, but for the life of me I could not find any exercise books with ruled lines. Unless you wanted blank art books you only had the choice between books with small squares or big squares. I thought they were maths books, but inquiries revealed that in France everyone writes on squares, and lined paper is very difficult to come by. That’s not a huge issue for me now that I know, although some of the UK students I have met were so disturbed by the thought of using maths paper for writing that they are ordering some lined paper in from home. If you feel this strongly about it and are going on exchange, be sure to bring some lined paper with you!
The orientation course itself was curious. They gave us about six hours of lectures every day, on French language, history and culture, and also dictated some French family law to us for reasons that are as yet unclear to me. (Unfortunately by ‘law’ I mean raw procedure and rules, not anything resembling argument or analysis.) There were one or two social events but little to write home about, however it did mean lots of bonding with fellow international students in between lectures, and lots of immersion in French!
Pillows
Like the writing paper, in France, pillows are square. This has an immediate novelty value when you arrive, but if you are not used to your pillow going down past your shoulders, it can make for some uncomfortable sleeping. Again, I haven’t found it to be a big problem, but I am aware of some Russian and Hungarian students who brought their own pillows from home because they feel so strongly about the shape of their pillows. Worth thinking about if you are a light sleeper.
The University
Even the uni manages to incorporate the square shape into its structure. Made up of two large squares creating a building in a digital-figure-8 shape, the Manufacture des Tabacs campus of Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 was converted from a cigarette factory into a university about 15 years ago. (Interestingly, some of this heritage lives on in the form of dozens of students blatantly smoking in the undercover areas beside large ‘no smoking’ signs.) More to the point, the result is that the campus is effectively composed of only two courtyards, each about half the size of South Lawn. This is a small place. What’s more, the small grassed areas within them are out-of-bounds, which further reduces the available space. There is little prospect of sunbaking and studying between lectures. Not that there would really be any chance to. Lectures start at 8am and can go to 8pm, and often go for three hours straight, there is no allocated lunchtime like at home, and you can be unlucky enough to have class on Saturday mornings (it is entirely normal to have class on Fridays). Obviously how much class each person has depends on their course, but for an equivalent of 50 EFTSL of arts and law subjects I am currently looking at about 24 hours of class a week. It certainly isn’t very conducive to part time work!
Class starts tomorrow and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into it. Until next time!
I finally arrived in Manchester a few days ago and have settled in. The place doesn’t feel totally foreign as it reminds me so much of Melbourne. The hard part is getting used to the accent. It’s very thick here. I like it!
To set the context, I am an undergraduate studying Arts at Melbourne, majoring in Political Science. This is my first time out of Australia and I have never lived out of home. It is so daunting leaving the luxuries I am accustomed to and coming to a foreign place alone. I have, however, experienced uni life before, so the next phase of actually beginning classes at Manchester Uni is – simply – exciting! (Or at least it will be for the first week, while it’s all fresh, until the prospect of writing essays looms closer.)
So far I have been travelling. I spent a few days in London (which I did not like as much as I had anticipated I would, probably because I saw the tourist attractions alone) and then went to Greece where I spent just under a month with relatives. I fell in love with Thessaloniki. This is where I stayed and a sister city of Melbourne. The Greek lifestyle is very different from ours and I daresay I prefer it. They seem to enjoy life more. They can joke and spend ours at the one café, with the one frappe, just enjoying each others’ company. They don’t work Sundays, they are not so uptight with rules and the law, they are funny, good-looking and educated. I love the city. I felt at home there. It helped having relatives that treated me so well and made me feel comfortable.
Now, I am familiarising myself with Manchester. This is the daunting part of the experience, where you get to a new place and you are clueless. It feels as though I am back in my first semester at Melbourne Uni, where I am lost and don’t know the area at all. (My sense of direction is pathetic so it doesn’t exactly help the situation.) But, I do like this city and am ready to explore it. I can’t wait until I learn the shortcuts, the cheapest places to eat at, where the best coffee on campus is… I have only been here a few days so this will all come in time. I will let you know how I go.
I can say without a shadow of doubt that the most important thing I have learnt on my study abroad experience thus far is this: don’t take high strength sleeping tablets unless you’ve eaten something first. Before leaving for California my doctor was hesitant to prescribe me my sleeping tablet of choice because of horror stories that he’s heard about Stilnox. I laughed them off because I’ve taken it before…these things don’t happen to me! Once on the plane, me, nauseous flier at the best of times didn’t eat any dinner and decided to trust the claim on the tablet box that told me “Taking tablets on an empty stomach will speed up their response”. For me, this means discovering myself in the plane toilets 30 minutes later with no real memory of getting there, vomiting profusely and having to be hooked up to an oxygen tank by an incredibly lovely and gracious flight attendant…given the circumstances.
It can only go up from here right?
I had made the decision to travel directly to San Luis Obispo (SLO) rather than spend any time in Los Angeles. So I took a bus directly from LAX, it’s called Coastflyer http://www.coastflyer.com) and it travels from LAX to San Luis Obispo about eight times a day with stops in Santa Barbara (so it’s good for UCSB students too). The other option was Amtrak and that meant taking a commuter bus to Union Station in downtown LA and then a train to SLO. I’m incredibly happy that I didn’t have to do that. I was several kinds of wreck once I arrived in LA and stepping straight into a bus was a relief to say the least.
I’d be lying if I said I did anything for the first two days other than sit in the sun, read, do crosswords, and do some very lazy wandering downtown. But San Luis Obispo is that kind of town. I had already organised accommodation through Craigslist so that was one less thing to worry about, and I had the luxury of being able to stay with a family friend for a couple of days so I could orient myself.
Craigslist is an absolute goldmine and also a little bit terrifying. But it definitely did the job for me. I had started applying for houses here in July, the house I’ve ended up living in was the fourth or so place I contacted. In retrospect maybe looking for a house when I got here is more sensible in terms of meeting people and having an idea about locations, but honestly in a town of 40,000 people, with an additional influx of 20,000 students every September the housing market is pretty tight and I have no regrets (so far!). Craigslist has made me really appreciate the house I’ve got – some of the ads I was reading had stipulations like “NO people staying over!” “NO alcohol!” “NO gatherings of more than 4 people!” Maybe I’m naïve about what happens in Melbourne – I’ve only ever lived with friends – but I’m surprised people in SLO find housemates ever. One of my incredibly generous new housemates drove me all the way to Sacracmento – about 300 miles (like my adaptation to American life?!) – to buy all my new furniture at Ikea. I probably could have achieved the same thing through Craigslist but being able to buy everything in one go was great. Unsurprisingly the Californian Ikea experience was much like the Australian Ikea experience, except that they sell cinnamon buns in six packs at the checkout, and their hotdogs are only 50 cents!
So classes start on Tuesday. I have four hours of exchange student orientation on Monday (compared to what I know happens at the University of Melbourne I feel a bit neglected) and until then I’ll be watching back to back episodes of NCIS and eating Mexican. Believe it!
Stockholm is growing on me. I have been here for just over a month and this is my first blog. The weather has been sunny, but due to my neglect and the lack of watering, my rosemary plant is now barely alive by my window sill. It now sheds brown leaves against my window, which captures a view of rabbits in the morning and not much else.
My Rosemary plant was one of the first things I bought in Stockholm and it might be sad to see that it probably won’t last the year with me or even make it to the wintertime. I don’t think I am prepared for the winter. I’m sure I will get used to it but at the moment I only want to believe in the blue skies and low clouds that have surrounded me since I’ve arrived.
What I appreciate about Stockholm is this landscape. Gardens and Parks are everywhere and they are most noticeable on any neighborhood map. It’s all green. Young and old couples who jog past me in the mornings, afternoons and evenings have often made me appreciate the way this place can motivate one to adopt a healthy lifestyle. The surrounding nature of Stockholm; close to the water, the fresh air at 2am, the clean streets and the warm coloured buildings that uniformly decorate this city, seem to instill a deep pride to one’s identity and home place.
I consider myself lazy in regards to fitness, but in Stockholm I have enjoyed my long walks around the island near where I live; Kungsholmen. To observe the daily life has been a real interest of mine. Whilst attending local events, going out to bars and meeting local Swedish people has been a thoroughly enjoyable experience. My first few weeks were spent mostly with international students as many of us took Swedish language classes. I struggled to keep up with the German, French and Spanish students who seemed to naturally grasp Swedish much faster than me.
Overall, the language course was worthwhile. There were a few late nights because I wanted to pass the course. At times I lament on how I could have used that time to travel around Sweden. But in the end it was a valuable course in familiarising myself with the dialect, meeting people and then finally showing off my Swedish tongue. It’s a very difficult language to master for native speakers, (excuses), but a truly enriching way to learn a language in the country where it’s spoken. However, the majority of Swedes speak very good English and most times one can often forget about practising their Swedish.
Summer and the outdoors are full of events in Stockholm. Recently the city hosted its annual “Kultur Festival” where Swedish, Scandinavian and distant cultures took part around different locations of the city, using film, galleries, music performance and installations to celebrate the culture within Sweden and the cultural diversity it has recently embraced.
I have observed that a summer in Stockholm is all about keeping occupied outdoors. Many bars and cafes extend their presence onto the wide cobble stone pavements. Lots of conversation, comfortable silences and relaxed customers sit under blue skies enjoying their “fika” (chat and coffee) into the late afternoon. Nearby, parks invite families of young and old, teenagers, new lovers, musicians and readers to relax and absorb a perfect day overlooking the water.
The sight of water is the most pleasing to the eye. River canals within the city leave behind water trails from boats, whilst kayakers bask in the sun and take their time paddling around islands. Ferries come in and out of the harbour to visit nearby archipelago islands. The city looks beautiful from the water and it is here where you can really frame parts of the island into one view such as the beautiful Old Town “Gamla Stan”, the alternative “Slussen” and the green gardens of “Djurgården”.
There is very little noise pollution In Stockholm. It’s so quiet. There are cars, and yes they are mostly Volvos, but most people in the city rely on the Tunnelbana (subway train). It’s always on time and easy to commute around even if you are visiting Stockholm for just a few days.
August has just ended and at this time, every year, Swedish celebrate Kräftskiva – Crayfish party. One of the reasons why it’s held during August is because Crayfish reach their mature size and are ready to be caught and devoured. Vegetarians will obviously miss out on this event, but can choose to eat bread or a salad, whilst crayfish lovers are allowed to make a complete mess, digging away and salvaging the meat that is quite hard to reach inside the crayfish shells.
At a typical Kräftskiva party, wine, bread, salad, cheese and more alcohol is shared. It’s a special night that involves close friends, drunken singing (to Swedish traditional songs), great swedish indie music from Spotify of course, like Håkan Hellström, The Deportees, Frida Hyvönen, Loney, Dear, Markus Krunegård and Jenny Wilson. However I was told the whole point of this night was to get drunk and dance. Either way, it’s a lot of fun.
Stockholm can feel a little too comfortable at times and I would really love to see an ugliness to this city. Unfortunately it’s been very hard to locate. Stockholm is just a beautiful place. Who knows, maybe this month I’ll discover something really ugly. Let’s hope so. A word of caution, stay away from Burger Stands and consider asking your mum how to make a homemade burger. For those who know how to cook make sure you work out where the best supermarkets are situated and buy carefully as everything in Stockholm is very very expensive.
Vi Sers, Steven 
There is a saying often repeated in my Hebrew class. If I could remember the grammatically correct sentence in Hebrew, I would tell it to you, but neither my memory nor my Hebrew is that good. As a matter of fact, I speak Hebrew like a 3 year old.
But yes, back to the quote, it goes something like, “There is something from the whole world in Jerusalem.”
As you walk the streets and greet the various characters you will undoubtedly meet, you will find that they really are from everywhere.
Egyptians, Parisians, Germans, Italians, and Chinese – you name it, and you will find it. And let’s not forget the believers and non-believers. I’m not really sure where I quite fit in to all of this, but I can’t help but wonder if I’ll be back here one day…
The Old City in Jerusalem is made up 4 quarters; the Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Armenian quarters. It is really quite astounding to see how a 0.9 square kilometre walled area within the modern larger city of Jerusalem can be as varied as it is.
My flatmates and I have had dinner in two aesthetically beautiful restaurants in the Armenian Quarter. They don’t really look like restaurants, but like taverns that are lined with beautiful artefacts and lamps that my imagination would not have been able to dream up.
Not to mention that I found it perfectly bizarre seeing modern day things like Plasma Televisions in a space that looked like it was from a thousand years ago. But maybe that’s just me )
After reading some of the horrors already endured by my contemporaries in France, my first week seems fairly tame. This does not, however, mean that it has been without its challenges and as I blog over the next six months I hope to share both the ups and the downs with you, readers, to inform you, delight you, and to generally get things off my chest.
I have studied French for a fairly long time now, which is handy at the moment, but doing so did not entirely prepare me culturally for France. The first thing that struck me is that France is a land of incredible contradictions.
Upon arriving at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, I was surprised by its antiquity and uncleanliness. Could one of the world’s most important airports really be so OLD? Shuddering bubble escalators lug passengers from floor to floor in no doubt the bizarre actualisation of some 1970s architect’s vision of the future. But then, just a few hours later, I was sitting on the fastest, cleanest, smoothest and quietest train I have ever encountered, namely the TGV to Lyon. I was startled when I realised we had actually started moving, and at some speed, as I simply hadn’t noticed. The train ride was spectacular and quick, although I did fall asleep for part of it, it was so comfortable. Incredibly efficient train system, incredibly inefficient airport: a slight funding misalignment, but the train was so good I can forgive it.
But enough about contradictions for now, and onto accommodation. I was fortunate enough to have arranged through a friend to lodge in a room in a French woman’s apartment while I was still in Australia, sparing me from the rigamarole of searching for housemates or rental accommodation when I arrived. Upon arriving at the apartment, in the 6e arrondissement of Lyon, it became clear that I was getting a fantastic room for a good price. This, however, is largely good luck, and in hindsight I should have asked more questions about what furnishings my room would have. It turns out that the bed is a double, and that I have a big desk, a bookshelf, a heater, and a vanity and mirror in the room, all matters which I completely omitted to ask about beforehand, not having done this before. I do not want to imagine what would have happened if the room was unliveable when I got here.
Yet I nearly had to. Another surprise upon arrival was that the woman had a cat, something which she completely failed to mention when describing the accommodation to me. Two days and several coughing fits later, I started to suspect that I might be allergic to the cat and the thought of having to find other accommodation only made me feel worse. Not yet knowing anybody in the city, uni not yet having started, the landlady being on a work trip, the cat clawing at my door mewing for food all the time, and knowing that if I went out that door I would cough for five minutes, I felt rather isolated.
Fortunately my landlady came home and removed the cat hairs that were lying all over the place and forbade the cat from entering the kitchen while I cook or any of the rooms near my room (although enforcement is still a challenge). Even so, my condition deteriorated to the point where I went to the doctor (now there is a vocabulary experience) who gave me an ordonnance or prescription to fill at the pharmacy, and the coughing turned out to be an unrelated virus I succumbed to after not sleeping well on two overnight flights.
There is a lesson in this for others though, and that is this: if you are going to pay to live somewhere for several months, ask lots of questions about what you will get and what to expect. Are there pets? Do they smoke? Are guests welcome? It might not seem very guest-like to interrogate a host, but if it’s a commercial transaction you have to make sure you are getting what you pay for, and they will probably have lots of questions for you as well. Wanting to seem pleasant is not worth six months of coughing.
Having sorted that problem out, I am free to enjoy my surrounds. The 6e arrondissement, or sixth district, is the classy part of Lyon and dates from the 1910s-20s. It certainly feels like I have travelled back in time, perhaps onto the set of Mary Poppins, such are the carousels, wrought-iron lampposts, miniature dogs being walked and 4-6 storey apartment buildings (naturally without lifts).
And yet (another opposition) the underground metro system is super modern. Trains come every 3 minutes (seemingly always) and are spotless. Some of them don’t even have drivers, they are so automatic.
Even without the metro, the city is very easy to get around. Everything is walkable, and the bicycle-hire system looks convenient although I have yet to try it. This is just as well, as you do need to go to many places. Unlike Australians, who love being able to buy as much as possible at the nearest Safeway or equivalent, happily the French are still into their specialty stores, so you need to go to the pâtisserie for your bread, the markets for your fruit and veg, the butcher for your meat, and the (mini)supermarkets for your miscellaneous items (you can buy all these things at the supermarket, but they are overpriced and of poor quality). There is only one skyscraper and only one shopping plaza in Lyon (at Part Dieu), which is stunning, indeed, laudable, for an agglomeration of 5 million people, and even there, there is only one supermarket (a giant Carrefour).
Finally, a note or two for those currently on exchange in France or considering it in the future. At the start of the semester, the queues are terrible. My university requires everybody to have French civil liability insurance (the travel insurance doesn’t cut it) and everybody seems to get it at one of two French agencies (LMDE or SMERRA). This means that those agencies are inundated, and Lyon, a town with over 150 000 students, has one branch of each. At LMDE, which I was required to go to for reasons I won’t delve into here, there were only three people serving the dozens of students waiting. On the first day, I waited 90 minutes, only for them to tell me it was great I brought the four forms I did but I needed another one too and one of the other agencies had made a mistake on one of those that I had with me. The next day, they had instituted a ‘take-a-number’ system. When I arrived, my ticket said 410 and they were up to 360. I variously stood or sat numbly in the queue for another 90 minutes (if you left you could not get back in, and I heard all the screaming matches that ensued from that policy) and they finally processed me just as they were closing at 5pm. I tell you this not because you can avoid it happening to you, but just so that you can brace yourself for it beforehand and know to take an encyclopedia or something to read while you wait.
The next quick lesson is one that most people who have travelled in Europe probably know already, and one of which I was warned but of which the ramifications did not quite sink in for me. On Sunday, NOTHING is open. NOTHING. I discovered this when I roamed the streets for an hour, starving and seeking food, and all I could find amidst the steel shutters was a tobacco store that sold croissants, but even that closed at lunchtime. Buy food beforehand and plan your activities well.
Planning is also important more generally with store opening hours. In Australia, most places are open from 9 to 5. Banks (and some university services) open late and close early, which is annoying but at least you know they are the exception rather than the rule and you can easily plan around it. In France, or at least in Lyon, opening and closing hours of all shops are inconsistent and seemingly random, which makes it more difficult to plan one’s day. Some places close for lunch, some don’t, some close for 1 hour, some for 2, and all at different times. Everything is closed Sunday. All the banks I tried to open an account at were closed Monday. Some places are closed on random weekdays. Some places don’t open until 10, some close at 3, others at any time up to 9pm. I saw one place that is open from 11.30am to 12noon and 2.30pm to 3pm on Tuesdays and Fridays only. It was surreal to read something like that on a shopfront. Again, I tell you this not because you can do anything about it, but just to prepare you and to encourage you to allow for it.
Well that has been my week (more or less), and uni has barely started. The orientation course began on Wednesday but more on that some other time. It’s time for some Orangina.