Entering Monash

So yesterday morning I finally arrived in Melbourne, after what felt like a very long series of flights. Brad was waiting at the airport to pick me up, and then we drove the hour or so back to the house that he and Kate have been renting whilst out here. It's a really cute little place (I haven't taken any pictures of it yet) that's been converted from someone's two car garage. It's not too big, but has everything you need and is so cosy. The sofa itself makes an extremely comfortable bed.

After I had showered and gotten rid of all the travel filth, we set off for the University. Monash is only about a 5 minute drive away, so we got in super quick (and early). The office that Brad and Kate share is in the Maths Department, and I sat in there for the first day (although tomorrow I think I'll give them some space and go sit in the visitor's office. Surprisingly I wasn't really tired, so Brad dragged me along to the Extragalactic meeting at 11am.

This meeting was really interesting. There were about 15 people sat in there, most of the Postgrads and Masters students. All of them seemed really friendly, and asked me to introduce myself and give an impromptu five minute introduction to what I study. And then we got on with the meeting. The way it works there is you go around the table and people update everyone on what they've done in the last week. I thought this was a really good idea, because it presents the opportunity to bash ideas about, admire and discuss plots and recent results. It's also an incentive to have done something new within the week, so you can show it off in this meeting.

Oyster Bay

A couple of hours later we went to the next meeting, which was for people working on stellar evolution stuff. It's really not my thing, so I didn't follow along most of what was said here. However, they gave us lunch at this meeting, which was a yummy combination of sandwiches, cheeses, quiche and chicken - a super great incentive to go to this meeting. And then Kate presented a paper she'd read recently. It was all pretty good.

First night at the pub

Shortly after the meeting we decided that it had been a long day, and it was pub time (3pm). So the three of us and 3 Ph.D students from Monash packed up and walked to an open air pub that's relatively nearby. This is where we picked up the first bottle of wine for the evening, a tasty white Oyster Bay. Brad, Karen and I had two of these bottles while we were there, and Karen (rather amusingly) was quite drunk by the time we left. It was only 5pm!!

Karen and her two bottles

Numero 3

We headed off home at this point (don't worry chaps, Brad has been taking it easy on the wine so that he could drive us). However, we then got home and he brought out our third bottle, this Thick as Thieves drink. This was a really yummy wine - shown in the picture below. I'd asked Brad how much wine he actually had in the house and he showed me the cupboard shown in the picture. Apparently, these are just the very good ones.

Brad's private collection

Kate - positively cheerful :D

I've never seen anyone so
happy about sweeties.
They were pretty good though.

We had some tortellini and pesto for dinner, as we kept drinking and chatting. We had a few yummy snacks as well as we made our way through the bottles. It was pretty funny, everytime we opened a bottle of wine and poured it out, Brad would get up and put a new bottle in the fridge. It was like the never-ending fountain of wine!! As they'd collected these bottles from a whole bunch of different wineries, there was a story to go with most of the bottles as well, so we had loads to chat about.

Poser

A tasteful and artistic capture

Number 6

Number 7

Number 5

Thoroughly enjoying myself

Anyway, before I knew it, we'd consumed 7 bottles of wine and it was nearly midnight!! Brad was just off to bed and I think Kate and I stayed up a bit longer chatting, but soon we needed our sleep too. I thought that point was the perfect time to phone boyfriend, but in my inebriated state I couldn't get the internet to work. This might have been a good thing because, next thing I know, I wake up on the floor. Don't ask me how I managed to fall asleep there, but I did :(

This morning wasn't great, I'm not gonna lie. The combination of wine and jet lag meant I didn't wake up until 11am. Brad had gone off to work, but Kate and I had already decided to spend the day at home before going into town. We kinda failed on that front. After eating some cold pizza for lunch both of us went back to sleep until 3pm!!

Still a poser

I have no idea what was happening

Did she start dancing
while we were singing?

Uploading wine pics to facebook

Eventually I got up and got ready to go out. We were planning to go to a place called Bridge Road, in Richmond, which is apparently good for shopping and restaurants. The train station is about 15 minutes walk from the house, and the train took about that long too. So we were on Bridge Road by about 4.30 and had a great time wandering up and down looking at the shops. They were all mostly boutique style shops and we didn't really buy anything, but it was nice to see all that stuff. We met up with Sarah Bird when we were there - she's a PhD student from Finland who's spend the last month or so at Swinburne and is heading back tomorrow. She was really nice and friendly.

The shops had all started to close by about 6pm, so we window shopped a bit more and checked out the menus of some of the cafe/restaurants there. There was a lot of variety in cuisine there - I can see that it must be a popular place to go out to eat. Then we headed over to the Lebanese restaurant we were going to for dinner. There we met Brad, his daughter Tilda, and Sarah's supervisor, Chris Flynn.

Dinner was really lovely. We managed to drink some Riesling, hangovers mostly disappeared. The chat was great and I had Kibbeh for my main. They're a sort of lamb ball dish and suuuuper tasty! I totes recommend. But by then we were getting a bit tired again and it was getting late for Tilda. So we headed back home and here I am, ready for an early night and fresh start at work in the morning :D