After weeks of just dossing about my time at the university of Melbourne is finally underway. Well sort of. Although lectures for my four history subjects have started, there have been no tutorials. Even the lectures have taken on a distinctly introductory tone. Over the past couple of days I have started to read around my subjects, looking at both primary and secondary sources. I am loving it. I know that sounds a little bit nerdy but I can't help it. The periods that I am doing (20th century in both Europe and America) fascinate me. It looks set to be a interesting and engaging semester, helped enormously by the fact that I don't have any exams!
At the start of this blog I declared that I was aiming to find out more about the nature of Australians. It is nearly four weeks on since I made that statement and I do feel that I have learnt plenty about the Aussies. However there are still things that take me back. A prime example would be a conversation that I had with one of my fellow residents in college earlier this week. We were discussing life in Melbourne and they were explaining how busy and unpleasant the CBD (central business district) can be (pictured below).
It is basically the heart of the city and inparticular its banking and finance centre. Now I have spent a fair bit of time in this part of Melbourne during my first twenty or so days in the city. Yes it can be fairly busy but nothing on the scale of rush hour in central London (pictured below). When I tried to explain this fact to my fellow residents they were in shock. "What a place busier than the CBD? No. Impossible. I could not cope". This brief conversation taught me two further things about the Australians. One they don't expect to be proved wrong especially when concerning things they know well. And two, that they have no idea what a busy city centre is.
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