Spent Wednesday and Thursday finishing unpacking, being bought my first suitcases (a right of passage in everyone's life), and then packing again. I also went to see Toneh, one of the few people in Brampton who shares my taste in music, for a couple of hours. As I haven't seen him in over a year, apart from a ten-second encounter in December, twas good to catch up. My parents and myself then spent Thursday night in a hotel near Manchester airport, where I spent an unprecendented amount of time trying to work out which way, exactly, the water went down the plughole. Naturally, both sink and toilet cheerily disposed of it in a wholly rotation-free manner, and, a few days later, a friend told me the Corealis effect is a big hairy myth. (But the toilets in Australia I've encountered so far do flush in a most unnatural-looking fashion, which may be where it comes from.)

I arose from my bed at 7am on Friday morning, having had very little sleep (not due to nerves, just the bed being very uncomfortable) and arose from my country at 10. Annoyingly, presumably because the plane was due to land in Singapore at 6am, local time, and they thought everyone might like some sleep before then, they turned all the lights off and closed all the shutters for most of the flight. Since this was still very much daytime by my clock, I wasn't in need of any sleep, but I could neither watch the world go by (literally) nor read in much comfort, and my headphones weren't working, so I was condemned to watching "flight path" tell me which novel airspaces I was in.

Singapore airport was warm and rather disappointingly filled with international chain stores. (The first one I noticed was Burberry. Argh!) Nonetheless, the toilets I investigated featured the option of a squatting pan. And it had a free net cafe, which can never be a bad thing. I used it to leave a message in my Livejournal, and the cache instantly recognised what URL I was typing. I'm clearly not the only person who gets her kicks from updating from different continents.

The flight to Australia was rather funchier. I saw loads of islands, dozed for a while, then looked out of the window to find us passing over the north coast of Australia. Then there was much orange sand, and a sunset with a streak of green in it.

I arrived in Melbourne at 7pm. My supervisor collected me from the airport and took me to stay with his family for the night. I crashed at 9pm, only to wake up at 3am, for no obvious reason, as this hardly corresponds to waking-up time in England. I felt wide awake til 7am, then slept til I was awoken at 10.30. I spent the next few hours reading, went for a walk (saw light green-breasted birds, Eucalypts and that the city is completely hidden by trees in the outer suburbs), then was taken to my lodgings.

I'm staying with a woman and her cat in the inner suburb of Richmond. My room is huuuuuge and v. cheap, if a tad cold. (The weather here is weird - I felt inclined to put on a woolly jumper this morning, and sweat was running down my back when I arrived at work, but I then spent most of the day trying to keep my hands warm enough to function.) And I'm only a fifteen minute walk from my workplace, traffic lights permitting. (They all seem to either take forever to work and only relate to half the road. Stranger, I've seen one with men on one side of the road, and Walk / Don't Walk on the other.)

Spent the evening reading and acquainting myself with Australian TV. On some channels, the adverts occur with even greater frequency than they do on Canadian TV, where every seven minutes of programme seem to be followed by three of adverts. But it's wondrous! It's like the worst parts of British and American TV put together! There was a teenage girl explaining why Jesus is her best friend (I can understand people considering God to be their best friend, but ?), a programme about how dangerous roundabouts are, a quiz show that required a degree of risk taking but no skill or knowledge whatsoever, and an advert declaring "The Age" to be the world's most "liveable" newspaper. Well, perhaps it's loveable - y'know, Australian accents - but would you want to love a newspaper anymore than you'd want to live one? You would be filled with grief every time you came to recycle a copy. And how do you judge how loveable a newspaper is? Maybe there's Australian "Trisha" ("Sheila"?) with a "Newspapers and the women who love them too much" feature.

My workplace is the Burnley campus of the University of Melbourne, if that means anything to you. My mission is to simulate seed rain patterns and fit probability distributions to them, if that explains anything.

My supervisor isn't particularly bothered about when I come in (which is just as well: I went to bed at 11.30 last night, woke at 2.30, was wide awake for three hours, and then was woken by my alarm at 10. I understand jetlag, but this sleeping pattern makes no sense whatsoever), or, indeed, whether I come in at all. Yay! For the twenty fourth time, I won't have to go to school or work on my birthday!

And some things here are very good indeed. Firstly, Australia banknotes are very brightly coloured, shiny and have a transparent bit. Secondly, despite bringing a toothbrush with me and being given a free one on the plane, I somehow managed to lose both, but I found the most gothic toothbrush ever - black and silver - in the supermarket!