Coffee and ID cards: Two good things

We landed Wednesday morning at 10 am (after what turned out to be 17 long but not terribly tedious hours on a plane). On our first day in Melbourne, we explored the city centre. We will write more about the architecture later, but we have been reminded of San Francisco, Vancouver, New Orleans, and Brussels. We successfully stayed awake until 10 pm, after watching Top Chef Australia (Ann's first tv in months!). We had breakfast across from our apartment where we learned that "coffee" describes any drink made with espresso. In fact, no one drinks drip coffee here. So now, Ann drinks a "long black" (essentially an Americano made in reverse) and Andy drinks "short blacks" (which is a double espresso). If you don't have an espresso machine (which apparently many homes do) coffee is made in a plunger (what we call a French press).
After breakfast we navigated the tram system to go out to the Deakin University campus in Burwood, a suburb of Melbourne. There we met with a professor who studies arts-based pedagogy and coincidentally, one of her graduate students who is originally from Detroit. Being able to talk about education, politics, and race in Australia with someone from Michigan was really informative. She was able to translate a lot of what she knows about Australia through a US lens and help us to make comparisons between the two countries. In many ways, it doesn't feel like we're half way around the world and in other ways, everything seems new and different.


Before leaving the campus we checked out the bookstore and Ann got her official Deakin University email and ID!