Class Starts and Apartment Hunting

  Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Wednesday, January 14, 2009

I've been extremely busy the past few days, so I haven't had a chance to update my blog, but quite a bit has happened since then.  Let's start with school.  Classes started yesterday (Tuesday) and I had a 9:30 am class on International Finance.  Looks like it is going to be very little work, despite the syllabus suggesting 10 hours of work per work on the class.  All there is to do is one mid-term and one final with no homework, so I will be spending approximately 0.5 hours per week on this class, since all of my classes are pass/fail and (get this), passing is only 51%!  The prof was fairly good and it was an interesting topic, but its a 9:30 class, which is an hour earlier than I've had a class at Kellogg and is 4 hours earlier than any classes I had last quarter.  I only have two days of classes (3 three hour classes) while I am here (on Tuesday and Wednesday),  but both days I have a 9:30, which doesn't agree with my tendency to stay up till 2:30 in the morning, generally.

UNSW Campus

After class, the whole student body (which is only 140 students) went down to Coogee Beach for a barbeque, which was nice.  One area, though, that is significantly different from Kellogg, as mentioned in my previous entry, is that because the social budget is so much smaller, we had to go purchase our own beer.  After the bbq, most people headed over to the beachside bar, which has a huge patio and we drank there for awhile, but I was home by 11.

Today I had two classes:  Negotiations in the morning and Financial Strategy in the afternoon.  Both are interesting topics for me, but the prof for Negotiations is a bit dry, though she is an American who just came over from Sloan (MIT's b-school), which makes her easy to understand. The Fin Strategy prof is considered one of the top profs at the school and he's pretty good.  We had another bbq after class today, though just at our building.  They are having these events right now because the first years of the regular student body are just starting right now, so this is sort of orientation for them right now. 

On the social front, I've been having a blast.  I've already found a group of friends here- a guy from Michigan, two guys from Chicago GSB, and there are a bunch of cool people here from London Business School.  One of the girls from LBS is actually an '03 Notre Dame grad (my brother Andy's class and my roommate Brian Price's class) and we have a ton of common friends (including all of Andy's all old roommates, though somehow she doesn't know him).  After taking it easy Friday night after orientation,  I met up with Ryan Hutchins, a UM guy, who had some friends that go to Columbia's Business School in Town.  This was after I went to the Sydney Summer Festival for a short time to meet up with a friend of Leslie Gerdes's from Stanford.  However, the place was way too crowded and Kim (the girl I was going to meet up with) said that her and her sister were tired and heading home.  So I met up with Ryan and went to a place in Darling Harbour called Bunglaow 8, and, by coincidence, several other AGSM people were there as well, including Lenny and Dale, the two GSB guys.  I didn't get home until 4 that night.  Then all day Sunday, the four of us (Ryan, Lenny, Dale and I) went to Ryan's family friend's beach house on Coogee and hung out, then met up with some other Exchange students at this huge bar on the beach.  We finished by late-nighting at the beach house and had a great time. 

As for apartment hunting, this has taken up a considerable amount of time.  The apartment vacancy rate here is 1%, so there isn't much decent stuff on the market, especially furnished apartments.   I've seen about a dozen places.  After starting off looking for an apartment on my own, Ryan and I decided to look together.  I nearly took a studio in a neighborhood called Darlinghurst, and while it was nice and in my price range ($350 per week- yes, everything is price in weeks here), it was incredibly small.  That would work out to rougly US $220 per week, or about what I pay in Evanston.  After doing some looking with Ryan, we came across a great terrace house (which is typical in the neighborhoods we've been looking in) and put down a small deposit.  It's got laundry, two queen bedrooms, fully furnished, and has a patio with a grill, which is all fairly rare here.  It's also great for getting to school and the beach is a short bus ride away.  Buses are extremely good here and are the primary way of getting around. The timing isn't fantastic, as I can't move in until Monday, and I'll have to pay for about two weeks of extra rent, but it's in a great location for getting to the nightlife we are looking for and it was $400/week, Australia, so about $1200/month in US dollars.  A bit pricey, but it is about what a 1 bedroom place in Lincoln Park would cost and I figure I'm only here 3 months so I'll just suck it up.   Too bad I still have my rent in E-town. 

After we settled on that place, we immediately started to doubt ourselves on the place we found.  Since we only put down a small deposit, we kept looking at places.  There are a couple of minor problems with the place, primarily that it is located very close to the heart of the gay district.  I have no problem with this, but Ryan seems to have a little time getting comfortable with it.  Another issue is that we have been mainly looking near the city in the yuppie neighborhoods, but are now starting to wonder if we'd rather be by the beach.  Also, we went and looked at a place today that was simply outstanding.  It may have been the nicest apartment I've ever been in and was simply huge, but was in a not-so-great location.  The price worked for us as well, since the timing was better and we'd have ended up about even monetarily.  We finally decided not to take it a few hours ago, though, deciding that location was more important than how nice the place was since we're only here for a short time and after talking with some locals in the know.  And since gay Mardi Gras, the world's largest, will be right outside our door in a month.  Apparently it is a total gong show around here at that time.

Ryan is heading to Byron Bay this weekend, but since I'm still around, I'm going to go look at some places down by the beach, and if something great pops up prior to that, there's still a chance we'll take that.  Alright, sorry about the drastically long update- I'll try and update more often.