My stay in Australia so far has been everything that I was hoping it would be. My roommates are great and we all get along very well together, we are the only co-ed apartment on the program but it provides a very unique dynamic which we all enjoy. We all hang out in our common room just talking about our classes/ internship and discussing where we want to go for the weekends. Overall I am very happy with the placement I got and we all have grown to be very close friends.

We are about three weeks into our stay here in Australia and we have done some pretty cool things. So far our apartment and friend group have done a walking tour of Sydney that included a scavenger hunt (which some of my friends including myself won and we will each be receiving a kangaroo onesie within the next couple weeks), we went on an aboriginal tour where we learned about the natives of Australia and what their culture is like, we went on a Chinese food crawl in one of the neighboring towns, we went to a Sydney Swans AFL game, and currently as I am typing this entry, we are on a flight to Cairns where we will be visiting the Great Barrier Reef and sight-seeing around the neighboring areas. I am very excited to go to Cairns because seeing the Great Barrier Reef is one of the top reasons why I wanted to study abroad in Australia in the first place. With the remaining existence of the reef being highly uncertain, I wanted to make sure that, while I had the chance, I would make it up there to check it off my bucket list. Very few people can say that they saw the Great Barrier Reef and I wanted to be able to tell everyone back home what it is like.

Our program provider, CAPA, also have other activities planned for us such as a zoo Roar and Snore where we will spending the night at the zoo in tents and having access to late night tours and exclusive behind the scenes looks at what actually goes on in a zoo after hours, and we also have a Blue Mountains hiking trip planned where we will be going on a guided tour through the brush and learning and seeing all of Australia’s indigenous creatures. I am particularly excited for the hiking trip because I want to see koalas and kangaroos and I also am a huge fan of hiking in general.

Overall, I am more than pleased with how the program is going and I am very thankful that I had the opportunity to experience it through Pitt. I know that this will be one of the more memorable experiences that I will have in my life, and I am glad that I have made friends that will be able to reflect on that same experience. Next week I will provide an entry based on how my sports marketing class is going and also what my internship at the Sydney Blue Sox as a marketing intern is like.