Melbourne: The Ideal City to Study Abroad for Coffee, Culture and Good Company – Stories Beyond the Hilltop: Georgetown Students Abroad Blog

Students relaxing on the lawn at the University of Melbourne

“Why Melbourne?” Many people ask me when I tell them I studied abroad in Melbourne for a year. Looking back, I’m not exactly sure how I made the decision. I had studied abroad in New Zealand for two months with my high school and knew that I wanted to return to Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand) to do some of the Great Walks in the South Island. Australia was close and seemed to have plenty of good universities and nature to offer. I knew I wanted to go somewhere where I didn’t have to learn another language (I had already passed my SFS language proficiency test) and that was not already populated with Georgetown study abroad students. After talking to people who had visited or lived in Australia, I was told that while Sydney is the popular tourist spot, Melbourne was the secret gem of Australia. It made it so much easier that Georgetown already partners with the University of Melbourne, the top university in Australia. Annette Russell from the Office of Global Education made the somewhat tedious visa process stress-free for me, and served as an excellent bridge between Unimelb and Georgetown during my time abroad (thank you Annette!)

Thanks to the housing company Semester in Australia, I found housing easily and was placed in and old Victorian house in the North Melbourne neighborhood with two other exchange students. I loved my house, despite its plethora of (harmless) spiders, with its spacious backyard, a perfect space to hang our laundry (driers are not really a thing in Australia) and Facetime faraway friends and family.

Melbourne has been (rightfully) voted the Most Livable City for years in a row and has recently been named the live music capital of the world. During my year in Melbourne, I tried aerial yoga for the first time at Body Flow Yoga, had a 3-meter pizza at Criniti’s for my 21st birthday, danced to Ghanian highlife music, had my rights read to me on the tram for not having money on my Myki (the public transit card), ran my first night-time race (Wings for Life), tried sculling for the first time on the Yarra river, and reconnected with friends from Singapore I had gone to middle school with years ago, who are now studying in Melbourne and Canberra.

At a concert in Melbourne, with the band The Head and the Heart

Rooftop yoga in Melbourne

Although I have spent more years living in Beijing, Singapore, and DC than in Melbourne, I feel like I now know Melbourne like the back of my hand, while I can’t say the same for any of the other cities I’ve lived in. More than anything, I loved living in the neighborhood of North Melbourne, with easy access into the city on the 57, 58, and 59 tram lines and its proximity to Royal Park, where I spent a lot of time going on runs, doing yoga with friends, playing on the giant playground, and taking pictures of the trees for my plant Instagram account (@plantsofmelb).

Royal Park, featuring my favorite playground

Many cities label themselves as “diverse,” but living in Melbourne was the first time that I had felt that the diverse populations of the city were truly intermingled, instead of segregated into their own ethnic neighborhoods. This I could tell simply by people-watching on the street and attending social gatherings where friend groups are made up of people from an eclectic racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds but find commonalities in their shared appreciation of culture.

I know it’s starting to sound like I didn’t do any studying in Melbourne, but on the contrary, I loved spending time on the Unimelb campus and thoroughly enjoyed all of the classes I took. As the classes took did not count into my Georgetown GPA, I was able to take all elective classes in subjects that I was truly interested in. I took four classes each semester, the equivalent of five Georgetown classes. I took a class on Marine Biology, where we did a class field-trip on a windy day to Barwon Heads to collect data on intertidal zonation; a class on Postcolonial Literature, where I read (and would high recommend) postcolonial writers such as Jamaica Kincaid and Zadie Smith; a class on Aboriginal Land, Law, and Philosophy, where we were given a walking city-tour of Melbourne by an Aboriginal tour guide and learned about the history of Melbourne from the Aboriginal perspective; a class on African Music and Dance, where I learned about the different styles and instruments of West African music and put up a dance performance at the end of the semester, much to my friends’ amusement. During the (Australian) summer month of November, between my two semesters at Unimelb, I also joined a trip with the Unimelb Master of the Environment program to Laos and Vietnam to study forestry practices in Southeast Asia. We visited many plantations (rubber, palm oil) in the region, spoke to local farmers and government officials, and I made some lovely Australian friends from the trip.

A class field trip to Barwon Heads, Victoria

I have always loved libraries and I think that a part of my struggle with getting work done at Georgetown is the lack of study space filled with natural light (Lau? no thank you). At Unimelb, I quickly came to love the Bailleu library, with its spiral staircase and its three-storey glass window letting in glorious light and opening up to a view of the luscious South Lawn, where students lounged and picnicked between classes.

University of Melbourne campus in the fall

Prior to going to Australia, I knew that I wanted to learn about its Aboriginal history. I had learned a decent amount of Maori history with my high school study abroad trip, which had made me curious about the Indigenous history of Australia given its status as a settler nation. I only scratched the surface with my Aboriginal Land, Law, and Philosophy class, but I really appreciate the the University of Melbourne’s effort to educate students on its nation’s history and the current state of the Indigenous populations. At Unimelb, before the start of each lecture, most lecturers will read out the Acknowledgement of Country (The University of Melbourne acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the lands on which of our campuses are situated. We pay our respects to their Elders both past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians who have made a contribution to the life of the University community). The statement certainly does not resolve the centuries of oppression suffered by the indigenous populations, but it is a starting point. I did notice that the University of Melbourne offers a major in Australian Indigenous studies while Georgetown (and most American universities) does not offer degrees in Native American studies, when both are settler nations built on indigenous lands.

I loved Melbourne most importantly for the friendships it’s given me. I found a group of like-minded people (mostly exchange students) and together, we explored the alleyways of Melbourne, had one too many poached eggs at the endless list of brunch restaurants, cooked vegan-friendly food at the University Food Co-op, biked on the Capital City Trail, swam in the lovely outdoor North Melbourne community pool, gathered for weekly pot-luck dinners on Friday nights, and sampled an excessive amount of mulled wine and jam-filled donuts at the Queen Victoria market. A year later, we are all scattered around different parts of the world, but our time in Melbourne will always bind us.

I got my first tattoo in Melbourne, one of the sun, the mountain and the ocean. Every time I look at it it brings a smile to my face, and I know Melb will always have a special place in my heart.

Making healthy, sustainable food with the Unimelb Fair Food Challenge