I’m plowing through my photos. If you take a look at my Flickr stream, you can seem I finished Sabah and Jakarta yesterday. I’m hoping to get everything else done today. I think everyone at this hostel thinks I’m weird because I sat in front of my computer most of yesterday.
The process of getting my passport renewed is much more complicated than it needs to be. I went to the US Consulate which is close to where I’m staying. They said I had to schedule an appointment to get my passport renewed. However, I couldn’t just schedule an appointment, I had to go online to schedule an appointment. The consulate website doesn’t let you schedule an appointment for a normal passport renewal, just for the oddball cases. So I sent an email which I haven’t gotten a reply to yet. (I have sent email to embassies and consulates in Fiji and the Solomon Islands as well. Never got a reply from them either).
So in addition to making it hard to even schedule an appointment, they wont give you the forms to fill out either. You have to print those off of pdf forms from the website. Getting the pdf isn’t a big deal, but finding a printer is a pain in the ass.
I know, just know, that if I can get an appointment and fill out the form correctly, something else will happen to screw this up. That is how much faith I have in bureaucracy.
The area around my hostel is very nice. I’m a block from the botanical garden, which is probably the nicest urban park I’ve ever seen. South of me is another park with six cricket ovals and just north of the Botanical Garden is Rod Laver Stadium where they host the Australian Open.
Melbourne seems expensive. This is probably a combination of three things: 1) I’m used to cheap prices the last two months, 2) Melbourne is a big city, and 3) The dollar has taken a big dump against the Australian dollar. Like in Canada, prices didn’t change to reflect the shift. Here, they might never shift because there isn’t the proximity or reliance on the US like there is in Canada.
I would really like to go see an Australian rules football match and/or a cricket match before I leave. I have no clue what the rules are to either sport, but it would be fun (so long as the cricket match isn’t one of those week long games).