{"id":18,"date":"2015-03-21T05:54:16","date_gmt":"2015-03-21T05:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/?p=18"},"modified":"2015-03-21T23:23:46","modified_gmt":"2015-03-21T23:23:46","slug":"gotta-start-sometime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/?p=18","title":{"rendered":"Gotta start sometime"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been here 5 days and figured I&#8217;d start blogging. I&#8217;m not exactly sure what that means but here we go with some musings.<\/p>\n<p>The 24 hours of flying to get here were trying, but I managed.\u00a0 Not so nice to have turbulence for about half of a 15 hour flight when you really want to sleep.\u00a0 I think I managed about 3 hours of terrible sleep.\u00a0 I cleared immigration and customs pretty quick, but no cab drivers wanted to deal with me and my pile-o-bags.\u00a0 Ultimately, some enormous van-cab came by and took me to the apartment.<\/p>\n<p>Things have been good so far, I do miss my &#8220;drip&#8221; coffee &#8211; everything here is espresso based, and I for one appreciate volume in my beverages, because whatever I drink, I tend to drink fast. I got a &#8220;long macchiato&#8221; today and I think I finished after 1 block of walking.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m quite enjoying the tram system, it saves me from thinking about driving at this point. I have a hard enough time looking the right direction when crossing the street. I have picked up running \/ walking on the left pretty well.<\/p>\n<p>I went to lift weights yesterday, and that was confusing since everything is in kilograms.\u00a0 I&#8217;m doing so much math with currency conversion, metric system, time changes.<\/p>\n<p>They still have payphones around town, which I find sort of odd. Also, the birds make extremely strange noises.\u00a0 Beer is super expensive, but I knew that coming in. At bars they sell it in &#8220;pots&#8221; (8oz) and pints.\u00a0 There is no discount for buying more, which I think is weird. They do have much more &#8220;craft&#8221; beer than when we were here in 2011, so that is nice. The beer store around the corner does sell Sierra Nevada, for the low low price of $26 for a 6-pack.<\/p>\n<p>We signed a six month lease for a furnished apartment in St. Kilda &#8211; if you want to check out a map, we are near the intersection of Barkly and Inkerman streets.\u00a0 It is about a 10 minute walk to the beach, which is nice.\u00a0 The is an &#8220;Olive Garden&#8221; right in our building, but it is not *the* Olive Garden.\u00a0 I find this very confusing.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll call that my first post, and let you look at some pictures!<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_24\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-24\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/IMG_1737.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-24\" src=\"http:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/IMG_1737-300x214.jpg\" alt=\"I'm going to have to get used to this.  Most people don't have dryers, and our apartment is no exception.\" width=\"300\" height=\"214\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/IMG_1737-300x214.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/IMG_1737-1024x732.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/IMG_1737.jpg 1589w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-24\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">I&#8217;m going to have to get used to this. Most people don&#8217;t have dryers, and our apartment is no exception.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<figure id=\"attachment_23\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-23\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/2015-03-21-11.42.32.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-23\" src=\"http:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/2015-03-21-11.42.32-300x266.jpg\" alt=\"Yay!  Day drinking is legal.\" width=\"300\" height=\"266\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/2015-03-21-11.42.32-300x266.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/2015-03-21-11.42.32-1024x908.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-23\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Yay! Day drinking is legal.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<figure id=\"attachment_22\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-22\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/IMG_1742.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-22\" src=\"http:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/IMG_1742-300x165.jpg\" alt=\"Looking towards the city from the St. Kilda pier.\" width=\"300\" height=\"165\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/IMG_1742-300x165.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/IMG_1742-1024x564.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-22\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Looking towards the city from the St. Kilda pier.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<figure id=\"attachment_21\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-21\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/IMG_1744.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-21\" src=\"http:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/IMG_1744-300x159.jpg\" alt=\"Sunset over St. Kilda pier.\" width=\"300\" height=\"159\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/IMG_1744-300x159.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/IMG_1744-1024x543.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-21\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sunset over St. Kilda pier.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been here 5 days and figured I&#8217;d start blogging. I&#8217;m not exactly sure what that means but here we go with some musings. The 24 hours of flying to get here were trying, but I managed.\u00a0 Not so nice to have turbulence for about half of a 15 hour flight when you really want &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/?p=18\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Gotta start sometime<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28,"href":"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions\/28"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.handelblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}