Feeling better - mostly

When I woke up this morning, I was actually hungry (first time all week), so I knew I was finally on the mend. Hooray! I was still feeling cautious, however, so I took it easy on the food and hung around the house all morning, just in case I needed to make yet another dash for the bathroom. I know, I know, more information than you really needed to know, but still - getting sick is one of the challenges of travelling. Jen tried to comfort me earlier this week with stories of how she's been sick in lots of other countries, most notably Peru, but strangely enough that didn't really help. :-)

We've decided that we likely caught a nasty virus from another one of our housemates. Originally we feared it was food poisoning, brought on by something that we served at our party last Saturday - but then everyone would've likely been sick at the same time. Turns out now that our first housemate was likely already ill at the time of the party, Jen and I succumbed two days later, along with the Dutch girls down the hall... and since then three other housemates have also, um, experienced this little flu. (By the way, using the term "flu" is confusing down here - at home the flu is a specific disease, but here it's used interchangeably to mean either a cold, a viral infection, or actual flu - so sometimes it's a little hard to figure out what people are talking about.) To be honest, I feel a whole lot better just knowing that it probably wasn't food poisoning - how embarrassing would that be to have poisoned our housemates at our welcoming dinner?

It's been a long time since I've had the luxury of being sick, if that makes any sense. One of my few consolations over the last couple of days was knowing that I wasn't inconveniencing any co-workers by being home sick, and that I didn't have to worry about leaving lesson plans or any of that stuff. On the other hand, this little mis-adventure has left me exhausted and dehydrated, so I'll pass on a repeat performance, thank you very much!

I finally decided about 2pm that it was safe for me to leave the house and do a little bit of exploring around the neighbourhood, something I've been meaning to do for the past week or so and just haven't gotten around to. Most of Melbourne is built on a grid system (another way it reminds me of Toronto), so I basically walked in a big square down Blyth to Lygon to Brunswick to Sydney and back to Blyth. All in all I probably only walked for about an hour and a half, but it was almost too much. By the time I'd made it to Lygon and Brunswick (the furthest I could possibly be away from my house on this route), I was wiped and needed to rest for half an hour before I could continue. But continue I did! Brunswick and Blyth are both residential streets (at least along the stretches I walked), and Lygon and Sydney are long strips of shops, with trams running along them in either direction. Unfortunately I'd left my Metcard (bus pass) at home so I couldn't just hop on a tram and go home, I had to walk.

Now that I've had some more time to get to know my new neighbourhood, it really does remind me in many ways of home. Melbourne is a cosmopolitan city, with many different races and cultures represented. Just north of us along Sydney is a very Muslim area - and the dress stores there are fantastic. Just south of us along Sydney the community is mostly Greek and Italian. There are sushi restaurants, bubble tea places (hooray!), and tons and tons of little bakeries. I swear the Australians make the best baked goods in the world. Even the 'cheap' bread is excellent. It is difficult to pass the bakeries without sticking your head in, between the delectable smells wafting out into the street and the yummy goodies in the window. Fortunately, yet another one of my housemates works at one of these places, so we're pretty much guaranteed some good eats every once in a while. There are tons of discount stores in our area, which is great since we're definitely on a strict budget this year.

I still haven't managed to take the neighbourhood pics that I wanted to - thought about it this afternoon but I still wasn't feeling 100% and I found myself concentrating so much on my energy levels that I never once pulled out the camera. Perhaps another day.

Jen and I finished off the day by going trampolining, as we will every Wednesday. Unfortunately we didn't get to play in the huge pit of foam cubes tonight, so I never bothered to pull out the camera. Mark, our coach, is a real taskmaster and had the two of us sweating and working hard. Jen mastered her back pullover (yikes, in my opinion), while I struggled to do simple 360's and full airplanes. Stupid twisting. Any tricks that involve twisting sideways I have a terrible time doing. But I know it'll come in the end. I wasn't sure I was going to bounce at all tonight, since my stomach was still rather delicate, but gave it a try. I was doing well until the very end of the evening, when one too many attempts at learning a 3/4 front flip left me nauseous enough to want to throw up. So, wisely, I stopped. We'll leave that one to next week. :-)

So here's hoping that tomorrow I'm back to 100% - I am so ready to get out and explore that it's beginning to drive me crazy, this whole being sick thing. Gah!