Settling into Life in Victoria

The last few days have been relatively uneventful as I've spent most of my time in Brunswick, which is the suburb where Ben lives, utilising the best Internet access I've had since arriving in Australia to look for a job and an apartment. One of his friends has a room in her house that will be available in about two weeks' time so we visited her yesterday. It's a cute little house on a quiet street in the next suburb over, but I know a lot of people are interested in the room so we'll see what happens. I've spent a considerable amount of time on Gumtree, which is a website that's popular to use for apartment hunting, and have emailed a few people who have or will have vacant rooms in their houses soon. For some reason, I don't get cell phone reception in or anywhere near Ben's house so it's been a bit of a challenge to contact those who have posted that they want potential housemates to ring them to make arrangements to view the house; however, I'm planning to go into the city tomorrow to remedy that issue.

This evening, Ben and I attended a service at Planetshakers, which is a megachurch in East Melbourne that several people at Hillsong had recommended when I told them I was moving down here. It was a decent service and I enjoyed the sermon that the pastor presented to us, which was largely about humility. Interestingly enough, the message that resonated with me the most came at the end when he said that one touch from God could change everything because it was something that was boldly stated at the Hillsong service I had attended. Very powerful words, right?

Although I generally found the experience to be a positive one, I'm wondering if it was just a little too Pentecostal for me. It was a lively service with tons of brightly flashing lights [and an unnecessary video camera that obstructed the screen with the words part of the time], but particularly in the beginning, I felt as if I was at a Christian rock concert instead of church..... and hours later, I'm still on the fence about how I feel about that. On the flip side, there are Urban Life groups that meet fortnightly so I'm looking forward to meeting new people through those. Most likely, I'll give Planetshakers another chance next week because I don't want to write it off prematurely, but there's another church called CityLife that I would like to check out as well so perhaps I'll find that it's a more suitable fit.

The weather here is just as bizarre as I had heard it would be. Prior to moving here, I had been told that in a single day, Melbourne could very well experience all four seasons. Today it was a bit humid and even rained on and off for a while; however, yesterday was properly hot, 30 degrees Celsius [86 degrees Fahrenheit], which was just a friendly reminder that summer is right around the corner.