Moving in Australia

I have now been a week in Australia and what a great country it seems to be. People are actually as friendly as they are said to be, which I found a little bit confusing because I have used to the silent finnish atmosphere. Here you will constantly hear things like "hello mate" "how's it going" etc. when walking along the streets. An australian phrase "no worries" was also a little bit surprising to me in the beginning but now I've even using it myself.

I'm living in the international house, which is located at university of newcastle's campus area. I have my own room but the kitchen and bathroom are shared. No worries though, because my 5 roommates seem to be really nice. I have 2 korean girls, a guy from Singapore, a guy from Hong Kong and a local Australian guy living in the same unit. It's a great way to experience about different cultures.

The campus seems to be in the middle of forest/jungle and there's lots of animal life around. Criquets start their "buzzing" in the evening and different kinds of birds make noise during the morning and day. Since I'm not an environmentalist and don't know much about species I won't probably recognize all the animals. Anyways, I think I've seen an owl, a kakadu(white parrot), budgies and of course spiders.

I just finished my orientation week. We had a great opportunity to make new friends in the campus and our school during the whole week. Last saturday I was on a dolphin cruise trip in Nelson Bay and was actually lucky to see some of the beautiful mammals. Temperature has been over 30 during the last days and the humidity is really high. It feels quite hot even after 6 weeks travelling in Asia.

Last evening when we were sweating like hell in the humid weather meanwhile trying to cool us down with cold beer, we found 3 redback spiders under our terrace chairs.
Redback bite symptoms: "Common early symptoms are pain (which can become severe), sweating (always including local sweating at bite site), muscular weakness, nausea and vomiting. Antivenom is available. No deaths have occurred since its introduction."

It seems that you always need to check under the armrests and other dark places if there's a venomonous beast waiting...