Phew!

Thanks to the help and support of family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers I finally have a place to live for the next 5 months!! I cannot express how relieved and happy I am. It has been a very rough couple of days for me living out of a hostel and trying to find roommates and an apartment. I do consider myself an adventurous person, but I have learned that being homeless is NOT the kind of adventure I enjoy.

I woke up early on Friday (the morning after I arrived) and took the bus to campus (about a 20 min bus ride) with 3 of my hostel roommates from The Czech Republic to see campus for the first time and attend an Accommodation Information Session. I had a lot of hope tied to this information session- thinking that I would meet other people who are looking for housing that I would want to team up with and look for housing together. However, this was not that case. There weren’t many people at this session and most of them did not English (many were Asian) and they all seemed to already be sitting with people who they were already friends with. This made me a bit nervous at first, but I was still hopeful. The meeting pretty much just explained how you sign a lease and what your rights are and stuff like that (from what I gather, many landlords take advantage of international students and try to screw them out of money). The only information they gave us regarding finding housing was a website run by the University which has listings of rooms for rent. These listings however were not always students (for example: a couple looking to rent out a room in their apartment, a woman who has a young son and wants to rent a room in her house, Chinese students seeking roommate who is quiet and studies a lot…). Other than this website, this session gave me no information on how to actually find a place to live or people I may want to live with. I was immediately very nervous about this because I was banking on this session being helpful to me.

After this session, they held an optional “Getting Started Session” for international and study abroad students so I stayed for that, hoping that it would be helpful and I may meet people. This session gave me some valuable information about the bus systems and maps and stuff, but no help with housing. After this session I walked out onto campus and saw three students (2 girls and a boy) sitting on a bench who I recognized as sitting a few rows in front of me at the session. They looked very nice (and also American, which was comforting at this point) so I sat down and talked with them for a bit. It turns out they are from Austria and spoke English very well. They were also in the same housing situation I am, but they seemed less nervous and stressed about it (maybe because they had each other). We ended up spending the next few hours walking around campus- getting our bus cards, our student IDs, setting up our wireless internet, and just exploring campus together. It was very nice making friends and having people to figure out how to get around campus with. They were extremely nice and helpful to me and I wish we were able to join the housing search together, maybe trying to find a 4 person apartment, but after looking a bit on that website that seemed to be very difficult with our tight budgets and stuff. We parted ways and promised to keep in touch, and I hoped we would because they seemed like great people.

I spent the next few days very stressed and nervous, trying to look online for a housing option that would suit me but really getting nowhere. I spent sometime at the apartment that 4 students also studying abroad here from UofI are living at, which did help make me feel better. It was nice because I barely knew these people and they were doing a great job of helping me calm down and offered any information they had about housing. These students planned their semester through a company called Semester in Australia, which sets them up with a flight, an apartment, a phone, internet, and an optional trip to Sydney during the week before arriving to Brisbane. So, they all already knew a lot of people in their apartment building and also all over Brisbane so I was a bit jealous and wished that I had paid to have all of that set up for me so that I would not be in this situation (I did not know about this service when planning my semester, so instead did everything on my own).

After a few days of this, I got a message from one of the UofI boys saying he had ran into a girl at the store who lives in their building who mentioned that she is looking for her roommate because her room is set up for 2 people. This made me really excited and gave me the first glimpse of hope since I had arrived. Their apartment building is pretty nice and it is filled with a lot of study abroad and UQ students so they hve been having a lot of fun. The next day I went over to the apartment building to get more information. I stopped by this girls room and she was not there but I spoke with 2 of the roommates and they said she was definitely looking for someone to share the room and rent with. I left my name and number and left feeling the most hopeful I had in a few days.

Luckily, she called me the next morning. I talked to her for a bit and we really hit it off. I assumed that she would want to meet for lunch or coffee to see if we could work out as roommates, but after we spoke for just a few minutes she said I could move in that night! I cannot even describe my happiness and relief. I could not wait to get out of that hostel and unpack. So, after about 4 days of stressful searching, I have found a home in Brisbane, Australia and can finally begin the kind of adventure that actually enjoy.