I am an Industrial Design student studying Product Design at the University of Technology in Sydney for one semester. I arrived six weeks ago and my time here has been awesome. I haven’t felt like an outsider for a minute, as Sydney is a very international city with kind residents that start every conversation with ‘Hey how are ya?’ and respond to every question with ‘No worries!’. And they have a Dutch shelve in the supermarket Coles! The downside to the internationality is that you bump into people all the time, as no one knows on what side to walk.

Just like this beautiful sunny country, which is around 185 times bigger than the Netherlands, everything here is bigger. Eindhoven fits 136 times in Sydney, cockroaches are the size of my thumb and spiders in the Netherlands are about as big as an ant compared to the spiders here. So, you would expect the people to be big as well, right? Believe me: no! I am a regular sized Dutch girl, 1,75 m, and at one of my first days at uni I decided to wear my heels. That usually makes me as tall as most guys, but here I switched my heels for a friend’s flip-flops within two minutes as felt like a circus freak. Guess I won’t be wearing them for the rest of the semester.

See you in summertime, take care!