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Morgyns Blog

Considering going on exchange but not sure what to expect? Take a look at Morgyn's blog entries following her own personal experiences of exchange.



Morgyn is in her 2nd year at The Women's College, studying International and Global Studies at Sydney Uni. She is currently on exchange to Mexico...


Blog Entries

A Final Message from Mexico

April 2011




The fact that it’s taken me this long to write my ‘back-home’ blog post perfectly sums up my post-exchange experience since getting back from Mexico. I came back at the beginning of February, from a month and a half of pure travelling and a total of seven months overseas, and within a few hours of getting off the plane I was smack-bang in the middle of house-hunting. Around this I had to make room for the endless stream of coffees, meals and events that make up the process of getting back in touch with people I hadn’t seen for the better part of a year. Then there were the trips back home to see family, the infinite number of miniscule administrative tasks that come with being back in the country and the looming deadline of going back to uni to make it all seem particularly urgent and over-whelming. And then once uni started I was still trailing behind, taking a good six weeks to even comprehend that I had to get back into studying and doing assignments (helpfully around the same time those first assessments I should have been working on during those six weeks were due). Pile on top of this the joys of post-college independence; cooking, cleaning and not being able to get up five minutes before class starts, the somewhat fruitless desire to keep up my Spanish and the general struggle to balance work, life, and fun, and you can see why it’s taken me almost three months to write this post.

The good news is that I am finally starting to get back into the swing of things and while, from the looks of these posts, a lot of my life for the past year has been a stressful, red-tape covered blur, exchange was such an amazing experience that I don’t regret a minute of it. It allowed me to explore a completely different culture and way of life, made it possible for me to learn a language almost fluently and gave me greater confidence and independence, as well as some pretty fantastic stories to tell. So for those of you considering going on exchange or in the throes of organising one, don’t be disheartened by the tales of woe and difficulty I’ve been telling; they’re only there to show you the possible complications and unwanted side-effects of an exchange. As long as you keep in mind those less-pleasant aspects of the experience to stop you from conjuring up an image of a perfect, hassle-free exchange and being disappointed, you’ll be sure to have an incredible time and conclude, like me, that it was without a doubt worth any hiccups, downsides or stress.

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Parables for Exchange

November, 2010




You lucky people must be finished or almost finished for the year and while I still have a few weeks to go, instead of being petty I decided to write you a nice, long final blog post. This post contains a few anecdotes from my trip so far, which I like to pretend have a moral for those of you going on exchange, and which I also like to believe are funny. ¡Enjoy and adios!

Fun with stamps

Soon after the beginning of my trip I decided to be really organised and track down a post office so I could buy some stamps and send off postcards and the like. I decided to first try looking online for post offices, but with little success. The next logical stop seemed to be my host family, who you may assume would have crossed paths with a post office at some point in their lives in Guadalajara. Apparently not. I approached my host mother and she told me that she thought she might have heard of a post office somewhere in Zapopan, sort of like telling me that there might be one somewhere in the Northern suburbs. She then asked me to buy some stamps for her if I did manage to find one. My next stop was the international office at uni and with a good amount of internet and phone usage, the advisor was able to track down the exact address of a post office. After printing me off a map and recommending a bus route, I was half-way out the door when he asked:

“Oh, and while you’re there, could you buy me some stamps?”

Moral: sometimes you just have to accept those infuriating little differences in the system

Fun with family

A couple of months ago some Australian students in my Spanish class decided to throw a party. Now, at this point I’d been quite the anti-social hermit and was yet to accept any of their many invitations, so thought that I better give it a shot. However, as it turned out it was also my host father’s 50th birthday, so I decided I better be a good host student and hang around for cake instead of going out partying. This might seem like the tame option as it started off with a sophisticated glass of red wine with dinner, but sometime after the kids had retreated upstairs I managed to convince my host parents that I couldn’t possibly go back to Australia and tell them that we drank wine at a Mexican birthday. Obviously, my argument was very persuasive and my host mother got down a bottle of tequila and some shot glasses. I then proceeded to serenade my host father with the ‘piss-pot’ song (as an Australian tradition) and, believing that it was the Mexican way, gulp down my (generous) shot of tequila in one go. Turns out Mexicans actually sip tequila, but I think I managed to pass it off as a cultural difference. I think I actually ended up choosing the much more entertaining option, complete with a slightly drunken conversation with my host mother.

Moral: sometimes the option that seems more boring is in fact far more exciting Fun with a volcano

For the weekend leading up to the day of the dead, I decided that I was feeling too lazy to organise anything and ended up going on one of the many group-organised trips for students here. I realised that the term ‘organised’ was subjective when we were taken to climb a volcano one day. We turned up 1 in the afternoon and, after eating breakfast at 9 in the morning, we were told there wasn’t time for lunch because it was a 7 hour trip to the volcano and back. This was a little worrying, but none-the-less we headed off cheerfully, half the group on horses and half the group on foot. I thought it would fun to pretend we were in the Lord of the Rings and started jumping from rock to rock pretending to be a hobbit. Needless to say, after about an hour and a half of walking, I gave up on this and started concentrating on not inhaling too much volcanic ash. Now, anyone that’s ever walked along a beach with dry sand for a long period of time probably understands how much more effort it takes, and so will understand our feelings by the time we reached the incline up to the volcano, 2 and a half hours in. I would have gladly walked that part 10 times over if I’d known what awaited us on the incline.



To cut a long story short, I eventually reached the volcano, delirious with hunger, exhaustion and an inability to breathe, and decided that, despite being one of the last to reach the volcano and the sun being worryingly low in the sky, I should try and climb it. Now, obviously the volcano gods of Mexico have a twisted sense of humour because my Lord of the Rings analogy became painfully true when I transformed from the hobbit Smeagol into Gollum. Every 20 metres of climbing turned into half an hour of scrambling over rocky volcanic ash which, every time you got ahead a little, would slide down underneath you. All I could think about (in my Gollum-ey way) was that it would be worth it when I reached the top. And then it started raining. Now, you can probably guess from the description of the terrain above and with a few calculations that I was in danger of climbing a volcano in the dark in what was pretty sure to be landslide conditions. So, when the others came hurrying down the volcano they reasoned with my delirious, Gollum-like self until I was forced to turn around. But not before they informed me that I’d gotten 4/5 of the way up. I think that was the cruellest part of the whole day.

Hunger + Exhaustion = delirium and selfies

Now, it might sound like it’s about over, but you forget that the sun was setting and we had the 3 and a half hour trip back. Luckily, I’d gone halves in a horse with someone and could ride back. In theory. When I got on the horse it was painfully obvious that, short of a wolf attacking it, it was not going to move faster than a snail. Well, that was OK because I’d at least be as fast as the people walking, right? Nope, they managed to talk a Mexican family into giving them a ride in their pick-up trucks and so I watched them vanish off into the distance with the people riding horses that worked. So, there I was, riding a horse in the rain and dark, in coyote country, alone, with no sign of the ‘organisers’ of the trip anywhere. Fortunately two girls on horses from another group caught up with me and their group was kind enough to send a truck to fetch them, as it was dark, and I caught a ride with them in their heated van. So, things seemed to be looking up, until they asked me where they should drop me:

Them: “OK, so where should we drop you?” Me: “........” Them: “OK, well what’s the name of the town where you got dropped off?” Me: “.................” Them: “Alright, well, what did it look like?” Me: “There was a graveyard.... and a restaurant...” Them: “Hmm... OK, well, maybe you should call someone” Me: “Oh yeah!” Looks for phone “Uh-oh” Them: “Hey, that’s fine you can borrow one of our phones” Me: “...... I don’t have anyone’s number”

Eventually, and I have no idea how this is even remotely possible, we pulled over for a pit-stop and one of the guys poked his head in the van and informed me that he’d found a local that remembered seeing our bus come into his village. So, I was offered the option of going with a random Mexican man in the hopes that it was the right bus or basically being left on the side of the road. I weighed up my chances of being sold into the white slave trade and, keeping in mind that my decision-making abilities were hampered by a volcano climb and 12 hours without food, I decided to get in the truck. It turned out that it was an Indigenous Mexican family in the truck, complete with little old grandmother that didn’t speak Spanish. I hopped in the truck and tried to make conversation:

Me: “Hi, how are you?” Them: silence Me: “So, are you guys from the village?” Man driving: “Yep.”

And we spent the rest of the drive in complete silence. Miraculously, after driving through a town I didn’t recognise in the least, we somehow arrived at the restaurant where our bus was parked and I think I almost had a heart-attack of relief. So, I gave the family some money in appreciation and approached the restaurant, expecting to be berated and yelled at for being so late. There were five people in the restaurant. Turned out the others had gotten lost or spent hours riding horses in the dark listening nervously to coyotes howling. So, it turned out we all had some pretty good survival stories, but it was decided unanimously that I definitely had the best tale.

Moral: even the most exhausting and terrifying experience is fun if you call it an adventure



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Some Friendly Advice from a Hermit in Mexico

September, 2010




Sorry for the break since my last blog, I’ve been quite busy for the last month or so, but more about that later. It seems every time I decide to write one of these things, it divides itself nicely into 3 different topics, so I’m just going to launch straight into the first one.

So I mentioned last time that my university gave me a bit of a shock with its strictness, e.g. regardless of sickness, kidnap or death you can’t miss more than 4 classes or you fail. I assume this is to make the university look worth the exorbitant fees. They obviously decided that another way to look real impressive was to have “parciales”, which are basically a mini exam week every month. The work for these is not particularly hard but there is a lot of it. This is my first point for today: yes, exchange is really exciting but it’s hard to soak up the culture/explore your new home if you essentially sit in a basement all day chained to your desk. After a month of barely being aware that I was living in Mexico, I finally finished my first lot of mini-exams and, with very fortuitous timing on the part of Mexican history, I was able to actually take advantage of my thousands of dollars in plane tickets.

This is my next point, public holidays. For someone that is pretty much under pain of death not to miss classes, these are like gifts from the exchange gods. A week ago I lucky enough to be in Mexico, not just for its independence day, but for the 200th anniversary of its independence. This meant that the university gave us not one, but TWO days off. Not just that, they gave us Thursday and Friday off. Take into account that I don’t have class on Wednesday and you can see why this was cause for great excitement. The moral of this paragraph is: look up those public holidays as soon as your plane lands (or sooner) so that you can maximise your opportunities to (and with a Today Tonight worthy segue...) travel!

So, of course, I took advantage of my 5 day weekend and started gathering advice, googling Mexican destinations and desperately trying to make my 10-year-old camera work again. Eventually, it got to Tuesday (the day before my super-exciting trip) and I was yet to organise anything. That afternoon I hurriedly booked some bus tickets and hostel rooms in the independence heartland of Mexico. Now, as I’d left it so late and I’m not particularly close to anyone here yet, I did end up travelling alone (I’m clearly still alive and haven’t been kidnapped into a drug cartel, so don’t panic) and I had a great time. Maybe this won’t be a problem for other people going on exchange (because, you know, you may actually be capable of making friends in less than a month), but even if it, don’t let it deter you or stop you taking every possible opportunity to travel. However, also don’t feel pressured to run off every time you have a spare second. I waited a month, and I don’t necessarily think it was a bad idea to settle in first and figure out the work load before heading off.

In conclusion: be careful not to let university get in the way of exploring, keep an eye out for opportune holidays which will allow you to travel, and don’t be scared to jump on a bus and head off, even if you are alone (come on, if I made it out alive in Mexico you’re pretty much bound to be alright, unless maybe you’re on exchange in Africa or the Middle East).



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Diary of an Illegal Immigrant

August, 2010




Despite the fact that I arrived in Mexico three days ago, I decided to wait to write this blog entry until I was no longer an illegal immigrant. I’m happy to say that I have overcome the legendary mess that is Mexican bureaucracy (though to be fair, I’d take Mexican immigration over a visit to Centrelink any day) and am now starting to settle in (legally) to my new home. I have no particularly entertaining stories or humiliating language barrier issues to report, but I have distilled my impressions so far into three (hopefully) helpful tips:

1. It doesn’t matter how long you study a language, the locals still speak in an incomprehensible alien tongue and that past subjunctive you learnt is no use when trying to politely decline the taxi driver’s invitation to go clubbing.

The reason I disappeared off the radar before the end of exams, and have only reappeared now, is that I spent the last month and a halfish in Ecuador, Costa Rica and Nicaragua. This was possibly the best decision I could have made as, when I stepped off of the plane in Ecuador, I replied to the first question someone asked me in French. If you can afford it, and bear to part with enough of your possessions to live for 6 months with what you can fit in a pack, it seems that doing a language exchange is made a hell of a lot easier by travelling around a little beforehand. This means that you’ve had language practice in situations where your living legally in a country is not dependent on your comprehension of said language. Something I’d particularly recommend is some sort of program where you can stay in the same place for a few weeks with Spanish speakers, rather than backpackers. I did a language/volunteering program in Ecuador, which was particularly useful because if you can understand an Ecuadorian orphan when they’re excited, you can understand anyone.

2. You may have prepared yourself for all sorts of cultural barriers, but it’s always those unexpected little things that trip you up.

I’m staying with a host family here, which was a very difficult decision to make due to the large numbers of pros and cons involved. So far, my family is fantastic. They’re very laidback and understanding, just crazy enough for me to fit in and, most importantly, they can cook. One thing I didn’t really consider was that they would pray as a family before bedtime, during which time I have so far skulked awkwardly in another room. It’s not that I didn’t know that Mexico was a very religious country, it was more that I hadn’t really comprehended how it would affect things. I now realise that I need to be more careful with what I say and how I act than in Australia, so that I can avoid offending the majority of the people here. The relevance of this is: for anyone else going on exchange, I’d definitively recommend that you try and consider what the facts you learn about the cultural differences really mean for what to expect.

3. When applying for exchange there’s so much going on that you don’t care whether the university is more like a Victorian orphanage or Hogwarts, but it’s worth checking it out closely so you don’t end up studying business in a hippy-commune art school.

My problem is almost completely the opposite of the one above. I didn’t even know the university I’m attending was private until someone told me a couple of months ago. Even then, when I turned up for orientation I certainly didn’t expect to be entering a police state. Now, instead of being able to head down to Manning for a beer between classes, I’ll be escorted from the premises by police if my blood alcohol level is high during one of the random drug tests. Couple that with the contrast between my vinnies jumpers and the designer sweater of the average student and things aren’t looking too positive for my gentle assimilation into the university. I’m sure it will still be a great experience but, if I were to do it again, I’d definitely investigate the university itself more closely.

Well, I apologise for the rambling essay above, but I hope the tips were useful for some of you and entertaining for others. I haven’t officially started classes yet, and as I’ve bravely (read: stupidly) opted for half Spanish-half English, you probably won’t hear from me all that often, or at least not at such length (which may be a good thing!).

¡Hasta luego amigas!

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Exchange Predeparture Session

June, 2010


I’m happy to say that the transition from freaking out to being wildly excited happened smoothly during the exchange pre-departure session. The first hour involved the sombre bureaucratic warnings condemning us to fire and brimstone if we did not take out adequate insurance and register with smartraveller. Then, we split into country groups and those of us jetting off to Mexico spent the next hour talking to two people that had previously enjoyed the exuberant and corrupt process of settling in. This was where the excitement started. Firstly, our practical questions received much more comforting answers than the usual doom and gloom. For instance:

Question: “What happens if we don’t get our visa in time?”

Answer: “Take 2000 pesos to the immigration office, get a visa application, take it around the back of the office, have the little men with typewriters fill it out and hand it back in.”

Question: “What happens if you drive without a licence?”

Answer: “Make sure you have 500 pesos on hand to give to the police officer.”

Question: “What’s the legal drinking age in Mexico?”

Answer: “Whatever age you happen to be.”

And then secondly, the obvious nostalgia of the two guys who had been to Mexico when they answered our questions or insisted that we HAD to attend such and such festival and visit such and such town was hugely comforting. They had both obviously adored the experience and could barely remember the inconveniences of its organisation. This was exactly what I had been hoping for. With my academic credit approved, visa application in the works and travel insurance pending, I can almost taste the coconut flavoured tequila and deliciously dodgy street food of Guadalajara. So, if anybody is in the process of applying for exchange and is having difficulty keeping that light at the end of the tunnel in sight, just wait until the next Mexican night at college and picture me in my sombrero and poncho, taco in hand, and hopefully it’ll make you feel much better.

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Preparing for an Exchange

i.e. Wading through red tape

March, 2010


When someone mentions the possibility of an exchange, your mind instantly jumps to the wildly exciting aspects; a colourful new culture, fantastic food and a whole bunch of crazy adventures. Unfortunately, people rarely introduce the idea of an exchange with the tagline:

“Ever wanted the opportunity to gain an intimate knowledge of the course catalogue of another uni simply so you can pick four courses that may or may not actually be on offer and attempt to convince Sydney uni that they should let you count these ephemeral courses towards your degree? With an exchange you can do this AND juggle your uni work so you don’t fail and get kicked out of the exchange program AS WELL AS suppress your increasing nausea as you watch the exploding prices of those flights you can’t book until an undetermined point in the future when you might find out that you are actually going on exchange!”

Sitting here with an arm full of expensive typhoid, hepatitis A and yellow fever trying to decide whether malaria pills or accommodation are more important, it sure doesn’t seem quite as alluring as when I first started the application process last October. I am, at least, taking solace in the fact that I’m doing these preparations now, in March, rather than in June when I’m scheduled to leave. And having just gone through the vaccinations, the scholarship applications and the donation of thousands of my precious dollars to Qantas’ ailing executives, my advice to anyone considering exchange would be: “make sure you are damn-well organised”.

However, as much time and energy as the bureaucracy takes up, it is not what occupies my thoughts most. When I think about my approaching exchange, I think about how good my Mexican host family will be at cooking. I think about how beautiful it will be on a beach in Ecuador where I’m taking Spanish lessons. And I think about the children I’m going to be looking after in a Mexican orphanage and their mischievous smiles after they’ve pulled some horrendous prank on me.

I may sound cynical and jaded when talking about the process of applying for exchange, but it’s all with the aim of making sure it runs as smoothly as possible, and I never ever lose sight of why I’m doing it. I don’t kid myself into believing that the actual exchange won’t include a decent amount of frustration, homesickness and embarrassing language and cultural barriers. But whatever happens, I’m positive that as long as I keep a decent sense of humour about it all, recognise the good things and appreciate the amazing opportunity I have, I’ll look back and be glad for every little bit. Well, apart from the bits I can’t remember courtesy of the Mexican national drink.

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For more information on student exchange at the University of Sydney, please click here.