My "Week"

Happy Birthday Mom! This post is going up as a special birthday present to her.

So, let’s go through my week, which is basically just Tuesday and Wednesday – everything else counts as a weekend in my eyes.

Tuesday morning I wake up around 7 so I can take a shower and get ready for my 830 class. We, being my roommate and our friend Steph, go to breakfast at 730ish. Breakfast for the most part is just cereal – some days they have hot breakfast, like sausage, bacon, pancakes and eggs, but we all know I don’t eat any of those, so I stick to my cereal. I have started eating it with milk though – I don’t know why I had such a huge problem with it before, it’s actually quite manageable. Anyway, we hop on a shuttle to the campus and I have my 830 Redefining Eden: Indigenous people and the environment class.

I’m enjoying this class so far. It’s not specifically about aboriginals; it extends to indigenous knowledge worldwide. This week we learned about how indigenous knowledge tends to be more sacred and holistic than western knowledge. My professor isn’t advocating specifically for indigenous knowledge over western knowledge, but more for a blending of the two.

After that class, I walk to my 930 class – Australian Content: Media, Narrative and Celebrity. I think that if I were taking this class back home, I would probably drop it and take a different one, but I don’t feel like going through the whole process of approvals and what not. The class seems a little hokey to me – this is a new class, so I suppose I should cut the professor some slack, but in general it just feels like it’s all over the place. Then my professor took thirty minutes of class time going over motivation/time management techniques. I was kinda bothered by this – I’m a junior at a decent university, I think I know how to do these things. However, my irritation with the whole thing might just have been because I had to pee really badly.

Those two lectures are over by 1130 and my next class, my Australians and the Great War tutorial, doesn’t start until 330, so I walked back to my dorm and took a nap, among other little things. During that time, I’m usually able to talk to people from back home because it is night time back home and most of my friends/family are still awake. Oh! For lunch, at my dorm, they don’t actually serve lunch. At breakfast, they have a sandwich bar with different lunch meats and cheese and toppings, so you just make a sandwich and wrap it up for lunch.

Anyway, so I head back to uni for my last class of the day. Normally it will be a two hour tutorial, but it was shorter because it was the first one of the year. I’m really excited about this class – it’s good to learn a bit about history and apply it to war, especially seeing as how I’m going into an international security field, and what better to look at from a different perspective than World War 1? Even more exciting, I’m one of two Americans in the tutorial – which is basically a class of 12 people where we go over the lectures and go more in depth about some stuff. We started the tutorial off with trying to define war. While I see it as a highly technical term and I define most other things relatively technically as well, we talked about the events of 9/11 quite a bit. It was strange to see it from an international view – I felt that even though I was surrounded by people, they couldn’t actually understand what it was like to have that happen on your home soil. Although during WWII the Japanese bombed Darwin, a city in Northern Australia. Judging objectively, from an IR standpoint, I would say that 9/11 had worse consequences, but then again I don’t know how objective I can be.

After that class is over, at 530, I’m done for the day and I head back to International House for dinner and then Tuesday Topicals. I-house runs events every Tuesday and Thursday which are meant to broaden your horizons and what not. This most recent topical was a Faculty Face-Off, where everyone got in groups with their majors. Here, I’m in the faculty of Arts. It’s weird, back at AU, SIS is the most popular major…here, I have yet to find anyone else studying International Studies (as a major at least). I’m not used to being in the minority! Most of the people here that I know are engineers or science majors. Ha, oh well. I actually often think, maybe I should have picked a different school/country that is more relevant to international affairs, but I decided that I’m here not just for school but for the experience, and experience abroad is still experience abroad. Additionally on Tuesdays, I-House has supper, which is when they put out donuts, cookies, crackers, cheese, and people drink coffee and what not. It’s delicious! There are cookies here called Tim-Tams – at first, I didn’t think much of them, but I think there’s an exponential curve of how much you like them.

Wednesday mornings I have a tutorial for my Eden class at 930 to 1130, and then I don’t have my Great War lecture until 130. My friends Brett and Marissa (more about them later) and I met for lunch and decided to make it a weekly thing. It was a great feeling, walking out of my lecture at 230 and knowing that I was done for the week…One of the weeks here, week 4, I have two tutorial presentations which are actually quite a big deal, and I think to myself, Holy crap that week is going to suck! But then, I have to remember that my ‘weeks’ consist of two days of actual work, so it’s really nothing that is extensively terrible. I do have to start doing a lot of work for those presentations and for a few other things as well…I think that maybe I will devote my time on Saturday that I am not at the beach to doing homework. The readings are quite interesting, especially seeing as how it’s nothing that I’ve ever really learned about before.

Well, that right there is my week. I suppose I should say a few other things, like how the food (at least at I-house) is kinda bland – I’ve started putting salt on a lot of my food. Not a ton of salt, so my blood pressure should be fine, but enough to give the food more flavour. Every night for dinner, I-house has brown rice, white rice, two different kinds of vegetables, and a potato option. For the main meals, there are three meat eater options – chicken, beef, or fish – and one vegetarian option. The chicken is sketch for the most part/it doesn’t meet my standards – it’s often on the bone and doesn’t resemble chicken breast, so I’ve been getting beef a lot. I know that beef isn’t as healthy an option as chicken, so who knows, I may even start eating fish. I doubt it though. There is one food thing here that I absolutely love and know for sure that I am going to be very saddened to leave: sweet chili sauce. IT IS DELICIOUS! I’m going to bring a whole bunch back/import it myself from Australia if I have to.

Back to Brett and Marissa. The three of us are taking our spring break together – Marissa and I met on the plane from Chicago to LA and then she and I met Brett at the LA airport. It is there that we discovered a shared love for Lord of the Rings, and thus, our spring break (Easter/ Mid-Session Recess here) was borne. At the moment, we just bought our tickets to New Zealand. There are two islands to New Zealand and what we decided would be the most convenient way to get around would be to rent a mobile home and drive around to all the places we want to see in North Island, then take a ferry to South Island and see the places there before heading back to Uni. It is going to be an adventure of epic proportions! I am very excited indeed for this, because I love Lord of the Rings and being able to see where the movie was filmed I know will absolutely take my breath away. Not to mention I’ll be trekking across a country in a mobile home with two really awesome people!

I know a few people are aware that I went to Sydney last Saturday for the Gay Mardi Gras Parade, and I’ll have a post up about that sometime this weekend or so, because I’m actually going back into Sydney tomorrow to go to the aquarium, so I feel as though a joint post would be more efficient.

Finally, I’ve already picked up an Australian phrase. I was actually trying to say it before I left for Australia (I didn’t know it was an Australian phrase then, but regardless, I’ve picked it up now). It’s “no worries.” It can be used in place of you’re welcome, but it’s used all the time. Like today, someone floundered with my name, and then was like, hey, it was close enough, and I just smiled and said, very nonchalantly, ‘no worries.’ It’s perfect and I think it shows the Australian attitude towards everything very much so. And because I was already so apathetic, I think this fits in with my general outlook too. :D

I’m almost finished with this post. Today, I was at the beach for right around four and a half hours. Of course, I didn’t think to bring my camera, but I really should have. Probably around 4 I decided three and a half hours of tanning is enough and that perhaps I should go check out the water. It was so warm! After walking around for a bit looking for Mom’s birthday present (she loves it, I called her up to wish her a happy birthday and told her all about it) I just go in about knee deep and look for shark teeth, which involves me sticking my hand into the sand and looking through the little pebbles of sand and seashells in hopes of finding a tooth. After many unsuccessful attempts, me and my roommate go to this rock area right next to the beach, where there are tons of little pools of water supporting fish and seaweed and fun stuff like that. It was lots of fun crawling over it and seeing all the little pockets of life. Like I said before though, didn’t think to bring my camera. I don’t think I’ll make the mistake again, but I’ll probably go back to the little area to check it out and crawl all over the rocks again. It’s fun being active again, after spending so long in knee braces. I’m of course always conscious of my knee and its limitations, but I think that just doing things is a bit of a help for it too.

Once more, happy birthday mommy! And happy march 12 to everyone else out there too.