Monday I had my first class in Australia! At noon... Having been out the night before I made the (at the time) great decision to sleep through bfast. Theeen after I actually got up did I realise that my class was going to knock out lunch time at the college. Not a terribly big deal I just had to buy lunch on campus but I've found myself turning into a bit of a scrooge with my money. Everytime I look at something I can't help but think "that's not worth that!" For example I won't be eating at McDonald's or Maccers as the Aussies call it anytime soon, they don't even have a dollar menu! At the same time its made me more aware of how cheap a lot things really are for us in the states and then the mind can't help but wander into thoughts of the reasons that we're able to get such cheap food, clothing, etc.
But back to class or rather back to academic class, my first and only class Monday was Second Language Acquisition, a pretty self explanatory title I think. I knew I was going to like the professor when a student started saying something "Surely..." and the prof cut her off saying "Don't call me Shirley!" Oh you silly Australians and your theft of American culture.
The Monday night Croweek activity was an Irish pub crawl. At dinner they seated people at different tables that each had Irish last names on them (and some with more creative "Irish" last names). The tables had watered down goon (dyed green of course) and loads of green confetti all over the tables (which still appears all over the college in new places every day). The food was decent, nothing particularly Irish unless you count potatoes, the only other really interesting bit was a limerick contest and let me tell you, college students are nothing if not extremely inventive at creating lovely sexual rhymes.
After dinner, more goon drinking ensued. Fuster and I were introduced to the Australian goon equivalent of a keg stand, called a "liedown" which basically consisted of you lying down and have goon poured into your mouth. Let it be known that I rocked that (thanks for the good drinking blood mom). We had been informed time and time again that Australians were not into drinking games but in my brief experience it seems like many of them have actually been very interested in learning our drinking games. I was more than happy to introduce them to a simple game called "Up the River, Down the River".
The actual pub crawl was sadly rather anticlimatic. The first pub was not particularly exciting and the second and third pubs were actually CLOSED! Never found out what was up with that, we'd arranged our pub crawl with the pubs ahead of time so who knows. It worked out in the favor of the Victoria or Vic where wandered to instead (keep in mind you have to picture a mob of about 100-150+ drunken college students streaming through the streets). It had a pretty sweet dance floor and Dj as well as pool tables so we had no lack of entertainment there.
Oh jeez lecture just ended. I'll have to finish this post up back in the room...
Alrighty back at it. So tuesday I had Advanced Bioinformatics (basically using computers to do genetic sequencing, VERY cool stuff) which I had originally thought would be out of my league because I haven't had any bio-ish classes since high school but I've had two lectures now and think it should be doable. Followed that up with Australia Marine Biology. Now let me start off by saying that Dickinson basically tells us to take this course not so much for the actual course but more for the two field trips you go on, one up to the Great Barrier Reef and another to Moreton Island. Key part: THEY PAY FOR IT! So most of us Dson students are in it as well as large number of other international students with a decent number of Aussies too. Met a girl from Germany who with any luck I shall be seeing more of in my time here :)
Next came Artificial Intelligence. I was pretty pumped for this course but had a heck of a time finding the bloody lecture room. It was located in this complex of 4 or 5 buildings but no map would tell me which one it was in... So I wandered around and finally stumbled across some arrows written in chalk on one of the buildings that managed to get me there. I sat in the lecture for about 30 minutes and then walked out. Two main reasons: I couldn't stand the lecturer's voice and I remembered being explicitly told by a couple friends who had been here last year saying "Phil, don't take AI, the prof is terrible and you will learn nothing." Sweet deal for me really, I had been signed up for five classes and had been worried I wouldn't be able to pick one to drop (I can only take four courses). So thank you miss, you made my life much easier!
Tuesday night's event was called Black and White night, which was a bit more complicated than the rest of our activities. Basically it was like all the stages of marriage crammed into one night. Interested parties had to arrange some sort of public proposal and whichever proposal the exec board deemed the best would be married that evening. That night we had formal dinner, which I'm just going to call Harry Potter dinner. We all wear our wizard gowns and have a "nice" dinner with a little music and speaker. Cool but not overly exciting. At dinner one guy had his friends pick of the chair of his fiancee-to-be and carry her up to the grand piano where sang in the most terrible of voices. It was hilaaaarious (and they ended up getting married that night). One of my faves though came after the dinner. My friend, Spread had walked into this girl's biology lecture, apologised to the lecturer of course, and proposed right in the middle of this 100+ person lecture hall. Some girl in the crowd actually booed! The video of the thing was really funny.
Wednesday brought my Contemporary Australia course and more marine biology. It was karaoke night but people were pretty drained after the prior night's festivities so most of us didn't go out. We'd been rocking out since Sunday and had just had a wedding the night before so who could blame us! Today has been pretty relaxed, only had two classes and now I'm done for the week! Tonight is a big party at the Chalk again, they're apparently going to make over 40 tonnes of snow and it's also our All college exchange so people from each of the 10 UQ colleges will be there as well as whoever else might come. Fingers crossed we actually get in!
Whew that seemed like a lot, hopefully its not too boring of a read. I'll try to make my future posts a little more exciting for my two followers haha. Cheers!
you are anything but boring
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