Settled in and actually going to class

I didn't realize it had been 2 weeks since I actually posted on here! Time flies... when you can go to the beach everyday!!

But no, not every day. We do have to go to class here sometimes too, so this is what I've been up to...

I'm taking 3 classes (they call them units here and majors are called courses) here - Australian Studies, Sexology, and a Sociology class. In the Australian studies class it is all international students, mostly American and Canadian, and they teach us about the history of Australia up to modern day cultural aspects and we take some field trips around the city and watch a bunch of popular films, so that class is a lot of fun.

My sexology course here counts as a Psychology class back home and focuses a lot on gender differences and things like that, and the professor is amazing already. There are a lot of us in that class together so it should be fun and very interesting.

My last class is my favorite though. It is a sociology class about environmental climate change and how that pushes our society to progress. So we're looking at different climate changes and environmental battles that people are dealing with and how that is a means for change. I have to do a project in that class and one girl from Canada and I will be doing how coastal communities have found ways to deal with different changes and climates over the years and how they adapt quickly so that they can survive. This class also counts directly toward my major back home, so it works out and I'm excited to learn from this professor.

I have each class 1 day a week for 3 hours a day. So I go to class Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday from 1-4. The rest of the time... well... I don't know where it goes. By now all of us have paid for gym memberships because we were so bored and needed something physical to do that was in the air conditioning :-) So a few of us always end up at the gym together every couple days after class which is better than I do at home, so I guess that is a good change here so far. Other than that I am still hunting for a job. Here they don't really have job applications that you fill out, but you just have to bring a resume into restaurants and things like that so I took a resume into the mall, but haven't heard back so I'm headed to the city restaurants Monday morning to see if I can get hired there. My student advisor told me to look for some day time jobs so I would still have the evenings off and not have to pay for a cab home, but I also think night time would be fun so that I could still go to the beach. So I'm still on the hunt, but it is becoming more difficult than I thought it would be!!

As for the beach, it takes us about 45mins - 1 hour to get to the beach by bus which isn't horrible, since it is really only 20 mins by car. I try to get my work done on Wednesdays when I don't have class then go to the beach at least once or twice over the weekend. I've also been finding it is nice to catch a bus into the city and sit down by the water on the grass to read everything. There is a lot of reading outside of classes since we aren't in class very much, and everyone has been telling us to keep up with the readings... but I'm never very productive in my room, so down by the water forced me to do it since I didn't have a computer in front of me.

Another battle this week was the library here... It might be the worst building that I have been in on this campus. There are hardly any computers and standardly they crash in the middle of the day, so it's hopeless. I went all the way up to the 6th floor where it was supposed to be silent study and that was a joke. With some many international students I don't think that they paid attention or realized that they weren't supposed to be talking but they were. It must be their favorite place to go because I don't see them talking anywhere else but in the library! So that's out of the question from now on...

So that has been the past two weeks. I'm pretty much settled into my room now and working on meeting some people in my classes which is nice because everyone is starting to get tired of each other because we are together for everything that we do. I'm still struggling with finding foods to cook, I'm stuck with pretty basic stuff... aka grilled chicken and broccoli haha. But I'm working on that, too.

The other interesting thing that I picked up over the past couple weeks is that even though Australia as a whole seems to be 10 years behind the U.S. style and fashion wise, their TV stars and models etc. are not all skinny, tall, and gorgeous. I started watching a little bit of TV on my nights off and realized that the truly "Australian" tv shows don't have all gorgeous people or models on them which is actually refreshing to see. However, they are all last years episodes of U.S. shows so I guess I'll catch up on the Grey's anatomy and House shows that I missed!