So it's been a little while since I've last written. I guess with the start of classes, compulsory writing just seems silly, but I'll give it a go for the sake of some story telling.
I suppose I'll start with the last interesting thing to happen, which would have been my weekend trip out to the country. I caught a train out to Elisa's on Friday evening and arrived just in time for some dinner. We went and ordered some Thai food, I got some beef and vegetables (and pineapple! my new favorite food in everything) stirfried with sweet and sour sauce, it was tasty. While we waited for the food we took a walk down through town to go rent some movies for the night. I picked out Salt, since I'd heard good things and didn't feel like perusing for anything else. Elisa picked out Wolf Creek, a lovely Australian horror film. I made the mistake of telling her that I wanted to go to the outback, so she decided to make me watch a movie where some nice tourist girls traveling across the country get picked up by a guy, who starts off nice and helpful and ends up torturing and killing them. Apparently it's also based on true events, as the guy that they were traveling with was able to get away, though they never found the man. Elisa, her sister Nancy, and I all had dinner and watched the two movies. I was slightly put off by Wolf Creek, complaining that now I'm not going to know if someone I meet is just trying to be nice or wants to kill me, but I'm still set on going to the outback. Besides, I'm certain I know how to shoot a gun better than the girls in the movie, so I should be fine either way.
The next day we woke up early, around 9am or so, and I hung out for a bit while Elisa finished up her morning chores. Her mom made a delicious breakfast of either eggs and bacon or french toast--I went for the french toast. After breakfast and some more cleaning, Michael, one of Elisa's guy friends who I'd met at dinner a few weeks ago in the city, joined us and we were off to Trentham to find a waterfall to play in for the afternoon. Even after a wrong turn or two, (I'm quickly catching onto Elisa's lack of direction, and to be fair the sign for the falls was quite small and obscure) it only took about a half hour or so to get there. There was a nice little paved path for the "lookout" to the falls, and then on the other side of the small metal fence was a much smaller, narrow goat path sort of thing that led down to the base of the waterfall.
The couple that was there when we first arrived left after a few minutes so we had the place to ourselves for the next hour or so. We had some fun taking pictures and Michael and I went climbing back up under the waterfall. It wasn't an exceptionally warm day, probably in the mid 70s, but we were still determined to go for a dip. The water was absolutely freezing, to put it lightly. It wasn't even the sort of cold that slowly doesn't feel so bad after you give yourself some time to get used to it, it was more than happy to remain at pneumonia-inducing temperatues, I'm sure. After braving the cold and navigating the big pointy rocks we ended up seated under the waterfall. It was deafening, blinding, probably power-washing a few layers of skin off, but still an absolute blast. I think we only lasted 10 to 15 minutes in the water before we retreated to dry land and warm sun.
We spread some towels out on the big boulder conveniently located infront of the falls and laid out in the sun to dry off and warm up a bit. As we were occasionally misted with some icey cold waterfall water, a few more people came wandering down the path to have a look at the fall. I was slightly concerned that our sun bathing might be taking away from the scenery for these poor folks, but that was before one of the woman's presumed husband decided to strip down to his tidy-whities and go for a stroll behind the falls so she could take pictures while he posed. It was slightly disturbing, but at least it made me feel a little better about our much more socially acceptable presence. Once we were all dry, we drove back into town for lunch. Elisa and I got some rather fancy and extremely messy BLTs while Michael complained and picked at some sort of bread and dips plate.
After the drive home, the plan was to meet up with Michael and Jay on the 3 something train into the city and then head to Zack's house for the rest of the afternoon. It was a lovely plan, but it didn't quite work out. Turns out they were doing some work on the rails between Woodend and Melbourne and we could only take a bus there, but the bus wasn't leaving for another hour or so. We walked into town, hung out for a bit to kill the time, and then got on the bus. Conveniently, we didn't have to pay anything for the ride all the way into the city, but it did take a lot longer than the train. By the time we got into the city, some time after 6, I decided to just call it a night and head home instead of accompany the group to Zach's, which would have involved another 45 minute or so train ride.
From what I recall, Sunday was cold and rainy so there wasn't anything too exciting going on. Monday brought with it the much anticipated (or dreaded) start of classes. Luckily, one of the few nice things about living at unilodge is that the location is amazingly convenient. Campus is directly across the street, and even though most of my classes are on the far side of campus, it still only takes 5 minutes at most to walk to them. My first class was Genetics, which was in a normal sized lecture hall with about 300 or so kids in it. There isn't much to say on the class, the professors, or lecturers as they're called here, weren't exactly interesting and neither is the subject, but it's a requirement for my major so I'll suffer through it.
My next two classes are both of my zoology classes which are back to back in the same little lecture room. I think it's the only decent sized lecture room in the whole zoology building, so there aren't many other choices. The first class I had was my animal behavior class. From the classes I've had so far it seems like it's going to be really interesting. I haven't really studied the ecology and behavioral side of things in any of my classes at Penn State, and it's nice to see a different perspective. The lecturers are all really cool and interesting so far, and the class itself has very little work, just like all of the other classes here. There's only one main assignment, a "news and views" writing assignment that basically entails taking one of the 5 assigned scientific papers from a study and condensing the information into 1000 words or less. Other than that, you're required to peer review three papers from students in the class, and then there's one written final exam on the theory of the class and not on cramming in information. I'm sold.
The next class I had was Australian wildlife biology. The professor was a crazy little lady that ran around and spoke rather quickly, but she was entertaining. This class also seems like it's going to be really interesting. The weekly lab, or practical as they call them, usually involve going to the zoo or other parks and gardens nearby to observe and sketch the animals and birds that we see. Our first practical this week was in a lab room filled with a collection of preserved animals, birds, lizards, snakes, etc. that we had to go around an observe, sketch, identify, and answer a few questions on. Animals and drawing, what more could I ask for?
Unfortunately, my last class of the day wasn't nearly as successful as the others. It's my history class, called colonizing Australia, and should be at least vaguely interesting . As I quickly found out though, the lecturer can easily make or break a class. This guy spent the entire hour and a half of the class bent over the desk and reading off of what sounded like an extremely long, obtuse, and generally useless essay. It wasn't even like he was giving a lecture at all, and he would only look up from time and time again to change the slide to another picture of a map or something similar and then continue on in his monotonous chanting. It was extremely painful trying to listen to him--he kept quoting random historians and primary documents but I couldn't tell when the quotes ended and when his archaic rambling began again. I think by the end of the class someone may or may not have landed on Australia, but that's more of an educated guess than anything else. Fortunately, there are only two essays that we need to write for the class, so I think I'm going to try to stick it out and just get the work done.
For the most part, the rest of the week was spent going to classes, hanging out at unilodge, or stealing wifi from the university and doing enjoyable things like watching tv or downloading music that I can't do on my limited bandwidth in my room. It's generally been overcast, drizzly, windy, and in the 60s throughout the week. I know that those complaints aren't falling on sympathetic ears for those of you in the northern hemisphere still stuck in the throes of winter, but still, it's not nice. I've heard time and time again that this summer is one of the coldest and wettest summers they've had in decades. I guess that's better than raging forest fires, but still, I wouldn't mind some sun now and then.
One highlight of the week was Wednesday night. Elisa was in the city for one of her classes and I was invited along to meet up with her and a bunch of her friends from uni. We went to the night market first, which was really fun. It's at the victoria market, which is usually home to various vendors during the days that sell vegetables, meat, etc. But once a week in the summer season they have the night market with live music, food stands selling just about anything you could ever want, and other vendors selling silk clothing, jewelry, and other odds and ends. I had bratwurst and sauerkraut for dinner washed down with sangria, the most popular drink at the market it would seem, and then spent some time looking around at all of the vendors with Elisa. After we'd had a look at anything that looked interesting we headed off into the city to go find her friends again. We met up at bar called either Highlander or All the Tired Horses, I'm not sure which, though I prefer the horse version obviously. The rest of the evening was spent dancing with everyone to a lovely ensemble of 60's music.
Thursday afternoon I met up with Elisa again after her classes for lunch. We went to a place in the city called Crossways, I think. It's a Hare Krishna run place that serves a set menu of vegetarian lunches every day of the week. Apparently all of the proceeds go towards charity and the people that work there are all volunteers. Wednesday's meal was a big helping of tofu and vegetable curry and rice, cherry havlava with custard for desert, and then all you can drink koolaid, called cordial here, for a grand total of 5 dollars. I'd never had tofu before, and wasn't exactly impressed, but otherwise it was really good food. I'll be going there more often for lunches, that's for sure. After lunch Elisa had some time to kill before her next class so we wandered around the mall at Melbourne Central.
I'm not sure what the plan is for the weekend yet, but I'll probably be headed back out to the country to do some more sightseeing with Elisa. It's always nice to be able to get out of the city.
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