Well the first two weeks here seemed to go by rather slowly as I became adjusted and classes started up, however this past week seemed to fly by. Monday was my day off from classes so I went out to lunch with Julie, Mary-Beth, Bret and Matt who is from Australia who we had met at one of the orientations. We went to Grill’d which is right down the road on Glenferrie and is some of the best food I’ve had here so far. I got a hamburger with tasty cheese (which we know as cheddar cheese), salad (lettuce) and bacon on Panini bread. After lunch Bret had to go back to class but the rest of us walked around Hawthorn, walking to where the shops end on Glenferrie and back down again to school, stopping in a movie store similar to Blockbuster and a few computer stores.
Tuesday I had my first lab for Fluid Mechanics and we used four different methods for measuring airflow through a tube and had to decide which method was most accurate. After my lab I went grocery shopping with Bret, this time at Coles which is only a little past Safeway. The food here is generally the same as in America with some different brands and some of the same brands. I’ve been eating generally ham and cheese for lunch and pasta, sausage and hamburger among other things for dinner. I wasn’t aware of this but our microwave doubles as an oven, I just haven’t figured out how to use it as an oven yet. After all that grocery shopping Bret and I ended up going out to dinner where our roommate Conrad works at a place called the Spudbar. There they mostly serve baked potatoes which you can load with a wide variety of vegetables and they also serve salads.
Wednesday I had two lectures, one for Geomechanics and one for Fluid Mechanics. In Geomechanics we went over identifying sedimentary and metamorphic rocks as well as looking at maps of the rock formation of the Melbourne area. Wednesday night I went to Prahran with Bret and a group of kids from Australia. One of them, Max, had a friend who he grew up with playing in his band at a nightclub so we all went down to check it out. Before the show we went to a restaurant called the Lucky Coq where they had excellent pizza. Although Bret and I ate earlier, we decided to split a pizza as they seemed too good to pass up as well as only being $4 for any pizza. These were personal sized pizzas cooked in a brick oven and we split a salmon and spinach pizza and it goes up there as one of the best foods I’ve had so far and definitely worth making a trip back for. After dinner we went to the Revolver Upstairs to see the show in the one room venue. They were a rock band with a guitarist, drummer and bassist and were pretty good, especially with this being their first show they had ever played. They played for about an hour with generally the only people there being ones that knew them. There had been a band on before them so I assume that this is a place for a variety of bands to get some stage time and get started up.
Thursday was a rather slow day. I had my History of Ideas lecture followed by the tutorial where we talked about the Age of Reason and how people used to view nature as something that God created for humans to use and used nature to justify the existence of God. After my tutorial for History of Ideas I had a tutorial for Fluid Mechanics which was a class of about 20 and we went through selected problems from the chapters we had gone over in the lectures so far. Later that night we all went out to the Hawthorn for toga night, although only a few people were dressed in a toga.
Friday I had a tutorial for Fluid Mechanics for an hour to further go over the material we went over during the lecture that week. I finished the day with a tutorial in Geomechanics where we were given samples of sedimentary and metamorphic rocks to identify. After class Julie, Mary-Beth and I went to STA Travel to get some information on making a trip to Cairns for our spring break which is a week off at the end of September. We put a temporary trip together which includes going to the Great Barrier Reef and taking a hot air balloon ride as well as taking a few other excursions. We’re probably going to finalize our trip this week to ensure nothing has filled up since that’s a busy time of year for going to Cairns. After checking that out we went to an Australian Rules Football game with a lot of other international students, which was at the Telstra Dome right in the middle of Melbourne. I had watched a few games on tv so I had some sort of idea how the game was played. The game is played on an oval shaped field with 18 players on each side and four goal posts on each side. To score a goal you have to kick it through the middle two posts for 6 points or the outer two posts for 1 point. To pass you can either kick it and if caught that person has a free pass or you can punch it out of your hand to another player although you can then be tackled. It’s a very fast paced game with a lot of scoring, tackling and no protective pads. After the game a group of us went out to the city for a little bit and met up with some other kids who were also at the game.
On Saturday Mary-Beth, Julie and I went into the city and went to the Melbourne Aquarium. It was fairly big and had an Oceanarium which was filled with sharks, stingrays and other fish and had tunnels to walk under the water which was pretty cool. After the aquarium we went to the tallest residential building in the world which had a skydeck in one of the top floors which looked out over the city. They also had a glass cube that we went in that went 3 meters over the edge of the building and we could look straight down to the ground and look out over the city. I had done something similar to this when I went to Toronto with my Dad and went up the CN tower and they had a glass floor which we could walk across. Later that night some friends of mine were having a birthday party in my building so I went with Bret and some others and was able to meet some more people.
Sunday I stayed in and watched the end of the Olympics. I really wanted to watch the USA vs. Spain basketball game but as it’s not as big a deal here as it is in the US I only saw about a quarter and a half as they squeezed it between a footy game and their 6 o’clock news. I went out to dinner at the Spudbar again and got a free potato with Bret and our other roommate Steve. Afterwards Bret and I walked down Glenferrie to an ice cream shop before returning to watch the closing ceremonies of the Olympics.
I’ve put up pictures from the aquarium and the footy game on that same website but I can’t add any more photos for a month so below are some more photo’s I took of Melbourne. Well that’s all for now, I’ll update you in a week!
Hans
Monday, August 25, 2008
Monday, August 18, 2008
Photo's
You can check out some photo's I've taken here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29732322@N08/page1/
There are various pictures from my trip to the Healesville Sanctuary along with some other random pictures. More to come soon!
There are various pictures from my trip to the Healesville Sanctuary along with some other random pictures. More to come soon!
First Two Weeks
Hello Everyone,
I decided to start a blog so I could keep in contact with more people about my Australian experiences. I hope to keep this updated about once a week, so be looking for a new entry each Sunday. To give just a brief background, this opportunity was presented last November in one of my Civil Engineering classes by Joy Erb who is the Student Services Coordinator for the Engineering department. Coming into Northeastern I wanted to explore the option of doing a study abroad and figured my Middler year would be a good year to do it as I’ve been in school long enough but at the same time if I wasn’t accepted to a program I would still have time to do one. I explored the few other options for Civil Engineering but this seemed the most interesting. Well so far it has been great. My flight left Boston at 5:10pm on Friday, August 1st and thirty hours later added on to the fourteen hour time difference I arrived at Swinburne University at my on campus residence in the afternoon on August 3rd (August 2nd back east). I traveled over with two girls from Northeastern, Mary-Beth and Julie and we had only met once before the trip so we were all basically going in alone.
Some initial reactions from when we landed: it’s cold. Not New England winter cold, but certainly colder than
Once we arrived and got checked into our rooms we walked out to Glenferrie road which is a main road in our
We jumped right into things on Monday with an orientation for international students. There they had various people come in to talk to us such as an agent from STA travel about various opportunities to travel and a professor came in to talk to us about what to expect in our classes. They took us out to lunch where we were able to meet and mingle with other international students and we also broke up into out various studies where we could meet other international students in our specific study such as engineering for myself. The day ended with about a third of us being led into the city by train with the orientation leaders. The train stop is only a minute walk from my dorm with the city about a fifteen minute train ride away, making it very convenient to get in and out of the city. The train system here is very efficient with trains running every fifteen minutes or so for ones comparable to the commuter rail system in
Tuesday we spent hanging around Hawthorn. Julie, Mary-Beth and I got pay-as-you-go cell phones at Crazy John’s and then went grocery shopping at Safeway which is, again, right around the corner from our dorms. Wednesday and Thursday we had orientations with our specific studies for all incoming students, although the vast majority in engineering were international students with a few new local students. These orientations served as a good tool to meet other students in engineering as well as take a campus tour and meet a few professors. Afterwards they took us to the Glenferrie Hotel to again meet and mingle with other incoming students, and to continue with this trend, there was a barbecue in our building on Wednesday and a barbecue in the west building of the same complex on Thursday. These have been great as I’ve met people from all over the world and we’ve gone out to a local bar called the Hawthorn where many people from the university tend to hang out on any given night.
On Friday they gave the international students the opportunity to go on an excursion to the Healesville Sanctuary which most of us took advantage of. It was a great day as we were able to see Koala’s, Dingo’s, Wallabies, Emu’s, Pelican’s a Tasmanian Devil and of course, Kangaroo’s which we were even able to hand-feed and pet. On our trip back we did a little bit of wine tasting at a wine vineyard, although the vineyard wasn’t really in season so I’m sure it is much more beautiful in the summer. Nonetheless the vast fields and rolling hills reminded me a little of
Saturday Bret and I went into the city and walked around a little bit along the
Monday was the first day of classes but I didn’t have any classes scheduled for Monday so I took the day to do some miscellaneous things such as grocery shopping and to do some laundry. Tuesday was my first scheduled class, a lab for Fluid Mechanics, however being the first week no labs were scheduled since we had yet to have our lecture for the class. So my classes started up Wednesday morning, starting with my Geomechanics lecture. Geomechanics is primarily used for foundation building, combining soil mechanics with geology. I believe at Northeastern the equivalent would be Soil Mechanics however I am interested to learn about rocks as well. In the afternoon I had my first Fluid Mechanics lecture which seems like it will deal with a lot of physics. Thankfully at Northeastern they taught us in International Standard Units (SI units) so I learned mostly in the metric system with some in the American system. Wednesday night we again had a barbecue in my residence which I believe is a regular occurrence each Wednesday.
Thursday I started the day with my History of Ideas lecture followed by the tutorial for the class. The tutorials are just the class broken into a smaller section to get a more focused learning. The History of Ideas is a history class based on the idea of progress, specifically in the sciences and the development and consequences of ideas. This class probably excites me most as it isn’t something I would have been able to take at Northeastern and it seems like it will be a fun history class. Friday I started the day with another lecture in Fluid Mechanics, although it was only an hour compared to the two hours I had for the other lecture. This lecture focuses just on solving problems which will be helpful to better understand the material. After the tutorial I had an hour break before my Geomechanics tutorial where we examined various rocks and distinguished different properties to specify each rock. After classes on Friday there was another welcome event for new students, this time for us to be paired with a local student so we could have a local connection. Although I didn’t find my local student I still met other local students and had a good time.
Saturday I went into the city with Bret, Julie and Mary-Beth to do some shopping and explore a little more. Bret and I weren’t up for much shopping so we went downtown and walked around a little before meeting up again with Mary-Beth and Julie for dinner at Beer Deluxe. There they had a large variety of beers as well as hamburgers and chicken burgers for dinner. After our dinner we headed back to campus before meeting up with a group of mostly Australians and heading back into the city for the night. Sunday, Mary-Beth, Julie and I went into the city to go to the movies to see Pineapple Express at a movie theater in a mall in Melbourne Central. The mall had about five floors with a huge atrium, although each floor didn’t seem to have too many stores.
So far I have been having a great time. There’s a lot that I still want to get out and see and hopefully can do most of what I want to do. I’ve heard
Hans
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