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
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