Week 5

Now a week into September I can see things changing around here. Spring is clearly on its way with a few sunny days this past week while the birds are chirping and the trees are beginning to bloom. It rained at times but nothing like the rain that just hit New England or the rest of the east coast and south for that matter. It sounded as if the storm that hit New Orleans thankfully wasn’t as bad as predicted or close to that of Katrina. I’ve been watching some of the news here but mostly have been getting it off the internet. I wanted to touch upon a cultural thing I’m still trying to pick up but very prevalent here. Three common phrases I hear a lot are “mate”, “cheers”, and “no worries” which I feel are reflective of the Australian culture as a whole. Many people refer to others as their “mate”, whether male or female, when greeting each other which creates a friendly bond whether they know them well or not at all. “Cheers” is a common way to say “thank you” while “no worries” is often used to say “you’re welcome”. They seem like less proper ways to express these terms but reflect a friendlier atmosphere, which is how I generally feel about Australians.

Well it was another good week here in Australia. Monday was my day to relax which I spent around the apartment and getting some work done. Tuesday was my Fluid Mechanics lab. This week we observed the flow of water through a string of pipes which were connected with different diameter joints as well as a section of pipe that had a larger diameter than the rest of the pipe. With these variations we observed how each affected the flow of water. Tuesday evening Julie, Brett and I went to St. Kilda which is south of the city and went to dinner. There we met up with Keian and Erica from Cal Poly, Josh from Pennsylvania, Ben and Tosha from England and Mary-Beth for this restaurants Tuesday night special of $10 steak, potatoes and a salad and it was excellent. This was a fairly classy restaurant and they only had this special from 5pm-7pm so we were able to get in on it and try it.
Wednesday we finished our unit in Geomechanics on soil identification and discussed how to separate a soil mix to identify how much of the mix is gravel, sand and fine grains by using a sieve analysis which I had already learned to do back at Northeastern last fall semester. We also formed groups for a final project we have to present at the end of the semester and our group is tentatively doing Death Valley but that isn’t confirmed yet. My fluids lecture was in the afternoon where we primarily focused on learning the Bernoulli Equation which relates pressure, velocity and elevation in dealing with flowing fluids.

Thursday I had my History of Ideas lecture and tutorial and we are now progressing through the Enlightenment period by comparing and contrasting popular views of the time and how, with new scientific evidence surfacing, each view expressed them and perceived the opposite point of view. In the afternoon I had a my tutorial for Fluid Mechanics where we reviewed the previous weeks material by doing a few sample problems and worked on an assignment due on Monday. After classes Brett, Keian, Brian from Cal Poly and Mike from Michigan and I went to Chapel Street and got food at the Lucky Coq as only Brett and I had been there before.

Friday I started the day with a lecture in Fluid Mechanics which went over problems from this weeks lecture. After that I had my first lab for Geomechanics which was more of an introduction to the lab then actual lab work. Our Professor had gone over some of the procedure to the lab in our lecture but the tutorial instructor went over more fully what we were assigned to do. Our lab is to dig about a meter down into the earth and record the type of soil we find and some properties of that soil as we dig deeper. We then bring that soil back to the lab and do some tests on it which I’ll go into more detail about once we’ve conducted the experiment. After the lab was my tutorial for Geomechanics and we did some practice work on how to read data from a sieve analysis and how to plot it on a graph. After classes a large group of us made dinner on the grill in my building and I grilled some Kangaroo. It was pretty good although it had been hyped and I don’t think I made it as good as it could be so I’ll have to try it again but at an actual restaurant. Keian had gotten some footy tickets so he, Brett, Mike and I went to see Hawthorn’s first playoff game and it was heaps of fun (heaps is another popular word here). There are a lot of teams from different suburbs of Melbourne and around Victoria with a few teams outside of Victoria. Hawthorn won the game which made it that much more fun. Afterwords we went to Chapel Street to meet up with Mary-Beth, Julie, Erica, Ben and Tosha and hung around there for a little while.

On Saturday the bulk of the group I had been hanging out with this past week all went out to Lygon Street where Mary-Beth, Julie and I had gone for Italian food. This time we went to a different restaurant and had an excellent meal, with almost all 10 of us ordering a different meal from a variety of pasta dishes to chicken, veal, and a great fish dish that I got with shrimp on top. After walking off our dinner we got gelato which was very good as well. Sunday Mary-Beth and I went to see Batman: The Dark Knight at the IMAX since neither of us had seen it yet while most everyone else had. It lived up to the hype (at least for me) and the IMAX made it an even greater experience.

Well, another week has come and gone and a new week is upon me. In store for this week so far is a fairly heavy workload and a possible weekend trip. I’ll let you know of my endeavors next week!