Week 9

After an exhausting day of travel on Monday, I was able to take the day on Tuesday to relax in Melbourne. Monday Night Football was on so Brett, Keian and I went to the residential hall to watch it to keep up with our American sports. While we were gone, the local AFL team the Hawks won the championship and the entire town of Hawthorn went wild and celebrated in the streets and had a great time. It was too bad we missed it but we were too busy snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef which we saw as a good enough tradeoff. After the football game I did some grocery shopping at Safeway and did some homework for the remainder of the evening. Wednesday I was back to class after the nice long break but wasn’t ready to get back to it. I had my Geomechanics and Fluid Mechanics lectures for the day and was still so exhausted from the trip that I took a nap after my Fluids class. Well rested, I did some homework and went out with the “American Crew” to the Nevermind for trivia which we inevitably lost but was still a good time.

Thursday was just another typical day, with my History of Ideas lecture in the morning, followed by the tutorial and then my tutorial for Fluid Mechanics with less people seeming to be showing up for each class. I found the same type of attendance patterns in Australia as I do at Northeastern, with most of the students having shown up the first few weeks and week by week it could vary how many decided to come. Thursday night I stayed in to finish up my homework for Geomechanics the next day and then hung out with Brett in the apartment. Friday I had my extra Fluids tutorial in the morning about what we had gone over in class and then had a quiz in my Geomechanics Tutorial. That evening a group of us went out to the town Richmond where we had yet to go so we could experience a different part of the city. The town was pretty alive and we had a good time out exploring. Saturday morning Keian, Mary Beth, Julie, Josh, Brian, Mike and I went to a pub near St. Kilda that was celebrating Octoberfest so we decided to check it out. They went all out, with a band with an accordion player and all the waiters and waitresses in lederhosens while serving classic food like sausages with sauerkraut. After spending a good amount of time there we headed back to our place, got some Grill’d for dinner and hung out in our apartment building with a group of Australians for the evening. Sunday was daylight savings time which pushed us another hour away from the time back home, putting us now 15 hours ahead. Brett and I went down to the Crown Casino to hang out, watch some sports and play at the casino a little bit. After a long weekend we just relaxed that night and watched a movie in our apartment room.