First day of Class and Wandering

July 18th

Today was the first day that I actually had to do something for the 6 credits that I will be getting while I am here. Starting today we have class at Macquarie University from 8:30-2:30 but only till Thursday this week. Today we had 3 different speakers come in and talk to us about various areas of curriculum that are used in Australia. I was not all to impressed with the first speaker but the last two definitely brought up some interesting information. One of the things that is put into the schedule during our class time is "Morning Tea"! It's basically a 1/2hr break with snacks, coffee, and tea and it definitely makes it easier to sit through class with that break in there. One of the things that our professor brought for us to try were Lamingtons (Australia thing), which is like a white cake square covered with chocolate and coconut. She also made us Anzac cookies, which were apparently something that were commonly given to Australian soldiers during WWI. I found the Anzac cookies to be much more appealing!  I guess they even have this time set aside in the schools as well, so that should be interesting to experience once I get in the classroom.

After class we came back to the dorms for a little while, before heading out to Darling Harbour to do some exploring with Katie, Stephanie, Amy and Lauren. We managed to figure out how to take the right train combination to get there and one of the first things that we saw when we got out of the train station was the Sydney Harbor Bridge and Opera House! We all took our time taking lots of pictures of both, but once we got to the Opera House it started to rain! Luckily it didn't rain the whole time we were out, just a little bit here and there. I was also bummed that it started gettin dark out already because I was having a hard time getting some good pictures with my camera, but I think I was able to get some pretty good ones. It's crazy how early it gets dark out here! Since it is technically winter here right now, it's pretty much dark out around 5pm just like our winters. However, since just a week ago it didn't get dark out till like 9 it has really been throwing me off as to what time it is and I feel like I have been getting tired a lot earlier than usual.

After all of the picture taking we decided we were starting to get hungry, but didn't really want to spend too much money. The food (along with everything else) is so expensive here!! We decided to eat where we ate the previous night and split some stuff; Amy and I decided on a salad, but had to get the wedges with sour cream and sweet chili sauce that we had the day before since they were so good! Once we ate we really didn't know what else to do so we decided to head back to the dorms and catch up on blogs and sleep:)