Tourist Tuesdays

I had a really good day in the city yesterday. Going into town by myself made me feel really independent. It also really made me look forward to go going to New Zealand, particularly Queenstown, where I’ll be completely on my own. I like being self-reliant.

I actually missed the bus that I had planned to take into the city by about two minutes. I saw it go past as I was walking down the hill and since the village’s bus station is pretty minor, it didn’t even stop. It sucks because I was on time, it was just early. I know now for next time though. I was able to walk to the next bus stop, which is on campus, and by the time I got there I caught a different bus that was going to the same place—the Queen Victoria Bus Station, which lets out in the center of the central city.

I spent the day wandering around and touring museums. I took some pictures of centrepoint tower, also known as Sydney tower to tourists. It was once a mere tourist destination as the tallest point in the city, but now it’s being used for advertisement. I went to the Hyde Park Barracks museum, which has plenty of information about Sydney’s past as a convict community. It was entirely interesting, but I took some cool pictures of the barrack recreation. Apparently they slept in hammocks. I find that really weird, for some reason, but maybe the wooden beds overflowing with people is still stuck in my mind from the tours I went on of the concentration camps in Europe.

Pretty fountain in some courtyard

Inside the barracks

Outside of the Hyde Park Barracks

Centrepoint Tower

Next was the Museum of Sydney, which I surprisingly found fascinating. This one wasn’t even on my list of museums to see, but since I could get in free, I figured I would go. The place wasn’t very large but they have a lot of interesting information about how Sydney has progressed as a community. I also really enjoyed their then and now exhibit, which showcased pictures from the past taken in the same place present day. A lot of people found pictures from their parents and grandparents and went to the same exact place to hold up the picture and take another snapshot. It was really cool. They also had two landscape photos of Sydney—one from the 1800’s and another from 2003. It’s amazing to see how much the landscape has changed. For example, there used to be a law that buildings couldn’t be higher than 150 meters, but when that was abolished in the 1950’s the central business district full of skyscrapers sprung up.

Museum of Sydney!

Finally, I visited the Police and Justice Museum, which was a complete waste of time. I took a cliché picture in the mock court room, but other than that, the only interesting thing I learned was that Australia used to have a height and weight requirement for its police officers. The height requirement was 5’9; I’m not sure about the weight. Female officers also apparently didn’t become widespread until the 1970s.

My cliche picture -- the guy who took it for me was cracking up

I have no idea how an accident like this happens

I tried to go to a historic house afterward in the Rocks district, but apparently my information was wrong and you can only see the house by guided tour. I had thought it was open daily from 2-6, but I was told at the information desk that guided tours run for an hour at 2, 3, and 4 only. I was a little disappointed because that was the museum I was most excited about, but I’ll have to go back another day.

I spent the rest of my time on my own wandering around the Rocks. It appears to be the cheaper district in town, at least on the North side, from what I’ve seen. I found a place where I could get a chicken burger for $5.50, which is starting to sound amazingly cheap to me. They also had a lot of $5 happy hours in that area. I was tempted to sit down and people watch with a glass of wine, but it was so cold outside. They have heaters on almost every outdoor patio, but that still only helps so much. Instead I decided to get a $6.50 ice cream from Copenhagen ice cream (so good), which doesn’t really make much more sense since I continued to wander around outside while eating it.

I ended up sitting by the harbor as the sun went down and watching the boats come in to the wharfs and the lightening on the opera house change. Watching Sydney light up at night is really cool. I can’t wait to spend more time in the city once it gets warmer.

My view of the bridge

Darling Harbour at night

Bush walking

I hung out with a guy named Bagel today that I met on Wednesday night. He’s from “the country” of Australia, but not the outback, about 6 hours Southwest of where I am in Sydney. He’s been at Macquarie for three years though, so he definitely knows the area. We went on a nature walk in a national park nearby. It’s actually only 20-25 minutes walking distance from campus. It wasn’t super eventful, but it was fun to have some one-on-one time with an Australian and make fun of our accents together.

He kept calling our walk a “bush walk,” which makes it sound a lot more outdoorsy than it really was. Although I guess at points we were walking on pretty unlevel terrain and across stepping stones on some streams. At the end I basically had to climb up a wall of dirt to get off the trail right by campus otherwise we would have had to keep walking after it got dark (I probably wasn’t dressed entirely correctly for this outing). I did see a wild turkey though! They also had some very Australian signs in the park:

Apparently they have these signs at all the parks

Some pretty stepping stones at the end of the trail

Kangaroo crossing -- sadly I didn't see any

Technological Wonders

It’s so bizarre to me how efficient this school is. OWU was technologically challenged. They didn’t even have online scheduling until my schedule semester there. Yet Macquarie manages to not only organize their complicated system of lectures, tutorials, and practicals, but they have it all online for students to arrange their schedules as they deem fit at any time.

In addition to having the schedule online, every lecture is recorded and put onto a website along with the course guide (or syllabus) for each class and information regarding the upcoming readings for your tutorials. There are also special sections on this website for online discussions, which are optional but generally have a high participation from what I’ve seen due to the high amount of external (or online) students.

I’m still amazed that if I miss a lecture I don’t have to bother asking to borrow someone’s notes. I can just go online and listen to it whenever I want as early as two minutes after the original in-person lecture ended. It makes me really wish that I had unlimited wireless internet in my room. It would be so useful.

I think I’ve finalized my schedule at this point. I had to do a little bit of moving around because certain classes weren’t what I expected, but here’s what my schedule looks like for the semester: