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:

A Note on Culture

So many things in Sydney are the same as back home, it’s eerie. I was walking around the shopping centre this afternoon trying to find a job and I realized, I would be doing exactly the same thing back home. I found myself scanning the bottom corners of storefronts for help wanted signs, and sure enough, a couple of places had them. Granted, some of these stores are the same as in the United States. They have an Espirt, McDonald’s, Subway, KFC, and Target here. They have a Myer’s (similar to Meijers) too, but it’s a department store similar to Macy’s instead of a grocery store. They also have a Hungry Jacks, which appears to be the mere image of Burger King and Mad Mex, which although expensive, works in the same format as a Qdoba of Chipotle.

 When you really sit down and think about it, Australia is incredibly similar to the United States. Sure they have a different culture, but we share so many things. We even share the same name for our currency – the dollar. I spend a lot of time wondering if we’ve always been this similar though, or if in recent years, the process of Westernization has caused this… Also, is westernization caused by tourism? And does it relate strictly to the United States or all “western” countries? There’s no right or wrong answers to these questions, but that’s why my travel, tourism, and cultural production (which is listed under modern history) course interests me so much. Those are exactly the kind of questions that we discuss.

Right now, I’m essentially sitting in the middle of a huge pool of international relations. Sarah and I went to an apartment building across campus tonight to hang out with some Brits who are sharing their living space with Aussies. We watched them homebrew some beer with a brewing kit and then all sat down to laugh and puzzle over a terrible movie of Tommy Wiseau’s called The Room. Afterwards, I came home to my townhouse that I’m sharing with an Aussie, a guy from Singapore, another American who I haven’t seen since I moved in, and a girl I still haven’t met. There’s also a guy from Mexico staying with us. I guess what I’m trying to say is that when I decided to come to Australia, I thought I would be meeting a lot of Australians and learning about their culture. However, what I’m finding is that I learn more about the other international students who are around me, whether in the village or in classes or in the bars at night than I am about this culture that seems so similar to my own. Sure, I notice the basic differences the spelling of centre and the usage of both the words docket and receipt to mean the same things, but it’s going to be near impossible to get to the root of the Aussie culture when I’m having so much trouble separating the Brits from the natives (their accents begin to sound incredibly similar when all you hear all day is foreign accents). Hopefully, it will get easier with time and once I met more Australians in my classes. I guess I have only been to one so far.

 Also, I had my first Aussie ice cream on Sunday (it's actually flown in from New Zealand :/). It cost me $4.80!