Aussie Life

Hey again!

I know this is the third post of the day, but since we just got internet access seriously five minutes ago, I'm having to catch up on keeping this blog journal thing up to date. :)

Today started the first day of classes!  Yay for learning!  The professor lectured for about two hours about some basic background knowledge of marine ecology and it's impacts on Western Australia.  After that, we took an hour break for lunch at the uni's food court (uni is what most people here call the university).  There were a variety of foods available, everything from soups and sandwiches to wok and kababs.  Kababs are Turkish, and are honestly a lot like gyros.  They wrap meat and whatever salad vegetables you want into a pita wrap and serve it with a variety of sauces like bbq, sweet chili, sour cream, and a bunch of others.  Although at the price of food around here, I'm not sure I'll be eating it again, unless I want to be broke at the end.  We ate lunch with the Australian students in our class as well as with the professor, and he made plans for us all to hang out at the university's tavern on Friday, where he claimed that the first round would be on him.

After lunch, we headed into lab to do a refresher on quadrants and transects.  This is pretty much review for when we head up into Coral Bay, since we will be doing two three day projects with field work up there.  The lab exercise lasted about an hour and a half, with us mostly talking with the other students we hadn't met yet, and afterwards we were free to do whatever we wanted to.  This meant that we had plenty of time to head up to the nearby grocery store so that we could stock up on the food we need for the next three days.  Thus I have become acquainted with how typical college students eat:  bread, peanut butter, and ramen...all for under $10.  Although, we did have to splurge a bit when one of the students that has been here a semester told us that Tim Tams were extremely popular cookies in Australia and it would be worth spending money on them.  Here the university has a contract with the grocery store, and students are allowed to take the carts back up with them to the campus as long as they are put in those cart holders for employees to come and pick back up.  Imagine it: ten students from the United States with all their food and drinks, wheeling shopping carts back to the college while trying not to get run over by the cars, since the whole pedestrian has right away thing isn't as respected here as it is in the States.  Not to mention they're all going the other way!

Well, once again, I am definitely crashing before I'm used to, which is probably a good thing tonight, since class starts at nine tomorrow morning.

KK