Days 20-26

So much has been going on, yet I don't feel like I've done all that much in the past week. I still haven't recovered from being sick just yet. Another week of classes has gone by, nothing too exciting. I started my tutorials, which is a group of about 20 students who meet with the professor once a week outside of lecture for discussions. I'm not the only American in my US Imperialism tutorial, there is one other girl from Texas there. The other students in my tutorial don't seem very anti-American, which is good. Some of them had even studied abroad in the US or were planning vacations there in the coming months. The professor is even a visiting professor at Yale sometimes. I also dropped out of the Australia's Underworld and added Australia: Colonies to Nation. The professor for Underworld managed to make such an interesting topic incredibly boring, also a 4000 word paper was essentially 90% of the grade for the class. I decided that I didn't need such a boring and time consuming class while studying abroad. I also realized that neither of my Australian classes were about how Australia was formed. So I switched into a basic, entry level Australian history class.

Most of my free time this week has either been spent doing readings for class or watching How I met Your Mother with friends. Aside from those two activities though, I have done some other things.

Thursday night was North American dinner night at IH. The menu included spare ribs, chicken wings (not hot wings though), fajitas, poutine (some canadian dish consisting of fries, gravy and cheese. interesting) and pumpkin pie. Weird menu right? It ended up being quite mediocre, but most people had never had pumpkin pie here. Apparently its much more American than I thought. Megan, Claire, Adria and I got asked to represent America and do a little presentation on the good ole US of A. So we got together, and put a bunch of pictures of typical American places and activities and then talked a bit about them. We had pictures of college football games, prom, 4th of July fireworks, disney, harry potter land, FL beaches, and some random cities. Apparently people liked our presentation.

Friday night we had our first formal dinner at IH. This involved a speech from a former IH director (and wine and champagne) and then a formal dinner (with better food than usual and more wine on the tables). After the dinner was over, we all went back to our rooms to get ready for the first IH party: Welcome to the Jungle. When I say we all went back to our rooms, I mean that we actually all went to Libby's room to get ready. There were about 8 of us in the room all doing makeup, etc. Helping each other put fake eyelashes on, or turn each others eyes into peacock feathers, and some nail painting as well. Then Adria did my hair up in her room, because it was getting ridiculously crowded in Libby's room. The party was a lot of fun (they got bartenders and an open bar). I ended up going as a forest nymph. We had a lot of fun dancing, I ended up getting really tired and going to sleep around 2:30am.

Heres a picture of Claire, Adria and I from the party

Saturday was a pretty relaxing, lazy day. Everyone slept in pretty late after the party. That evening, a group of us went downtown to get sushi. I didn't think I liked sushi at all, but I went along anyways, because someone said that they had cooked food as well. I got there and decided that I wanted to try some sushi, since it has been years since I actually tried it. Megan and I ended up ordering a bunch of stuff and sharing. I tried eel and cream cheese rolls (one of my favorites actually), salmon rolls, crab rolls, tuna rolls, and grilled scallop rolls. It was actually really good! Afterwards we ended up getting dessert at McDonalds. This McDonalds was odd though, because it had a cafe (with pastries and cakes and cheesecakes) and had chandeliers inside. Craziness. I got a lamington, which is a popular dessert here. Its basically a sponge cake, covered in chocolate and rolled in coconut, very yummy!

Sunday, we took the ferry to Watsons Bay in the afternoon. It was so pretty! We hung out there for about 3 hours or so and ate fish and chips (and calamari rings) on the beach watching the sun set over the harbour. Very pretty! On the bus ride home, I realized that I could just stay on the bus, passing IH, and go straight to church. I made it just in time for the service. It was really nice, because almost everyone I had met last week remembered my name and were excited to see me. After the service I went along for coffee down the street and met some more people. Then I came back to IH to get some reading done.

Adria and I on top of a cliff at Watsons Bay overlooking the Pacific Ocean