 Thank goodness! There are malls in Australia, as our intrepid reporter has discovered.
Fitting in and getting around
After our second week of classes here at Curtin, I feel like I am comfortable on the campus and navigating between classes. Friday is the only day out of the week that I have two classes, so on Friday I woke up early, ready for my longest day of class (which is really only four and a half hours of actual class time). Much to my surprise, I found that there was no power to my room, or to the entire village for that matter. This sounds familiar, I vaguely remember a massive power outage back at Michigan Tech! It was nothing unfamiliar to the people of the area, the cause was something regarding the rapid change in the humidity and the rain causes a problem with the transformers and we were informed that this happens almost every year around this time. Once we determined this, the next dilemma was whether or not our classes would be meeting that day. We decided to go to the building of our class, only to find it completely evacuated due to the power outage. After finding our teacher and because this was a relatively small class, we had class outside in one of the many open areas on the campus. My second class of the day, Australian Studies, was a much larger class, so we set off to find our teacher for that class who informed us that we would not be having class that day, and were now free to do whatever we pleased. Quite a few of the students from Michigan Tech arranged their schedules so they don’t have class on Friday, so they had planned to take the bus and train into the city and do some sightseeing and shopping, so I decided to go along with them.
 The trip into the city was rather uneventful, even though there were nine of us that went. Traveling in that large of a group can always be an interesting experience, but once we got into town, we went our separate ways. The four girls that went on the trip did a little shopping and also saw some beautiful architecture and artwork. Another thing which seems to be popular within the city is street performers. We saw a musician who could play four or five different instruments, a guitar player and singer as well as performer dressed as a pirate whose main trick was swallowing swords. Although his trick was pretty amazing, he was rather rude to his audience, which we found to be rather strange. He was soliciting money, but expected to earn it from people he had just finished insulting! That’s a picture of him putting a rubber glove over his head, which was one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. That was the most interesting part of the trip, and after seeing this, we headed back to uni.
 A window from within the shopping center.
Now that classes have started, I’ve realized that I have to get back into the habit of doing homework, which was quite a shock after three months with no required readings or papers to write. Classes are going great so far and they are really interesting. I can’t believe that I’m already done with one sixth of the semester! It’s great having two days off during the week as we are then free to go to the beach when they are not especially crowded. I have this week of classes and one more and then we get a week off for our Easter break, and during that break Heather and I will be traveling to Sydney to do some sightseeing. Our surfing trip weekend keeps changing, but that is still on the agenda of things to do before leaving Australia.
Speaking of classes, it’s time for me to do some more studying!
Until next week,
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