Dropping the Ball

Oh, Man!
I don't know what happened! I was doing so well, posting every week or so, but all of a sudden, here we are, three weeks later with no new posts! It may have something to do with a couple smartass Australians crushing my confidence with derisive comments about blogging and those who blog, but it's mostly been that I haven't done anything too exciting. I guess I'll sum it up in bullet points, just to speed things up and get up to date.

Kalgoorlie pts 2&3
We spent a day driving through the outback and saw kangaroos, emus, eagles, an incredibly endangered bush turkey, and tons of sweet bush plants that will probably cure cancer someday. Or at least solve acne. The next highlight of the trip was our visit to a real, working sheep station, where we learned about the struggles of modern agriculture in Australia and enjoyed my new favorite Australian barbecue specialty, roasted pumpkin! We also got to eat skewers of kangaroo and goat--delicious.

Half Marathon
Totally didn't happen. Sorry to get you all excited to meet the new, fit, slightly-neurotic, half-marathon running Elizabeth, but she blinked out of existence about a month ago. I'm just totally better suited for body building--I need to quit fighting it.

School
Isn't really why I'm here. It shouldn't even be a subtopic. But it's chugging along.

Thailand
We leave tomorrow! Thailand has been going through a little political unrest the past few weeks, so we were concerned that we might not get to go. Luckily, though, things have calmed down and I'm back on track for eating five Thai meals every day for ten days.

Wine Appreciation
That's actually a class I took, and it just ended on Monday. We enjoyed some nice fortifieds and sparkling wines. The sherry and port were gross (I'm not cut out to be a fifties housewife or 18th century English gentleman, I guess), and we had a sparkling Shiraz, which was very different. Not my favorite, but not bad. However, St. Thomas More College as a whole appreciated wine very enthusiastically last Saturday at our College Ball. It was a lot like a prom, only with an open bar. Australians know how to do things right. It was also the first ND home football game, so a bunch of people stayed up all night to watch the game. I crashed early and missed most of the game, but I got up for the last few minutes of the fourth quarter.

This is Krysta and I waiting for the bus to go to the ball.

That's about it for now--thanks for being patient!

Signing out!
Elizabeth

Kalgoorlie Part One

To help us get a better understanding of the Australian culture, Notre Dame organizes a special class for the exchange students. It's led by two University of Western Australia professors, one Anthropology and one History, and they take us on three weekend trips to different points of interest around Australia. Last weekend we had our first trip, and we went to Kalgoorlie. Kalgoorlie is about 7 or 8 hours from Perth by car, but luckily Notre Dame decided to spring for 45 minute plane ride. Right now Western Australia is going through an economic boom, mostly from all the mining that's taking place, and Kalgoorlie is one of the big mine sites. We went to Kalgoorlie to see the real, raw, red dirt Australia, where men are men and sheep run wild.

The entire weekend was extremely sleep deprived. It started off with a 4:30 am bus ride to the airport. I didn't talk to anyone who got any more than about 3 hours of sleep. Straight from the plane we went to the Superpit, which is a giant hole visible from space with a lot of gold mining happening in it. One of the head mining engineers gave us a presentation about the operation of the mine. He fit the mining engineer stereotype pretty well, since he spiced up the pretty dull presentation with multiple profanities and he looked pretty hungover. The main gist of the presentation was: they blast the rock into smithereens, haul tons and tons of it around to different processing buildings, boil out the gold, and it is very, very expensive. I asked him what percentage of the mining engineers in Kalgoorlie were female, and he said 30%, but I'm not sure I believe him.

From there we were bused to various mining attractions where we shuffled around, rubbing our eyes and trying not to drool too visibly. We went to a museum with replicas of old tyme buildings, like a typical miner's house, a bank, and a police station. To the right is me, experimenting with being a miner's wife.

Then we went to the Mining Hall of Fame where we watched a guy pour what we thought was a gold brick until he started passing it around the audience. It was totally false advertising--it said everywhere that it was a "gold pour demonstration", but it was just some bronzey mixture metal. I mean, sure, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a brick's worth of pure gold just out in the open at some random Mining Hall of Fame, but we were too tired to think about it analytically beforehand, so it was a let down. After the "gold" pour, we went on a mine tour to get a feel for what it was like to mine before machinery. Basically, it was every bad thing you can think of. Mining sucks now, and it sucked even worse at the turn of the century.

We were staying at a "Camp School", which I think is Australian for "giant dormitory building with no heat and really spread out bathrooms". I think it's how Notre Dame could afford to fly us out there. I don't know if it's just a Western Australia thing, but very few buildings are heated. That's one of the reasons the weekend remained sleep deprived. Anyway, they provided us with food for a do-it-yourself Aussie BBQ, and the meal was 75% meat. Steak, sausage, chicken kebabs, but no kangaroo.

To the right is a traditional mining bathroom (bucket with threadbare curtain).

After dinner we headed over to The Trots, which sounds very uncomfortable, but in Australia it means horse races. One of the professors said there was nothing more Australian than "a bet and a brew", so we all gave it a shot. I don't think anyone came out on top, but most people won at least once. I didn't win anything until the very last race when my horse, Kapow!, blasted to the front unexpectedly. It's amazing how even just $2.20 can produce a pretty sweet winner's high.

Shoot--I don't want this to get too long, so I'll post in installments. That's it for the first day!

Operation MEET AUSTRALIANS

This week my goal was to branch out and meet some more Australians. At first we tried to set some Australian traps at dinner by sitting only 3 or 4 Americans to a table with a bunch of empty seats for brave (or unsuspecting) Australians. However, we only ever caught other Americans. That's when we realized that to meet Australians, we'd have to do a little infiltrating. It sounds so easy, but when it's time to sit down at a table of all Australians, 2 times out of 3 I chicken out. I don't think I'm cut out for a life of espionage. Electrical Engineering is a good fall back, I guess.

Speaking of electrical engineering, classes continue to be boring. I had my first homework assignment due Friday, and Thursday night all my suppressed memories from last semester came flooding back. On a cheerier note, I have successfully switched into a different Robotics class that I think will be a lot more interesting. I think for the first half of the semester we'll be working on simulating Soccerbots, which are little robots who play soccer (no, really?!) and we'll move on to programming real robots. The real robots are supposed to navigate an obstacle course using information from a GPS system. I think it'll be hard, but really interesting. Our professor seems really excited and knowledgeable about robots, so I think it'll be a good switch.

Right now everyone is planning our fall (spring?) break which comes up in mid-September. Half of the group is going up to Ningaloo reef, which is supposed to be comparable to the Great Barrier Reef, but on the West Coast. Another big group is going to hang around Perth and go backpacking for a week along some trails in the bush. My friend Tricia and I bought our tickets to Bangkok a few days ago, and we have been trying to convince a few other people to come with us. So far we have successfully enlisted Tricia's boyfriend Jeff and his friend Marty, and we have another girl, Krysta, who is still on the fence. The main reason I decided to go was for the food, but I've also started doing a little research, and I don't know how I can stay away now. I think we're going to spend a 2 days in Bangkok, go up to Chiang Mai in the north mountains for 4 days, and then spend 3 days at the beach. The itinerary is all still up in the air, though. All I care about is eating as much authentic Thai food as possible in 9 days.

We had two birthdays in our group this week, and on Friday night we had a combination Birthday-Olympic Opening Ceremonies party. We all split into teams of two and dressed as different countries. We had groups from Kazakhstan, Antarctica, Vatican City, Jamaica, Kenya, and others I can't remember. Nicki and I dressed up as Canada. We basically just dressed up as lumberjacks. It was a fun night.



The training for the half marathon continues. My legs are really tired. This is the determining week; if I can run 10 miles by next Monday, I'll sign up.

This weekend we're going on our first Notre Dame Weekend Trip. We're going to Kalgoorlie, which is a big mining city. We're going to visit some ghost towns, the Superpit, which can be seen from space (awesome), a sheep station (EVEN MORE AWESOME), and go to an authentic Australian horse race thing called "the trots". Apparently Kalgoorlie is also well known for their brothels and brothel tours are one of the must-do activities, but it's not officially on our itinerary. If it's part of the culture, though, I don't think we should miss it. We'll see if we can work something out.
Here's a picture grabbed off facebook of my friend Lindsay and me at the formal dinner last week. I need to get better at taking pictures. Maybe that will be my goal for this week. Operation Take Pictures of Australians.

That's all for now--
SIGNING OUT!

Week Two

It's weird to think that we've only been here for two weeks. Part of that might be that we haven't been super busy these past two weeks, so the days haven't really rushed past. Also, Tommy More is really similar to Notre Dame. Australia, and this college in particular, have a really sporty, masculine, hard drinking, Catholic atmosphere. The dorm has also been organizing a lot of events to welcome us, which reminds me a lot of Notre Dame. On Monday we had the speed dating and Tuesday we had a movie night with Old School and Anchorman.

On Wednesday we went to a concert by a band called Gyroscope, which was supposed to be the BIGGEST thing going on in Australia right now. The band itself was okay, not my taste exactly, but it was really fun to be at an Australian concert. I mean, not that an Australian concert is really that different from an American concert, but it still seemed like an important part of the culture to experience. Halfway through the concert, my friend John and I went out to go buy a kebab, which is just the Australian equivalent of a gyro, and we saw the opening band at the kebab place. Then, on our way back we just walked up to the backstage door and chatted with the second opening band for a bit. Australia has made me a lot more outgoing, I guess.

Friday night the student government organized a little Flip Cup tournament to try to make the Americans feel more at home. We all came, but it turned out that surprisingly few of the Americans had ever played more than maybe one or two games of Flip Cup before. Well, maybe not that surprising since this is an exchange for engineers and science majors. Luckily it's not a very complicated game and everyone caught on pretty quickly.

Last night St. Thomas More College had its first of three formal dinners. Everyone was really dressed up--girls in semi-formal dresses, guys in suits. The theme was Christmas in August, so they served Christmas-y food, like turkey with cranberry sauce, baked ham, sweet potatoes, and we had Christmas Pudding for dessert. The room was decorated in red and green and all the places had a Christmas Cracker on them. However, my very favorite part was the spiced red wine. Not because I am becoming an alcoholic, but because in my childhood I read a lot of fantasy novels and the various protagonists of them all at one point or another enjoyed a piping hot mug of spiced mead or wine. After a few glasses I felt like whipping back my cape and charging after dark wizards or something. It was awesome. The night went sort of downhill from the dragon slaying since everyone wanted to go out afterwards. We ended up walking forever to wait in line for half an hour to get into a sketch club playing bad music. I didn't even get a kebab, which is usually the best part of going out to sketchy clubs. But the formal dinner was fun.

I'm thinking about doing a half marathon at the end of August. There's a group of other Notre Dame students doing it and I think there's also a UWA team. We'll see--I'm going to ramp up my running schedule for about two weeks and if I can handle 10 miles by about one week before the race, maybe I'll sign up. I like having goals, and it's so easy to run outside here. There are tons of trails through Kings Park which is right behind our dorm, and in front we have the Swan River with a long trail along it.

My Australian accent is improving--I practiced a lot last night. So far I have all the easy words down, like "bettah", "yeah", "guhl" (girl), but I'm having a lot of trouble doing a convincing "no". It's weird--like they have something big stuck in their mouths and I always look like a moron when I try it. Luckily I have a single, so I can practice a lot w/o getting too embarrassed.

Shoot! No pictures! I need to work on that. I'll try to have pictures for my next post.

SIGNING OUT!

New Kids

Snorkel the Echidna
Billy the Joey

Another, older joey
Me with Billy!

Today was the first day of class.  I think this was the first day in 15 years of first days of school that I wasn't nervous out of my mind.  It's nice to know that I'm finally getting the hang of it all.  

I started the day off with Electromagnetic Theory, followed it with Robotics, and finished off after lunch with Signals and Systems.  So far I have no native English speaking professors.  Instead I have German, Arabic, and Chinese accents to augment my cultural experience.  I was secretly hoping that in Australia electrical engineering would be a hip and happening major with maybe more than a 10% female population.  I was disappointed, but not really surprised.  

Robotics was a little disappointing; instead of building robots, we're just going to model them with MATLAB.  However, there is another robotics class that sounds a little more interesting that I might try to switch into.  In the other class they're building robots that are supposed to navigate around a track using a GPS system.  

St. Thomas More College (my dorm) had a speed dating session tonight to help everyone get to know each other.  It sort of worked.  I saw a lot of faces, but now I'm mostly really hoarse.  About 45% of the college (dorm) is international, and about half of those are from Singapore.  The rest are Australian, and most of them come from the country.  I want to ask them what it's like to farm sheep, but I don't want them to think I'm too weird just yet.  

In the beginning are some pictures from our trip out to the bush on Saturday.  We saw two joeys, and echidna, a wallaby, and some falcons.  The video is of an echidna, and his name was Snorkel!  Australian wildlife is pretty impressive.  It's all really quirky.

That's all for now--

SIGNING OUT!

'Roo Country

Back when this blog was only imaginary, I thought that I would be constantly posting, adding pictures, and reflecting on the subtle nuances of the Australian culture like, every night.  However, now that I'm here and realize how time consuming that would be and how little I really have to say, I think once or twice a week is all I'll be able to manage.

The journey here was horrible.  I thought about writing out an excruciating blow by blow saga of Qantas Flight 12, but ultimately decided to sum things up with: Bomb Threat!  FBI!  26 hour delay!  On the plus side, we ventured out into LA during the 26 hour delay and saw the Dark Knight, and we may have free Qantas flights coming to us at some point.  But that's probably just a wishful rumor.

Before we left, people had mentioned that Australia was going to be expensive.  I was thinking they meant maybe 10-15% more expensive.  However, it's more like 100% more expensive.  In the airport (and this has turned out to be pretty standard) I spent $5 on an 8 oz Americano and an apple only slightly larger than a ping pong ball.  No frankenstein hormones injected into Australian produce, apparently.

I registered for my classes and starting Monday I'm taking Electromagnetic Theory, Signals and Systems, Differential Equations, Robotics, and a Field Research Project.  We found out on Thursday that the Field Research Project for the mechanical and electrical engineers is going to be converting a Lotus Lease sportscar to be purely electric.  We're all really, really excited.  Apparently Lotuses are kind of nice.

So far the food has been good.  It's a lot of really hearty stuff.  For example, for lunch one day this week we had huge slabs of meat loaf wrapped in pastry dough with a side of steak fries.  Kind of heavy, but pretty awesome.  I have a feeling we'll be at home with the food culture here, since Australia just recently passed the US in overall obesity.  Also, I really like vegemite!  It's intensely salty, which is sometimes just what you need on toast in the mornings.  And it's a good source of B vitamins.

Something that's pretty interesting is the university's attitude towards alcohol.  They really embrace it; in fact, there's a university sponsored tavern on campus.  The school-issued weekly planners have a pre-printed message on Fridays that says "Enjoy a drink at the tav!"  Definitely different from Notre Dame.  

I got to hold a baby kangaroo, touch an echidna, and pet a wallaby today!  I'll load pictures ... at some point.  It involves cords and menus and a lot of screwing around.  But they're pretty cute, so I'll try to get to it.  

That's all for now--

Signing Out!

Blast OFF

After many months of worried procrastination, anxious dreams, and answering questions with,"I'm not exactly sure where it is", the time has come.  I am about to blast off from LA into the future.  Or at least, blast off for a 14.3 hour ride to Sydney, a tortuous journey through customs, and then 5 more hours to Perth.  And then I will be in the future.  

Right now I am relaxing in Los Angeles and trying not to think about what I may have forgotten.  So far, despite my best efforts, I've thought of conditioner, power converters, and an ethernet cable.  Shoot.  

I'll try to keep this updated as often as possible so that you all can prepare your lives accordingly for what will be coming.  From the future, I mean.  

That's all for now--

SIGNING OUT!

Elizabeth