First Week of Classes

Hope everyone is having a good week thus far,

Friday we woke up after a long night and decided that it'd be a great day to go to the beach and do some surfing. It's just a short bus ride to the beach and then my roommate and I split renting a board (to save you money dad :)). It's $20 for the day so it's pretty affordable.  We had lunch at Subway where we got the great deal of $7 footlongs... I'm not sure why they didn't get the message that they are only supposed to be $5! haha.

Gold Coast, QLD

Anyways, the rest of the weekend was fun we celebrated my roommate Elin's birthday along with our friend Mikaela.

My roommate Elin turned the big 20

 Sunday we just hung out and got ready for our first day of classes. I was rushing to add/drop classes to figure out a way to get rid of Wednesday 8am class and Friday class. I am currently taking:

International Business
Intro to Marketing
International Relations
Australian History

The main difference in the University system here so far was brought up in  my International Business lecture. It occured when  my conveyor (professor) was talking about how he likes to have informal consultations hours saying, "I prefer to do them either in front of a classroom or at one of the cafe's, you can bring your rum and coke" haha.

Classes here consist of a lecture and then a tutorial. The lecture is usually 2 hours and the tutorial is one. Since you just have each classjust one day a week, it is expected that you spend 7 additional hours on each class on your own time.  This makes it very independent based learning compared to in the U.S.

I am still figuring out plans for my birthday but Thursday night is Tavern night so we will be going there to start off my birthday! The forecast here is supposed to Thunderstorm on my birthday so that may ruin my original plan to spend Friday at the beach but you never know.

Summer is wrapping up here and it is starting to cool off. Highs have been in the 80's and 90's and it is looking like it will be dropped down to the high 70's low 80's next week.  I am looking on planning a weekend trip to Melbourne a few weeks away. 

We have been warned that Red Back Spiders have been spotted in our pool area which for those of you who aren't familiar it is one the most dangerous spiders in Australia! I will be watching where I step to say the least.

Hope you all are having a great week and I will write again in a couple days!