LOVE LOVE LOVE Australian Class

So these days are really flying by and I really don’t have an explanation as to why. I don’t feel like I do much and yet I thought I updated my blog just a few days ago, not almost a week ago. And last night I realized I am half way through my semester here. Amazing. The time is really flying by because it doesn’t feel like I have almost been here two months. I’m about half way through my trip (approx. 2.5 months left) and it’s so weird to think about! Sometimes honestly I do get pretty homesick. I miss seeing people I know well and am comfortable with. However, I think the time alone is probably good for me. It’s teaching me how to be even more independent and kind of putting things in order for me. So I can’t complain. Not that I would want to.

            Well these past few days I really don’t know what has been keeping me so busy. I’m continuing to cook, which is good for me and Laura is continuing to eat her cake. Haha. The other day I was cooking dinner and asked her if she had eaten dinner yet and she simply replied, “Yes I bought a cake at Coles”. I don’t think, and I hope!, she didn’t eat the whole cake for her dinner but I thought it was really funny that that was her main course. She amazes me. She will eat doughnuts and just sweets constantly. And even though I think she might have gained weight, she’s not 500 pounds!

            In my Planetary Science class, my teacher distributed back our grades for our first assignment. Well we had to turn in a hard copy for the assignment and then he printed off individual notes with the grade and just set them in the front of the class for you to pick up. I thought it was strange at first and I couldn’t figure out why. Then when he pulled up the excel spreadsheet he keeps of everyone’s grades up on the projector for the whole class (of roughly 75 students) to see, I understood. That would NEVER happen in the US. A teacher would never dare to let anyone else see your grade but you. To put up everyone’s grades up on the projector? That’s amazing. I’m guessing that it’s ok here because I turned to my friend and I said, “I’ve never had a teacher do this before” with shock on my face and she didn’t think it was a big deal. She really just didn’t say anything about it at all. This teacher has been teaching for the past 27 years too so I’m sure he knows what he was doing. I looked around the room too and no one else was looking around to see other student’s reactions like I was. So I knew it had to have be normal. Well the reason he pulled them up was because he couldn’t remember who had gotten good grades and we wanted to call the students out in front of the class. Probably to recognize them and so he knew who his good students were. Yes, I was one of them :) I received a 30/30 and at first I thought it wasn’t something hard to achieve. My friend, who got her grade before me, also got a 30/30. But when he was telling us about the grades, I guess we were 2 of 3 or 4 people to get 30s! He said that if he didn’t see anywhere to take off he didn’t. I did my paper on global warming and I guess he thought it was interesting because that was one of the requirements for the assignment. So that completely made my day on Tuesday. :D

            Monday in my International Management class I had my facilitation, which I think went pretty well. My partner and I got a group together and we just had to lead the discussion of the case study that was assigned for that week. Pretty sure we got good marks. My International Management class is truly fascinating though. I now completely understand why I picked this as my major. Because I am absolutely in love with it! I leave this class every time thinking that I could seriously have that class everyday and not get sick of it. I would gladly do the work for it and it wouldn’t bother me at all. I don’t know if it’s because we just learn so many cool things or if it’s because of the people in the class. We do at least about an hour of group discussions and then the rest of the time we usually do something related to another country so it’s interesting. And we do fun stuff, like on Monday some of the students had to do a skit of a business meeting between a Japanese company and an American company. These nationalities do business COMPLETELY different and we had to identify the differences and how to overcome those differences. It was so cool! I definitely picked the right major. And not only it is fun we learn cool things! Like the fact that Coca-Cola has a different website design for every single country it’s in. Which makes complete sense when you think about it because not ever country is going to think the same thing is attractive. For example, the Japanese (I think) think that black is the color of bad luck so there aren’t black borders on their website. They also like a lot of options so there is stuff to look at, read, and click all over the place and is scrollable. Ours you can see the whole thing on one screen and is very simple. Argentina’s was really colorful and had a lot more groovy looking pictures and designs on it. We also learn that some things that are normal for us are insults in other countries. We were shown some advertisements and promotions ads that completely busted because they were utterly offensive to the targeted country. Poor management is what that was. Haha

            Well I just finished my paper for my Australian Studies class. It was just a reaction to one of the excursions we went on. Simple. But now I can’t think of what else I was going to say and I think I need to head to bed. I hope everyone is doing wonderfully! Love you all <3