The Last Day

So it’s the last official day of IQP. We had our presentations earlier today and I wore my suit that I brought all the way over here. Another landmark to my college career is done.
But all that’s on my mind right now is what just unraveled about an hour ago. It became apparent over the drinking game we were playing that some of my IQP mates had in fact discovered this very blog. And of course they’ve read all of my inner most thoughts because that’s what this blog is really for. I suppose just in case you guys are reading this now I’ll just take the opportunity again to apologize. I am truly sorry if I have offended you, but believe me when I say when I read back over what I’ve written it’s really just what I’m feeling at that particular moment and I harbor no ill will towards you and I hope that the reconciliation process that briefly began tonight while we were all slightly drunk can continue over the course of our remaining time at WPI. Words cannot express the regret that I feel at this moment for writing and posting what I wrote, but that’s all in the past and I’m glad we’re leaving Australia on good terms.

On the note of apologies, to those of you who eagerly await the Mondays where I update this blog, I apologize for not updating at the beginning of this week or even last week for that matter, I think. It’s just that I typically wrote these blog posts at work when there was nothing to do and it was just a nice opportunity to pass the time, but this past week we’ve actually had work to do so we’ve been working at the library and I didn’t really have any downtime to spend to update y’all on what I’ve been doing. And please, if you really miss me C-term is over at this point and you’ll be seeing my lovely face again soon.

So I guess this post will be extra-long due to the fact that I’ve missed updating last week, and I’ve also had about 1/5 of a bottle of Kahlua and that stuff is loaded with caffeine. Straight Kahlua is disgusting by the way. It’s like drinking syrup and this is one of those moments where I regret being dumb in an attempt to get drunk, but hey it’s the last day of IQP, gotta live it up, right? Three months until I’m legal in the States. Speaking of which, I really have a desire to learn how to mix drinks. I suppose that goes hand in hand with my fascination with cooking. Mixing drinks is basically cooking with alcohol, but without heat, you get to experiment and mix flavors. Perhaps the first thing I’ll do when I’m of age, is buy the components for the Pokémon starter themed cocktails and mix those. Should be a fantastic experience.

Well, IQP is over, all but three of my class mates are leaving tomorrow around noon, and I, oh I, will be leaving on Tuesday. What a smart man I am; booking my flight the way I did, but I really didn’t have much of an idea when I booked it all the way back in like October or whenever I booked it. Well, it shouldn’t be too bad, I cooked all the remnants of food all the apartments had and I have about 5 meals sitting in Tupperware in the fridge, should last me just until I have to leave. Which leaves me with $17 and change in AUD which is perfect because it takes $16 to get to the airport and I shouldn’t be spending anymore money. Oh wait, I need $2 to rent a padlock from the hostel… frick. I need to get one dollar from someone, less than that actually. I need 15 cents to put me at $18 which would be the perfect amount. I’m sure I’ll figure something out. I’ll just look at the ground seeing if anyone dropped 5 cents anywhere. Or maybe the hostel will be nice and let me rent a padlock for $1.85. Who knows? Or I could just suck it up and withdraw a last $20 from the ATM. I’m sure I’ll have no trouble spending money to use all my AUD before I leave.

I don’t really know how organized this post is going to be as I’m still a little buzzed and I can’t really focus on what I’m writing. I just keep coming back to what I wrote and how much I regret posting it. I have plenty of things that I catch before I end up posting them, or filter it after I write and end up deleting. I just wonder how different my IQP experience would have been if I hadn’t been ostracized for the last month or so after they found the blog. But what can I do about what’s in the past. Everyone involved is out clubbing but I’m unwilling to spend $20 to just get into a club. It’s the cheap Asian inside of me.

But I guess since I missed last week I’ll start with that weekend.

On Saturday we went to the Boroondara Sustainable Living Festival to conduct our final data collection for IQP. We got to the meet the Mayor of to the city we were working with, but unfortunately we didn’t have the clarity of mind to take a picture with him; sadness. But we collected all our data and came back. I don’t really remember what I did with the rest of the day; I probably went to the market and did some grocery shopping and just played DS/chilled. But the next day we had a group tour booked for the Great Ocean Road which was fantastic. All of the students, except two who had done it earlier, as well as the professor and his wife came along and we used what was left of the school’s budgeting for “cultural learnings” so the trip was subsidized to cost $40 per person, a discount of about $80 per person if my memory serves me correctly. But basically the Great Ocean Road is exactly what the name suggests. It’s a road that runs along the southeastern coast of Australia and there a lot of landmarks along the way. The tour guide we had was hilarious, and along with the 16 of us from WPI, there were 5 Russians and 3 European girls: 2 Dutch doctors and 1 Swedish? woman. But of course since most of us were from WPI the trip was dominated by the feel of our group there. There were awesome beaches with waves that were unprotected by the bay, wild parrots that were super friendly, cool ocean-eroded rocks and a host of other things. Overall the experience was fantastic and I’d recommend it to anyone who comes down to the Melbourne area.

That pretty much covers that weekend.

The following week was a lot of writing and working on IQP as was this week.

So that covers the last two workweeks of Australia: IQP.

The last full weekend of IQP I don’t remember what I did on Saturday. I think I went to the market again and picked up my last kilo of ground beef. And again I probably just came back and played DS/chilled. But on Sunday I dragged my butt to church and I’m glad that I did. Sadly, one of the main reasons I went was to redeem my free lunch voucher that I received the first week I went over a month ago. But while I was finishing up my free lunch some of the people I had met earlier invited me out to the beach with them and I had a lot of fun just chilling with their cell group. Whether or not their invitation was driven by the sermon topic of trying to be more welcoming towards new-comers or whether it was out of the kindness of their hearts, doesn’t really matter to me. The important thing is that did invite me and I went. I had a lot of fun just chilling at the beach with a large group of Asian, truly an “Asian Invasion” with about 20 of us. Their cell group is essentially the Singapore cell group as all but I think two of them are international students from Singapore. It was a day at the beach where my playing in the sand was not done alone. It was perhaps the most comfortable I have felt all IQP. And that’s what I’m doing for at least one of the days that I have left in Melbourne. Tomorrow there’s the International Student Ministry (ISM) Welcome Night that includes free dinner. Yes I get to meet a bunch of probably mostly Asian students on my last weekend here and then fly across the world back home. Fantastic, maybe I could’ve met my Asian-Australian girl if this had happened at the beginning of the term, but I guess that’s what I get for coming during their summer break. But it’s TOO LATE NOW DAVE. IT’S TOO LATE. That’s really the overarching mood I’m in right now: a mild state of regret. BUT IT’S TOO LATE AND I CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. I suppose I should’ve seized my time here but again it’s too late… I’m leaving in three days.

On the topic of three, I believe this is the first time that I’ve ever reached three pages for a blog post. Well the caffeine is keeping me awake, I’m kind of tired of writing and I want to chill a bit.
Again, I’m sorry. I don’t think you guys will ever read this again, but I’m sure in future I will look back to my IQP experience and smile. Perhaps kick myself a little for my mistake, but I think it was a great learning experience for me both socially and academically. I hope I’ll see you guys around campus.

Well, it’s time to watch a Pokémon movie that I took off my roommate. I don’t think I ever thanked you for having your external hard drive full of goodies that you let me rummage through, so thank you.

P-P-PEACE

Calm

This weekend wasn't too eventful. Perhaps the pinnacle was going to the popular Pho place down the street.

Half of the group decided to travel up to Cairns for a two-thirds day on the reef for an absurdly high price. I think the cost of their trip was at least $200 more than my trip up pre-IQP and their cruise was leaving 3 hours later than mine giving them less time on the reef. But I'm sure they had fun. Actually I know they did. It's the freaking GBR.

The rest of us stayed in Melbourne and had a pretty quiet weekend. It was quite a nice change of pace for weekends. Friday night I made meatloaf and it turned out pretty good, but it reminds me that either I'm too nice, or my roommate is a huge mooch. Probably a little bit of both, though I lean towards the latter. So basically I made a meatloaf and we were splitting it three ways and two of us ate a little over half so it was looking like I would have a little leftover for a snack/half a meal. But the third person, my roommate, was napping when the food finished, so when he did get around to eating his share, he just took the remaining half… and ate all of it… That and he's been mooching everyone's food for all term long. Maybe it'll come up again. Who knows? I don't really like unnecessary confrontation or conflict, but if it gets to a point where it needs to be discussed, I will lay down the law.

So Friday night I just relaxed and watched Akira. In retrospect, that's really all I did this weekend. Sat on my ass and watched anime, played Skyrim, or read Cell. Real cool Dave, real cool. Well that's not entirely true. On Saturday I took a bunch of people on my plan to see Melbourne Museum and eat Pho. Oh man, DAT PHO. So good. So much closer to Vietnam. And it was normal pho sized for $9.50 which is a steal in Australia. Sadly, I again forgot to take a picture even though I went in with the intention of taking a picture of the pho before I ate it. I was just too excited to eat it.

Melbourne Museum was also pretty cool. It was a general science museum that was free with our student IDs, pretty awesome. They had exhibits on the forest, the brain, and dinosaurs and stuff. It ate up a good 2-3 hours of our afternoon for free so I'm not complaining.
The rest of the weekend was spent doing one of my three activities, all on my butt, but I watched the entire first season of Avatar: the Last Airbender. It's quite entertaining and given my current rate. I'll probably finish at least season 2, if not the entire series, before the end of the week. On a similar note, I've taken it upon myself to watch all the Pokémon movies before I leave. And Word spellchecked Pokemon into Pokémon, awesome. Again, real cool Dave. Reeeaaaalll cool. But that's what I get for going to a small tech school. I was fighting with my inner-nerd for 1.5 years and now this is what I've become. I'm happier, but I'm much nerdier. But so far I've watched 4 of the thirteen. All of these were taken from the above-mentioned roommate's external hard drive. He's a great person, just when it comes to food/finances he's a bit… problematic.

Yeah, pretty quiet weekend. It's also kind of scary to note that we're more than halfway done with our time here in Australia. It's gone by quickly, but slowly at the same time. I think I'm definitely looking forward to going home, but at the same time I don't really want to leave. But really I do kind of want to leave… This whole trip is definitely an experience that I will never forget, but I think if I sit down and reflect, I have learned and grown a good deal while here.
Melancholy note to end on, but whatevs.

P-P-PEACE

I don't know why I end each post with that, but I do.

Musings in Sydney

Hello again folks. It's that time of the week again. The time where I remember that I have a blog and things to write about and document both for my own sake as well as, at least hopefully if you still read this, your entertainment.

The past week has been pretty eventful it seems, or perhaps not the past week, but the time since I've written the last post. The time between when I write seems to be forever, but it's really only a week. But I guess since I don't have my normal routine set here and I have no homework to do, time seems to pass by a lot slower. I'm no longer in the fast-paced world of being a student on a term schedule and having a million deadlines to meet, no longer in the US where everything is driven by productivity and profits. No longer, at least for now.

It's really a strange feeling being this un-busy. It almost makes me feel guilty, but then I go to the bathroom and see my IQP partner "inconspicuously" browsing facebook at the bottom of her monitor much like I do. But that's only during work. At (my temporary) home, I just really have nothing to do. I feel like there are a lot of things I WANT to do, but I don't really want to take the time to do them, I don't really know what I'm doing. It's like coming to Australia didn't really fix the issues within me. It's just put me in a new environment and changed the circumstances a little bit.

I also don't know why I started writing this when I did because I have a meeting at 11:30 which is pretty far away, but we have to do some prep work before our meeting. And it takes me forever to write these things because they are pretty long and even though I say I don't filter myself too much, I still do make some quick edits as I'm typing. Either way, it takes a pretty long time to write these posts which is good because it takes up time at work, AND I have a word document open and I'm typing so it looks like I'm doing work on the report or something. Overall, it's just a great way to pass time at work without being overly obvious and also I can upload it without wasting my precious 25mb/week I get at the apartment.

Well back to what I did this past week. We went to Sydney this weekend and it was pretty cool. By now you've probably already noticed my new profile picture, and at this moment some of my classmates are at work uploading pictures on facebook and tagging me. It seems that that's how they pass their workdays. They probably have faster internet too, and they can use their own computers… Enough complaining about my work setting, maybe. But actually it's probably not the internet here that's the problem. The real limiting factor is the processing capabilities of this "computer" I won't describe it again because I complain about these things every post.
So back to Sydney, we flew in Saturday morning because if we flew in Friday night we would've had to pay for another night in a hostel which is basically just $45 wasted for nothing. So Saturday morning/afternoon was spent just walking around the city, exploring and stuff. I took a few pictures, my classmates took way more. It was pretty fun just exploring the city and seeing all the iconic landmarks, and planking in front of them. That evening all but 3 of us had purchased bridge climb tickets which give you a 140m high 360 degree aerial view of the city. The only downside is that is costs $188 to get up there. Something I was unwilling to pay. You can't even take pictures up there and have to pay $30 more for just two pictures. Needless to say, I did not want to empty my bank account for 3 hours of amazingness. I'll take a longer tour and eat relatively well thank you very much.

Instead of paying for that I had a pretty quiet evening just chilling and talking with the two others who did not pay for the bridge. We walked a little more around the city, chatted a lot, chilled by the iconic view of the Opera house where I was enlisted by a couple to take their picture. Well that one I'll take a little tangent for. Basically we're sitting their talking and taking a few last pictures as the sun sets over the opera house. A couple comes up to me and has some extremely specific directions as to the picture they want taken. I apply the rule of thirds and take the picture she asked for. I show her and she's elated saying, "Oh, that's perfect! Thank you!" I smile in return with a, "No problem!" and as I'm about to sit back down another couple, younger this time and with a super nice camera, come up to me and say, "Sorry, but I reckon you're pretty good. Mind taking a picture of us?" So off I went again to apply the rule of thirds and take a nice picture because I don't take a lot of pictures, but when I do, they're freaking amazing. But not really. So I take a picture with the fancy camera, which makes taking pictures way more fun, and go to sit down again, but the older couple again realizes that in their first picture they had not asked me to capture the iconic angle of the opera house saying, "I'm realizing that we have the icon of icons here and we'd be silly not to capture it". So I take another picture and everyone goes on their way happy with the photos I produced.

Tangent done, back to Saturday night. Well actually there's not that much left. We basically headed back to the hostel, pooped from a day of exploring out in the sun, grabbed a bottle of something on the way back and relaxed and drank our drinks before calling it a night. Which reminds me of how weird is that when I go to a liquor store and buy a 6 pack of something for way too much I don't even get carded. It’s going to be a weird 3 months back home.
That brings us to Sunday. We booked our flight back for that evening so we had pretty much the entire day left for us. We woke up and checked out of our hostel and headed out to the wildlife sanctuary which is exactly what it sounds like. And of course by now you've probably already seen the 15 pictures that've been uploaded and tagged of me on facebook, and if you haven't yet, you probably just went or are going to check right after this. Basically it's a zoo, but there are animals, namely kangaroos, that you can pet and feed and all the profits go to saving and preserving the wildlife. Basically it was pretty amazing and we played with and fed the kangaroos for a long time and took a ton of pictures. There were also some koalas that we took pictures with, but those are still in fenced areas probably because they can/would probably destroy some annoying little kid if left in an unsupervised environment. Also while at this wildlife sanctuary we ran into one of my classmate's high school friends. It was mind blowing that they happened to both be in Sydney, Australia at the same wildlife park on the same day. That and apparently he had lost a TON of weight since high school.

After the park and copious amounts of pictures, the group decided that it would be worthwhile to check out the Hard Rock Café Sydney. So we departed on our quest to find the Hard Rock Café, which wasn't too hard. We ate lunch and it was super expensive. All my class mates bought mixed drinks along with their meals which doubled the price of their already expensive meals. I just ordered a pulled pork sandwich for $20 and enjoyed it. The serving sizes here were the largest I had seen while in Australia and they had Heinz ketchup. You might think Heinz ketchup is nothing out of the ordinary, but in Australia most of the ketchup here is not Heinz and they're all a good deal sweeter than the standard American tomato sauce, which is what they call ketchup. So a hefty, albeit expensive, meal was eaten and then we embarked out into the surrounding mall in search of souvenirs. By the end of the Sydney trip I picked up a magnet bottle opener that has the Opera House and the Bridge pictured on it and a couple of tea towels. The bottle opener was used the first day of purchase and the tea towels are in my bag of things that I don't use.

Cue airport scene without problems. At least I wish that's what happened. Instead we were delayed in boarding the plane by about 20 minutes, but then when we were all happily seated on the plane waiting to take off they told us that we had to wait for the engineers to come and see if the water in the cabin was anything bad even though they told us it was probably from condensation from the humid climate. So we sat there and I read Cell by Stephen King. In the end the engineer arrived and said it was fine and we took off, but not before having sat on the run-way for almost 2 hours. The entire flight from Sydney to Melbourne only takes about 65 minutes so we were sitting on the runway for longer than we were in the air…
We arrived back at our apartment with no problems, and we took Monday off for Superbowl Monday. I don't even want to go into the details of that game and it's the only sporting event I watched every year.

Sorry if the last few paragraphs seems rushed, but I started writing this at like 10 this morning and it's now 4 in the afternoon and we're leaving in about 5 minutes so it is indeed a little rushed. The term is half way over. Mind = Blown. At least IQP work is picking up and I have something to do at work now.

P-P-PEACE

Australia Day Weekend

I don't know what's happened to my writing mojo, but I don't really find the urge to write like I did during the first couple weeks here.
Maybe I've gotten settled in for real and before writing was my way of dealing with the "homesickness" that I was feeling. I've definitely settled in some and gotten the swing of things down.

This weekend was a pretty relaxing and uneventful one. A lot of my class mates were out traveling. A few went to Brisbane, where it was flooding, and another group went to Tasmania. I just stayed in Melbourne and chilled. It was nice. We had Thursday and Friday off due to Australia Day which is surrounded by a little bit of controversy as some people call it Invasion day. It's the day that white settlers first landed in Australia and it's since, at least publicly, become a holiday to celebrate the diversity of Australia. To show for this there's a parade with tons of different organizations and clubs that all represent a different cultural group that takes place on the day. Of course we went to this because it's the touristy thing to do. And of course it was pretty boring/lame. I mean it's cool and all to see the stuff, but really it was just people dressed up in their traditional cultural garb walking around. Of the guys I talked to who went, everyone seemed to agree on this and as of course as WPI students, the highlight of the parade is when the Star Wars club walked by.

After the parade there's a bunch of other activities going on in the gardens on the outskirts of the city and we wandered down to see the woodchop. Yes, a woodchop. They have lumberjacks race to see who can cut through the log the fastest both with axes and chainsaws. It was actually pretty entertaining.

To most Australians, the holiday is just about kicking back, relaxing, throwing some food on the barbie and drinking some beers. To commemorate this there was a reddit meet up on Australia day in one of the nearby parks. I invited all of my classmates to go as well, but I was met with ridicule and how meeting people from the internet sounds like a good way 'to get free candy from a van and never see the United States again'. Mmmhmm, feel free to live in your WPI bubble while on the other side of the world and be too scared to meet locals. Yes I'm a bit angry, but whatever, not my problem. I'll go explore the city and meet locals and hear about the hidden gems, you can socialize internally with people from the States and be closed-minded.
So I went to the meet up and there was a good number of people there, about 15ish as a ball park. The event was BYO and of course being a cheap student, and given the fact that alcohol costs way too much here, I didn't BMO. I was just looking to meet some people. And that I did. It seemed that everyone there was pretty much a mix of a group of friends that regularly meet up about once a week via reddit. They all have their own friends outside so it seems, or maybe not since they're redditors, but they congregate and chill.

That evening one of the sponsors invited us over for post-dinner drinks and snacks. Naturally, free alcohol and college students go hand-in-hand so we all went over and had some drinks. Now his house is near Chapel Street which is supposed to be a ridiculously awesome place to be on a Friday night, so since we were already out there we decided to check it out. Unfortunately the place was pretty dead as a lot of people had work the next day so it was a failed excursion. Most people were flying out the next morning so it was extra sad because they stayed up late for the "legen-wait for it-dary", night for nothing.

That brings us to Friday, and I guess my motivation to write is gone, but once I start writing everything just kind of explodes out onto the paper. So back to Friday, I don't really remember what I did during the day… Oh right, I just kind of chilled at the library and played some Terraria and tried to get details for what was happening that evening because I got invited out for some drinks with the redditors I had met on Australia day. So afternoon was spent at the library, but I started to get hungry so I starting thinking of what to make for dinner because I had plenty of time and was in the mood for cooking. So I start thinking of what we have in our fridge/freezer which is dictated completely by the price of things since most meats are in the ball park range of $15-25/kg, which roughly translates to $8-12/lb which is RIDICULOUS. But at the Queen Victoria market there are ground beef bulk specials and it's $10 for 2 kg of ground beef, which is awesome. So we have a lot of ground beef in our freezer, and as usual potatoes are always cheap no matter where you go for whatever reason. Ground beef+ potatoes = shepherd's pie of course. So I look up some recipes and throw together a MEAAANNN shepherd's pie. I was so happy with how it came out and it was so delicious, it's definitely being made at least once a week if not more.

Friday evening comes upon us and I invite a couple of my classmates out to the bar. We go and meet up with them and just generally have a good time chatting with them and stuff, and they're all young professional who have money so they buy a couple round of drinks for us, again free alcohol is awesome. It was a relatively quiet Friday night, but still enjoyable nonetheless.
Saturday, uhhh, afternoon disappeared to I don't know what. Maybe grocery shopping and wandering? Not too sure, but the evening I went to the International Student Ministry they have at the church I went to on Sunday, met some more people and went out to dinner with them.

Sunday I went to church, went to the market, bought another 2kg of ground beef as I ate most of what was in our freezer over the course of about a week and a halfish. Pick up a few kangaroo steaks to cook and eat for dinner. Go to the beach and chill, the water was so warm, but it seemed like as soon as we got there the sun decided to hide behind the clouds. We came back I cooked the kangaroo steaks for dinner with a side of mashed potatoes, perfect medium doneness on the steaks. Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures until the last bite of the kangaroo so it's a rather messy, unflattering picture of my cooking finesse. Then the Australian Open final was on and it was a hell of a long game. Nearly six hours and each set was ridiculous. Nadal looked like he was going to get stomped on, but then every time he would stay in, fight and win the game. He was down 40-0 and he came back and won the game. It was RIDICULOUS and I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish watching the match.

Sorry for the cop-out in writing after Friday, I was hungry and took my lunch break and I discovered that pieces of my bread were moldy, I was about to bite into it and I notice that there are these black splotches on my bread. And I just bought that bread like 3 days ago. Ridiculous, I'm going to start storing my bread in the fridge. Oh and I guess I was going to explain that the lunch break destroying my writing mojo. Man, I never want to read over/edit these, following my thought processes must be so difficult.

Oh well.

P-P-PEACE

Full Week #1

So it's about that time again at work where I don't have anything to do. Oh wait, that's all the time…

Well it's about time I updated my blog with what I've been doing. I know there are some fans of my blog out there dying to read about what I've been up to.

So the work week was the work week: me mindlessly trying to get through the day without looking too relaxed. It's quite hard to switch screens with the machine they've given me. There isn't enough processing power so sometimes the window of facebook lingers on the screen a little longer than I'd have preferred when someone is walking by. It's also funny to see that almost everyone else takes the time at work to upload their pictures.

But moving off the subject which I feel I've beaten to death and onto my weekend! So the Australian Open is in Town. There are banners and advertisements scattered across the city. And since I' m already across the world, why not go? So I bought a ticket that I had a classmate print out at his office. It was around $33 total which I guess isn't too bad because it is a grand slam event and you can pretty much stay there for the whole day. I woke up pretty late on Saturday due to the previous evening's festivities which I will go into detail later. I quickly ate some of my leftovers for breakfast and headed out to the open. I arrived there and got lost in the crowds trying to find where everyone else already was. Then I waited in line for about 30 minutes before I got into the courts and watched the 2nd half of Cirstea vs Errani. Of course while at the Open I took some pictures to prove that I was actually there because that's what this super expensive IQP is all about, right? Fly across the world just to take some pictures and say you were there and have done things! Who knows, something in the next few weeks might make me fall in love with Australia and move here. Apparently there are at least three WPI alumni who have moved here after their IQPs.

­But moving right along. After the women's singles game there was Ferrer vs Chela. I don't know any of the names I'm typing and frankly, I'm surprised I even remember them at this point. But Ferrer is ranked 5 and Chela is ranked 27 so Ferrer pretty much dominated the match. It took him a while to get into the groove and he doubled faulted the entire first game, but after a few games he started owning the court. Oh and Errani won the previous game. So after Ferrer beat Chela I'd had about 4-5 hours of tennis, which is a large quantity for someone who doesn't really follow tennis and really just went to say he'd been there. So I left and just chilled the evening away, which is what happens a lot. Watch some TV, watch some anime, play some games, the usual.

Now Sunday I actually made it to church. Relatively large church with a cool name, Cross Culture. Think about that for a bit. There's the whole diversity part of it as the church is pretty diverse, lots of Asians, got some Caucasians too, and Indians, and it's in general pretty diverse, but mostly Asian. But then the name has another connotation, the culture of the Cross, what it means to be a Christian, to carry your cross daily. And there are way too many commas in that sentence because I like to use commas instead of periods because Word puts that ugly green underline in if you use periods instead of commas. Enough about the name of the church. So the service was pretty generic, albeit long. And I slightly disagree with the order of their actual service, but that's a completely unrelated topic and perhaps it's not my place to even be criticizing that aspect. I met some people there and pretty much spent my entire afternoon with them. It was quite interesting.

I didn't exactly feel the most welcome at the church except for this one oldish guy who pretty much showed me his little cultural snippet of Melbourne. His name is Nigel and he immigrated to Australia 25 years ago, but still has an extremely heavy Lebanese accent. Along with us were Jim and Neal, two young men of Asian descent. I don't remember which name goes with which person… but I can just arbitrarily assign them and it'll be okay. So Jim moved here 13 years ago from China and now works in a small law firm. His English is good, but he also still has a pretty heavy Asian accent. Neal finished his contract for work in Taiwan and decided to take a year off and work somewhere that wasn't Taiwan so he made his way to Australia and he's now on his 5th month here. Neal barely understands English and because of that keeps quiet most of the time. I'm sure the three of us could have easily carried on a conversation in Mandarin, but that would've been quite rude in the presence of Nigel who was pretty much the guy who brought us all together.

So I met Nigel because he happened to sit next to me during the service. Whether or not he chose to sit next to me because he noticed that I was new I have no idea, but I have the suspicion that he didn't know I was knew because when he asked for my name he said, "What was your name again?" implying that he thought we had met at a previous engagement and he had forgotten my name. It must be because all Asians look the same so he was confused. After he found out I was new, he half-followed me around after the service and invited me out to lunch at a Lebanese bakery. So we ate falafel and Lebanese pizza. It was really good and tasted and felt really authentic, and it must have been because this man has been living in Melbourne for half his life, he damn well must've found the best Lebanese bakery in town. That and it was pretty popular. Then after dinner he brought us to get some sweets: baklava. And oh my goodness was that baklava amazing cuz I mean, half his life. The four of us ended eating half a kilo of Baklava and the layers of pastry were so thin and crispy and the filling was sweet and the overall feel was just freaking delicious. I wish I had brought my camera with me to take pictures of the falafel and the baklava, but alas, I'm a camera noob so I didn't even think to bring my camera with me when I left the apartment.

And that was pretty much my Sunday. I had planned to go to the beach with some of my classmate as it was pretty hot, but I'm glad I spent some time with the local people here. I want to spend more time with locals and meet more of them. I mean, we're on the other side of the planet. I go to school with my classmates. Sure I don't really talk to them much at school, but I'm sure it'll happen more often now that we have time together here, well at least for some of them. We're in Melbourne, I want to meet new people, have them share Melbourne's secrets with me. There's some bars and places I found via r/Melbourne that I'm gonna try and bring some classmates with me to. I wouldn't mind going alone, but there's still that barrier of being a foreigner. Go to a reddit meet up on Australia Day and perhaps go to the bars they frequent. Speaking of which, I found this awesome bar here that I'm definitely going to visit and take pictures of before I leave. It's called the Mana Bar and it's as nerdy as it sounds. It's a gaming bar and they have TVs and consoles scattered around the bar and have the nerdiest cocktails you can imagine. There's the Princess Peach, Health Potion, and the Mana Potion to name a few. Biggest nerdgasm ever.

And I guess since we're on the topic of alcohol, I can go into the details of Friday night. What a smooth transition that was just ruined by this sentence. Well Friday night we pre-game because alcohol is SUPER expensive here. The cheapest thing you can buy here is a $2.50 bottle of wine. And that's pretty decent. I mean it's probably really crappy wine, but I don't know wine too well and it doesn't taste too bad. I know the red variant is pretty gross, but the white version isn't too bad. I even bought a $12 bottle of Pinot Grigio just to taste and to my untrained taste buds the $2.50 white tastes better initially. The $12 tastes like vinegar when you first drink it, and it does for the entire first cup which is absolutely horrid, but the next day I decided to try it again it tasted a hell of a lot better and was actually quite enjoyable. But then I took a couple days off from the "expensive" stuff and had another glass with dinner yesterday and the same vinegar flavor of the wine came back and it's just so unpleasant. I don't think I'll understand wine while I'm here, maybe later in life, unless someone can explain it to me, or I might actually just try and look it up later because there's still a good deal of time left in the workday.

Now where was I? So we were pre-gaming and we played a little bit of slap cup, then we started to get too loud and we were on the same floor as our advisor, so we decided to move the party upstairs away from the professor. When we got upstairs we started playing with a deck of cards. Various drinking games that I had never played before because I don't drink or party at school. Well after the pre-gaming was over I had consumed almost a full bottle of cheap wine and I don't know how wise it is of me to be posting this information on the internet for the world to see. It'll be the dark side of the Sun I guess. But yes, almost a full bottle of wine + 120 lbs of small Asian don't mix the greatest. But I'm very glad that I don't have Asian-flush nor do I ever plan on vomiting due to drinking stupidly. Even when drunk I'm surprised at how much control you have over yourself. Makes you wonder about all those people who use drunkenness as an excuse. Then again I've never been ridiculously drunk because I don't ever want to reach that point.

Pre-gaming done, we went to Eurotrash. It was a really small club and the music was not bad. The crowd wasn't the greatest though; a lot of dudes and the chicks there weren't too attractive. Man I sound like a douche when I'm writing about partying and clubbing. But after awhile we decided to leave and go back to the Lion, the second club we went to last weekend. It's a pretty decent club/bar and it's got no entry fee and is a block away from our apartments. At the Lion is where things went down. I got threatened by a small Vietnamese dude. He threatened "to smack [me], and [I didn't] want that to happen bro. I'll do it." So what had happened was that in a club it gets pretty crowded and you get pushed around a little bit and of course the natural reaction is to push back. And apparently this guy didn't like it. I didn't turn around or even acknowledge his existence but I could tell that the voice was coming from the down direction so I could only assume that he was even shorter than me. It's kind of funny thinking back on it and I'm sure if anything did end up happening, my WPI crew ( haha that's funny because there's someone who rows here…) would've had my back, but fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, it didn't end up that way.

Speaking of the rower here, he got a free drink from a gay guy. He beat me to my own game. There are details there of course, but you can ask me because I'm at 2100+ words already.

Tl;dr: Work->clubbing->Australian Open->church

P-P-PEACE

The First Week and its End

So everyone arrived on site about a week ago and I guess it's time for an update. Especially since this is a word document and I'm typing and I'm at work. So it must be something pretty important looking in regards to my report. The words are just flying out as if I've just read a super relevant paper and now I'm trying to get all of the information down before I forget it all.

As you can probably tell, "work" is pretty uneventful so this will probably be a longer post if I have enough to write about because there's really nothing else I can do at this point. We're waiting for our sponsor to decide on what they want us to do and that was really apparent on Friday, which we informed after the fact that it's casual. But hey, maybe my new "casual" is the business casual dress, all grown up now. Speaking of which, I've been wanting to upgrade my wardrobe for awhile now, but clothes are too expensive. I did, however, take this opportunity of IQP and Christmas sales to pick up a few more "fashionable" clothes towards my future new wardrobe once I have the funds in a few years. It's not like I'm growing taller or fatter anytime soon either.

Well that's all unrelated to IQP at all and just random thoughts that stem from me starting to write about IQP. And to think I used to make fun of people who wrote like they talked. But then again, I think a blog is the time and place for something like that and not some academic paper. Even still I become more articulate and eloquent when I'm typing, it's like that extra half second I get to think before the words appear makes me awesome. But when am I never awesome? :D just kidding. Kind of. But not really.

I've gotten about half a page down and I've still written nothing about how IQP is going. I guess I'll start with the most recent and relevant topic regarding life here which is sharing an apartment with people who aren't really your friends and not brothers in Christ. It's a bit different to put things lightly. First of all the apartment is really small and maybe sometime I'll take pictures of it and upload them while I'm at the library. But the way the apartment is set up, it lends itself very much towards sharing food with your flat-mates, but as this weekend would have it, my dreams of simplicity and camaraderie would appear too lofty. I originally wanted to share all of the food in the apartment equally and split the receipts pretty much equally amongst the four of us. Very similar to how my apartment functions at school, again with me primarily doing most of the cooking which I'm totally okay with. But we seem to have hit a road block and we've now since converted to only sharing milk and eggs. I've paid the most for food so far because I like food so now I "own" a lot of the food we have around the apartment even though we've eaten most of it. I pretty much got a little shafted on the money side of things in regards to food, but it's not too much money and I'm not about to poke a sore spot over $5-10. Hopefully after last weekend it should be nothing but smooth sailing and blue skies ahead.

Now onto less touchy subjects and the fun stuff and of course my writing momentum gets kicked into a corner as we have the weekly office Monday morning coffee pow-wow. Then of course I have to look up how to make chili for our apartment dinner only to find out that it takes a damn long time and we don't have chili powder. I guess it'll be chili powderless chili. And I also guess we're eating really late too as it takes at least an hour if not 2 of simmering to develop the correct meld of flavors. Ah what a productive work day.

On a more exciting topic, this weekend we went out to a few different places. On Friday night we went to a couple clubs. Nothing really too exciting there, except one of my classmates trying to set me up with girls all night. Tapping on their shoulders and pushing me towards them. Really quite embarrassing to say the least, then add to that my extreme noobness in this type of environment. Yup, really awkward. Just imagine that happening for a few hours in loud clubs and him yelling over to me every couple minutes, "Dude just pick one out!" I'm totally a wuss and we'll see if that changes in the next few weeks I'm here. I may even discover that "clubbing" isn't really for me. I'm not too sure of it at this point. It's just really loud music on a crowded dance floor bobbing to the beat of the music. Music that is only mediocre. I mean it definitely fits the environment of a club and everything, but that doesn't mean that music isn't that great. Then again we only went to two clubs as we're reluctant to pay for any entry fees.

Saturday we went to the zoo and that was pretty cool. I took some pictures, but I forgot to charge my camera, so about 10 minutes in, it died. I was so upset but I did get some pictures of the kangaroos. Also the kangaroo exhibit is pretty much open air with a small fence that people can easily cross. There are emus and kangaroos kind of just chilling. Luckily while we were there one of the baby kangaroos walked out of the enclosed area and I got to pet it. Unfortunately there were so many people around so I didn't get to take an iconic profile picture. That kangaroo was pretty much an attention whore, but I can't blame it. It's a freaking kangaroo living in a zoo. There were also a bunch of other animals from around the zoo. Typical ones you'd find a t a zoo of this size. There were elephants, zebras, giraffes, all different types of monkeys, tigers, lions, seals, penguins and the list goes on and on. I did get to see a platypus though and those things are pretty damn ugly.

After the zoo, one of our sponsors here invited the whole group over for dinner and we sat around for awhile as they told us about themselves and then we ate and just kinda chilled because that's what you do at dinner parties. It was good, free food and company. Then Sunday morning I had planned to go visit a church down the street, but I'm kind of lame and couldn't exactly wake myself up in time that and one of my flat mates took the bathroom for about 15 minutes starting at 9:35 so I couldn't exactly wash-up in time for the 10 am service. All excuses I know, but I'll definitely go next week and maybe that'll be a better environment to meet people :D.

Then we went to the market and picked up groceries and the wonderful discussions took place, well not exactly then but the problem came up. We shelved it as people were going to the beach and so we went to the beach. The weather wasn't even all that great. It was warm when you laid down and got out of the wind, but with the wind blowing it was actually pretty cold. I basically spent the whole time digging a hole because that's what you do at beaches. You dig holes. It's much more exciting than just lying down and getting skin cancer. It's also hilarious because all my pale, white classmates are lathering on the sun screen and still getting burned and I don’t think I applied sunscreen until we were leaving and I didn't burn at all. There was also free ice cream being handed out and we totally abused it. I got two free ice cream bars and they were delicious.

And I guess that wraps up the weekend. It's Monday and we're back to the grind. Maybe we'll actually get some progress on our project this week. We should definitely be a little more proactive about our project because that is kind of why we're all the way down here in Australia.

On another note, with all the free time in the evenings I've been playing a lot of Terraria and Desktop Dungeons. I know I'm really cool, but everyone else seems to just be watching TV or other shows they have. Maybe I'll join in on some shows with people, but evenings here are going to be a large block of free time as we have no homework. This is what it must be like to have a job. *Gasp*

P-P-PEACE

First Day of Work

Being in an office setting is definitely weird, especially for project work. It’s like we have the whole workday to work and research things for our project, but there isn’t really all that much to do yet as the main supervisor isn’t even in today. Also unfortunately, my laptop is unable to connect to their internet because it’s the government and all they have some type of server set up and I’m working on a remote desktop computer for the next 2 months. It’s running on XP and it’s pretty slow seeing as everything has to be remotely accessed. Oh well.

Another thing is that the work day is pretty damn long. There’s only so much I can do during the workday at least today being the first day. I’m also pretty damn bad, already ‘slacking’ on the first day and writing this. But really there’s nothing I can do. I’ve been reading all morning and I’m “settling in” so to speak.

Other random things that I’ve been thinking about: I still need to butt my way more securely into one of the groups of people. I’m fine chilling by myself and all but I think it’d be nice to foster new friendships and do things in a larger group. Completely unrelated, we need to learn how to shop better. For whatever reason we only decided to buy half a kilo of ground beef which was the cheapest thing at the market at $4 a kilo, but half a kilo is almost nothing. I used all of it in one cooking session and now we have no meat left in our apartment. A lot of starch and other things, but we probably need to pick up some cold cuts or something for sandwiches other than peanut butter and vegemite, which has quite an interesting flavor. I tried a little this morning but after tasting it I decided against covering the whole slice with it and just opted for the more familiar peanut butter.

Excuse the randomness of thoughts but that’s how my brain is functioning right now. But our supervisor totally looks like Natalie Portman. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it when I first saw her, but there was some familiarity about her and then it hit me. She looks very similar to Natalie Portman. So that’s that.

I can’t believe there are almost two whole hours before we leave, although it is nice that the sun sets really late so you don’t feel like you’ve spent the whole day at work. I’d imagine the feeling to be terrible when you get home from work and the sun’s set and it’s dark out. Man sounds like New England winter. Well perhaps it’s about time to get back to research and actually being productive for the last stretch of my first day here at work. We’ll see what ends up happening tonight. I have to actually try and be social and make friends. Who knew?