First day of school.

It's weird to think that I'm in Australia to study. There's so much to do and see that today felt out of the ordinary. Classes are extremely different to ones back in the US. We only have lecture once a week, for 2 hours and a tutorial (like CU's recitations) or practical/lab. I only had one class today and it may just have been this class in particular, but there are 51 kids registered for the class, but less than 20 showed up. Apparently this is the norm, which I could understand because the professor had a 98 slide presentation that we went through and all he talked about was straight from the slides. Attendance is taking in tutorials so everyone has to show up for them and that's where we do the majority of the work (from my understanding).

One thing I still can't get over is how it's always cold - wherever you are. Everyone says it's colder than you expect, so I was prepared to wear jackets and jeans outside. What I didn't expect was that there wasn't any heating, anywhere. My hands are constantly cold and I can't sleep without thick socks, a jumper and my face completely under the covers (my nose gets really cold). So Wendy and I went on a hunt for a heater/fan combo we'd heard about. Turns out there aren't any in all of Wollongong (or so it seems). We spent about 2 hours looking for heaters and we figured we'd get dinner while we were out too. Around 4.45pm-5pm ish we couldn't find heaters and figured we'd take a break and go get some food because there are food places all over the mall. We were getting really confused when every food place was taking away the food and cleaning - it was only 5pm. Turns out the mall closes at 5.30pm - major culture shock. By this time we were tired, hungry and worn out from searching for the heater so we decided to head home and look for a Macca's (McDonald's).

Everyone says that McDonald's is different in Australia so we thought that yes it wasn't very adventurous but we were going to have to try it at some point so why not now. It was very clean when we walked in and the menu is a little bit different. The food tasted a little different, mainly because it wasn't so greasy. So it wasn't a huge difference, but then we saw the McCafe part. It looked like a little bakery inside the restaurant. We weren't having a great afternoon so we decided to splurge and got a chocolate muffin. It was delicious, more like chocolate cake in the shape of a muffin, but so good. So we ended the day with a little discovery and will look for more heaters!