Week Five




St. Mary's Cathedral

 






World War I memorial in Parramatta Park

    



Hey all! Hello again and welcome back to what will be my fifth week's post so far! Wow! It's hard to believe I've been in Australia for five weeks already! In fact, last week on August 5th marked my one month anniversary of being in Australia! Time flies I guess. Anyways, this week's post will function as a brief  update on my day-to-day dealings as well as some extra tidbits on some of the historical stuff I saw while I was in Sydney that I forgot to mention in my last post.

As I said already, it has already been five weeks since I arrived in Wagga Wagga on July 8th, and I'm nearly halfway finished with the semester. As you would expect, my workload is starting to pick up a bit and my schedule is filling up more and more. Luckily, my assigments are spread out just enough to where I can manage my time effectively around them. I've worked and went to school at the same time consistently since I was a senior in high school, so I must admit I feel as if I have a lot more free time to do things and get work done. However, it is a solid 15 minute walk from my dorm to the nearest computer lab so it does feel like a bit of a hassle if I need to do work on the computer. Nevertheless, I do enjoy staying busy. It is a bit tough to be 10,000 miles away from one's family and to be alone without any sort of friends and support beforehand, so staying busy with school work and the like prevents me from getting too homesick.

Which brings me to some more good news. As I've mentioned in my earlier posts, Australians seem to be by default nicer and friendlier than most Americans, so I've had no trouble making new friends. I've also joined a church recently which has given me a strong sense of community and spiritual support doing much to sort of stabilize my time here. Charles Sturt University is not much larger than Missouri Southern, so living on campus has allowed me to part of a very close-knit university community. Having friends and nice people to talk to might just be the number one thing in staving off loneliness and homesickness.

My classes here at CSU have been progressing quite nicely. I've only had a couple of assignments that have actually been due so far, so I have yet to recieve a grade back yet, but I am quite confident I have done well. There is a two week break approaching in just two weeks that I look forward to immensely, as it gives me the opportunity to travel and see more of Australia. After that, if the first half of the semester is any evidence, the weeks will only pass more quickly as the semester continues.

To conclude this week's post, I will take a moment to shed some light on the pictures included in this particular blog entry. The two photographs above (taken by yours truly) are of St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney, and of the Parramatta Park World War I Memorial. As I said last week, St. Mary's Cathedral had to be one of the most beautiful churches I've ever seen and I also mentioned how incredibly lovely Parramatta Park was. As for the two photos below, the top one is of the Government House in the Royal Botanic Gardens which I was unable to go inside of as it was hosting an official function on that day. The bottom photograph depicts Hambledon Cottage in Parramatta, the oldest still standing colonial building in all of Australia. Pretty cool stuff! Well, that's all for this week so you'll all hear from me again next week!



Government House





Hambledon Cottage