A day at home

Today morning I noticed - for some weird reason - I hadn´t spend a day at home since my arrival here. I must have felt a bit exhausted of constantly doing stuff so I decided to stay home for the whole day. It was raining so I didn´t really feel like going outside anyways. I did a bunch of boring stuff: studying, doing laundry, cleaning the common room, watching TV (Ugly Betty is my new favorite show) and eating our weekly flat dinner. Shinae cooked the most delicious sushi! Tim made us M&M-cookies for desert. He had bought this chunk of ready cookie dough that you just have to slice up and put into the oven for 11mins. It´s really handy if you don´t have a lot of time for real cooking.

Hmm...what should I tell about the rest of the past week... I´ve been working on some assignments, trying to catch up with all of my readings, doing sport (That dredmill is killing me :/ I only have to run 3 x 1,5min with some push ups and chins in between, but it´s so fast I feel like dying, the longest seconds I´ve ever experienced) and spending some time outside.

Victoria Park Pool, where Carla and I study every now and then.

Victoria Park

On Friday Carla and I went to a drinks night organized by the UTS Business Council. Members got 4 free drinks! We ended up listening an unofficial board meeting and the council doesn´t seem to be doing too great. Even though there´re thousands of business students at the UTS they´ve only got less than 100 members. We suggested they should improve their marketing, targeting especially first year and international students, and state clear objectives for the council - things we consider self evident - and didn´t even get to the more detailed ideas. No one really knows about the existence of the council, and even if they do they´ve got no idea what kinds of activities they do. So how on earth are they expecting people to join if they don´t tell what kinds of benefits their membership offers?! I think being business students they should know the very basics of marketing. It´s pretty much the same with the Student Association. Students seem to know the UTS Union, that´s a head organization of all societies and clubs and organizes fun things. But the Student Association, that looks after students´ rights and benefits, is unknown. Having being student actives Carla and I have a lot of opinions and after the drinks night we had this whole conversation about how these organizations should be run. Anyways, we´re planning on going to the upcoming drinks nights, as well, to get free drinks and talk to the nice people there.

On Saturday I went to Bondi Beach with Carla, Denise and Till (from Germany). Till had heard of a festival being held there. We expected something pretty big but it was just a small stage with some local (?) bands performing. We had a good time anyways just laying on the beach and swimming. The water is getting colder already: It was only 21c. We left the beach just in time since it started thundering when we got home. Later I went to a see movie with Tim. We watched the The Good German that told about WW2. It was nothing special but a good way to spend a Saturday night anyways. A couple of weeks ago we went to see Letters from Iwo Jima. It was an exceptionally good war movie telling about the Japanese fighting to keep the island of Iwo Jima. It was a realistic movie; soldiers surrending, missing their families, being scared, getting to know each other, leaders fighting over power etc. I liked them actually speaking Japanese even though it was a Hollywood movie.