"Our Uni"

In Australia, when we've referred to our "college" education, we've gotten nothing but strange looks of confusion. Here, it's simply referred to as "uni" (pronounced 'you-nee'). Our "uni" (Bond) is one of the most beautiful campuses I've ever seen. You can tell that a whole lot of time was put into the design of each building, sidewalk, and archway. The middle of campus has a massive arch building that overlooks a beautiful Lake with a giant fountain in the middle. This portion of the campus was designed by a big-time Japanese architect.

I recently found out that 10,000 square meters of quarry tiles were used for walkways on campus, along with 10,000 square meters of paving stones from Victoria Australia for internal roadways -barely any concrete! There was no cutting corners in the construction of this campus... making it the most beautiful one I've seen.

We've completed one full week of class and are on to week two. We are both taking a journalism class where we're writing stories for both Bond's newspaper and for the online edition of our co

mmunity's newspaper. Our first story is covering an event we went to on Friday held by the BCC (Bond Christian Connection), which is the Christian club on campus that we joined. The event was called a "Rec Crawl," and was held as sort of an alternative to the pub crawls that were held for students on the same night. We went lawn bowling, had pizza on the beach, and played arcade games and laser "skirmish." It was a lot of fun; we met some really solid people and got connected with a church near campus.

I think we've both underestimated the work load and difficulty level of our courses here. I can't imagine how people complete their full degrees here- it's so hard to focus! I'll admit I've been so insane as to secretly wish it would be 20 below and blizzarding for an afternoon- just so I could get some homework done. Such is life... I suppose we can bear to stick it out for a few more months :)

As for our courses, we are both enrolled in Gender Comm and Writing for the News Media. CJ is also taking Photography and a Broadcast Journalism course; both are very involved and could be quite a challenge. I'm taking a Digital Media and a Marketing class. They seem similar to the classes back home so I'm not expecting any big surprises. Right now we're searching desperately for a story for our News Writing class... no such luck so far.

As I can only get away with saying back home, "uffda."