My week started pretty poorly after the fantastic trip to the Blue Mountains; after returning home, having dinner and writing my blog post, I headed to bed early and set my alarm for some daft time in the middle of the night in order to get up and watch the Manchester Derby. At some unknown time, I stirred and realised that there was a fair amount of light behind my blinds; I immediately knew I had slept through the football - gutted! How had I even managed to do that when the last thing I did before falling asleep was to set my alarm?! When I checked my phone, I realised that the alarm had in fact went off properly and I had simply slept right through it - must have been seriously shattered from the weekend of walking. It was now around 6am and the game was over, so I opened up the internet on my phone to check the BBC Sport website and find out how my team had got on...only to be met by an absolute horror-show result. Disaster. We had lost 4-1 to one of our biggest rivals. I didn't read any further and in a foul mood, I rolled over and went back to sleep.
Monday morning brought my first day of a full timetable for a few weeks, due to having various reading weeks in the different classes. Given the result from the football I wasn't in the greatest of moods and really didn't feel that six hours of class was going to make me feel any better. The day plodded along and was largely unmemorable. It's amazing how much a football team impacts your mood and feelings, some people obviously won't understand that and never will truly get it, but there will be other people who know exactly what I mean. I was delighted to get home and fired up Netflix on the laptop to watch my weekly episode of Breaking Bad; couldn't quite believe there would only be one more to go. It was brilliant as always and I keep finding myself preaching about it to everyone who will listen. Just watch it and thank me later - it simply is that good.
On Tuesday morning I got up quite early again, pleased that I had managed to maintain my habit of quite early rises since the weekend in the Blue Mountains. I always prefer it when I am in the habit of getting up at a decent time and making more of the day, but it always proves difficult to actually start that habit and stick to it for the first few days. I didn't have any classes for the day, but on the horizon was the peer review for Competition Law which was due on Wednesday, an assessable workshop for Commercial Dispute Resolution which I had to prepare for by Friday and also some assessed problem questions in my Intellectual Property class due on the following Monday. Busy busy! I cracked on with getting my peer review written before also completing some preparation for the following day of classes. The routine requirement to meet deadlines and complete work gets quite tedious at university sometimes, when we are so often not required to do any substantive work whatsoever, it seems to always arrive all at once. I should be clear, I'm not complaining about student life - it's very enjoyable and very easy I think. Every stereotype about students pretty much rings true, however on the occasions when some real hard work is required it's never fun.
Wednesday brought another day of classes, which was a bit of a nuisance when there was so much work I needed to get on with. Again, they all seemed to be a bit uneventful really, for a number of reasons. I'm sure when I do have work to complete, I often feel like I would rather be at home with a chance to keep working on it rather than be sitting in classes. However, I also haven't found the latest topic we are covering in Intellectual Property as interesting so far; we are covering patents now and I found trade marks to be a lot more engaging and thought-inducing.
On Wednesday night - actually, Thursday morning, around 5am - I got up and watched United again; this time we beat Liverpool 1-0 to restore some kind of normality, which wouldn't last long, although we weren't to know it at the time. It was also an absolutely scorching day on Thursday and I always find myself feeling refreshed and invigorated each morning when I open the blinds to find another day of blue skies and wall-to-wall sunshine. I tweeted, "It's going to be another beautiful day today," before adding, "I love it here." I think that really captures my mood on Thursday - this is a great place and I'm very lucky to be here. It's constantly in my mind to make an effort to take everything in and enjoy every moment. Just shows the difference it makes to me between United losing 4-1 to City or beating Liverpool 1-0!
Thursday itself saw me make a trip to the library in order to camp out for the day and get some good progress done on my work. I hammered through a large chunk of my Intellectual Property questions and did some good preparation work before the assessable workshop in Commercial Dispute Resolution the following morning. I also went and bought my ticket for the Soccer Society FIFA Tournament, which was being held on Friday afternoon and I genuinely fancied my chances of winning it, even though I hadn't played FIFA at all since leaving home. There was also the small issue of a $100 prize on the line for the winner and since I'm not competitive at all, that wasn't really bothering me and I felt it was more about taking part. Of course, I'm joking, I wanted to know if anyone fancied turning up early for a warm up and some practice games!
On Friday, I got up nice and sharp, had a shower and breakfast and headed into uni to go to my Commercial Dispute Resolution class. Since we were running a mock mediation, where we would have to play roles and follow the process just like it was a real life dispute, a few of the guys turned up fairly smart, with trousers and shirts. It was really warm on Friday, so I arrived wearing shorts and t-shirt and my sunglasses. Awkward. I was certainly glad to see that not everyone had chosen their smart attire and had dressed similarly appropriate for the weather as I had done. Panic over. The mediation process itself went well and I think I made a good contribution; once it was over, my attention quickly turned to the main event of the day - the FIFA Tournament! Priorities right? I was hoping that I would have a great story of how I had turned up and won the $100 however I was beaten 1-0 in the quarter finals and without going into any details, just know that I was cheated out of it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Onwards. On a side note, the tournament was held at a building near the engineering school on campus, where they have these 'pods' which you can book out, without any cost, and use them for whatever purpose you please. They're supposed to be used for group work and productive things such as brain-storming ideas and the like, so the 'pods' are set up with white boards on every wall, and HDMI connections to large screen TVs in order to allow work to be displayed to the group. It's essentially the perfect place to play FIFA, as this photo will prove.
Saturday could be summed up with one word: procrastination. I had the best intentions of getting the bulk of the remainder of my work done before finishing it off on Sunday and relaxing in the afternoon. However, other things got in the way - like Netflix - and I found myself having hardly done any work at all by the time Saturday night came around. Not a day well spent by any means, although I did have a slight excuse since I did have a banging headache in the early part of the afternoon. Unfortunately it proved to be a total progress-killer and a great reason not to go back to my work. Late on Saturday night there was another United game to look forward to - this part of the season is great since the games are so frequent - fantastic! Rather surprisingly we slumped to another disappointing defeat, this time 2-1 at home to West Brom which was very, very poor. However, I did enjoy a good moan about the game as I spent the second half on FaceTime to Cameron at home; it felt like we were sitting at home in one of our houses watching the game and felt very much like being at home. Sunday was much better in terms of getting some work done and I got the Intellectual Property stuff finished off finally.
Sunday night brought about another "pot luck" where everyone in the flat makes one dish and everything is put in the middle of the table. It's definitely my favourite way to eat since it's dead easy to simply make one dish and make a contribution but then I'll get to experience some brilliant dishes from Singapore or Pakistan that the others have made. I hope they feel the same way about my nouvelle cuisine from Scotland. This particular night, since Khurram was making a spicy mince dish and Claire was making sweet and sour fish with various vegetables, it was decided that I should provide some kind of side to go with each. I made the pasta/rice combination thing which my sister showed me how to cook, which she learned from our friends whilst staying with them in Lyon a few summers ago. It's a really easy thing to make but it's so tasty and did go well with both a curry dish and sweet and sour too. Also, whilst incredibly spicy, the mince that Khurram made was insanely good and I'll definitely make sure I write down the recipe.
I totally over ate at dinner and was totally stuffed, so I went to go and watch some more of Long Way Down which I've been watching on Netflix again, after first watching it on DVD a few years back. Great watch and well recommended, along with the first one - Long Way Round. On Monday, I got up and had a lazy morning, reading some of the latest football news from the weekend and having breakfast. I headed into uni in the afternoon, printed my assignment off in the library and handed it in to the Faculty of Law office. I headed home with some time to kill before the LAST EVER EPISODE of Breaking Bad, which would be on Netflix around 6pm for us here. Claire and Jess suggested we take a walk to Extreme Gelato, which is the place which makes ice cream with nitrous oxide, which sounded like a great idea! We headed down through Chinatown towards Darling Harbour to the small ice cream shop, which permanently seems to have strange, smokey ice pouring out the front - quite strange to see. I decided to go for an adventurous choice and picked a chilli chocolate fudge flavour and it was seriously excellent. Here is a picture of my ice cream, including chilli flakes on top!
I'm going to try something I haven't done on the blog before and post a video which we took at the ice cream place. I have no idea if this will work, but I'll give it a go and see what happens...
That didn't work. Forget that plan. Anyway, I don't think I've actually wrote this in the blog at all before now, but Kerry has now booked her flights to come out here and visit next summer, which is great news! I've sort of been making a conscious effort to remember all the sort of smaller things which I need to remember and show her whilst she is here - not simply things like the Opera House or the Harbour Bridge obviously. I've now started keeping a little list on my phone and I'll keep adding to it in the hope that I have a fine collection of potential things to do when she arrives. I've realised so far that the majority of the items on the list so far are either foods, or places to have food - and Extreme Gelato for ice cream was one of the first! I need to branch out a bit. After heading back to the flat, I watched the last episode of Breaking Bad - I'll need to find a new TV show to get attached to now - before making dinner and sitting down to watch the Notebook, which I only watched because it happened to be on TV! I'm still a bloke and didn't lose any man points for it, ok!
This has been a really long post, almost done now...
Today, I had a quiet morning where I watched some more of Long Way Down and then headed to the Post Office on campus in order to pick up some post cards and an envelope. I also popped into Coles on my way back to get toothpaste, deodorant, some clothes for the kitchen and grass stain remover for my white Man United shirt - it better come out! I made myself some pasta for lunch since I was going to play football at night with the Soccer Society lads. Tonight however we were playing 11-a-side on a full size pitch against guys from the University of Technology of Sydney and I was really looking forward to my first proper game in ages, even if it was only a friendly. I caught the train from Central to St Peters station and took the short walk down to the pitch. Oh, almost forgot, for some reason there was a huge model railway set up in Central Station tonight, which was cool. No idea why it was there, but I snapped a quick picture.
Anyway, I really enjoyed a tough shift up and down the left wing of the pitch during the game - it felt incredibly familiar and made me remember how many weekends I had spent running up and down a touchline. I've discovered that I really miss playing proper football and tonight essentially made up my mind that I want to find a team here and may even get back to it when I return home. The game went well as we won 3-0 and I scored the second with a header from a great cross, before claiming an assist for the third goal too. Good work all round.
Headed home afterwards, made some dinner and sat down to watch the last bit of Long Way Down and write this blog post. I'm going to go to sleep now; it's spring break this week and then I have a reading week the following week, so I'm hoping to try and find a job and maybe do some other interesting things in my time off. Jessica has now managed to get herself a job here and that has spurred me on to try and get something too - I would really like the extra money in order to get the new Man Utd shirt, some new trainers and some nice sunglasses for summer. Good enough motivation, I think. I also need to find a new thing to watch now that Breaking Bad is finished and I would welcome any help or suggestions in solving that problem!
Good night troops,
Jamie
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