A few weeks of classes and Randwick Races!

My last post left off from Monday 10th March, which was the beginning of the second week of this second semester at uni. After my Intellectual Property class in the morning, I headed off to get some lunch and enjoy the sunshine for a while, before returning to class for Private International Law in the afternoon. Throughout the day, I had gradually felt a headache coming on and my attempts to drink plenty of water and eat some decent food at lunch hadn't helped prevent it; towards the end of my second class of the day, I had completely stopped concentrating or taking any notes. I trudged home, took some pain killers and slept for a few hours. After I awoke again, I got up and had some dinner and drank a few more bottles of water and the headache had died down somewhat. I spent the rest of the evening catching up on Top Gear on iPlayer and then got off to sleep.

On Tuesday back at home, Mum's car was seemingly headed for the scrapheap after breaking down on the way to Edinburgh. After some research, it turns out that the particular model had been subject to a customer recall due to engine issues - the exact same issue which had now caused her car to cut out on the motorway. At the moment, Toyota are trying to avoid responsibility for fixing the fault, however we shall see how things go. Meanwhile, I was off to Criminology in the morning, followed by another interesting Evidence class in the afternoon, where we watched a film called 'Shadow of Doubt' about a woman who was convicted of the murder of her husband. Whilst his body had never been found, no weapon ever discovered and numerous other inconsistencies in the evidence which was submitted, her conviction was upheld and she is currently in prison. It was really very interesting and thought provoking - was there a miscarriage of justice? I guess we'll probably never really know.

I had another day of classes on Wednesday, starting with Intellectual Property. It tends to always be a reasonably interesting class, but we spent some time looking at a case involving Creation Records and the album cover for the third Oasis album called 'Be Here Now'. Of course, that drew my full attention and I was a little bit taken aback when the lecturer described the band as, "really quite big when this album came out." Really quite big? Biggest band in the world! I avoided the temptation to say anything. Thursday meant classes again, bringing about the start of my weekend since I have no classes on a Friday. In other news, I received an unwelcome text from home, as Kerry told Mum that if I were buying her headphones for her birthday, then she wanted them to be Beats by Dre, they should be white and that she wanted to try them out before deciding on a pair. Personally, I don't like birthday presents which people choose for themselves, or even know about beforehand, though in this case there was a bigger issue, since I had already bought her headphones - and they weren't Beats. Oh dear. Luckily enough, I had been quite particular in researching and trying out some different sets for myself and had settled on an awesome pair of Bose over-ear headphones, which I knew would be better than any pair of Beats. Fingers crossed she buys into that reasoning!

With a free day on Friday, I had a long lie before getting up and having some breakfast and a shower. After a chilled day, not doing very much at all, I went to play football in Victoria Park at 3pm with the guys in the Soccer Society. After Jessica had finished class, I met her in the park before we headed home, made dinner and lazed around for much of the night. Some of the people from Iglu were planning on heading out, but since we were going to the horse races at Randwick the next mooring, we decided not to join them. Jessica headed home and within an hour, I had been convinced to go out. We had a few drinks and then went out to the Palace Hotel, where we enjoyed a Guinness, before moving on to Star Bar. I didn't have too much to drink and I was home by around 3am, however I was suffering on Saturday morning. I got up and headed over to McDonalds to get a milkshake and I was feeling alright; Jessica arrived shortly after and we got dressed up ready for the races. We met everyone in the common area in Iglu and got ready to leave.

A quick group photo before we left. Alex was running late, so unfortunately he's not in this one.

We walked to Railway Square and caught the bus which goes by the racecourse on its way to Coogee. After initially feeling quite alright, although quite tired, my hangover hit me like a brick wall on the bus. The journey was a struggle to say the least. After we arrived at Royal Randwick Racecourse, we bought our tickets and headed towards the main grandstand.

The back of the grandstand at the racecourse - quite comfortably the most impressive course I have ever been to or seen. It's the definition of luxury and prestige.

The 'Theatre of the Horse' where the horses were walked around before each race.

Since most people were hungry, we headed inside the stand and found ourselves some food. We also went and bought race books and some pens, safe in the knowledge that Chloe's dad - a bit of a punter himself - would be on the phone in an effort to give us some solid tips for the days races. Shortly before the start of the first race, I placed $5 on the favourite to win, on the recommendation of those more in-the-know than myself. Typically, it came in close to last in a six-horse field. Not the start we had hoped for by any means. After the race, we headed outside and met Alex who had caught a later bus. We met up with the group again, placed our bets for the second race and headed back to the track to cheer on our horses.

Our track-side view, just as the horses were making their way out on the course for a race.

Once again, the second race was unsuccessful as my horse failed to make any real challenge against the leaders. This patter of under-achievement and lost bets continued for the entire day and we all eventually decided to call it quits and head home early. Rather tired, we caught the bus back to Central and then walked home through the tunnel, which felt like miles. After arriving home, I collapsed onto my bed, completely shattered. It turned out that our timing had been rather good, since the clouds soon rolled over and the skies opened with pounding rain. With the rain on for the day, the rest of the evening was spent eating Thai food, whilst Jessica and I started watching 'Gavin & Stacey'.  I also enjoyed a FaceTime call from Jason, Fraser and Joanne back home, who had been out to City that night.

On Sunday morning, we picked up watching 'Gavin & Stacey again before Jessica headed home and I watched some of the Australian Grand Prix at Melbourne. As it was the first race of the new season and Hamilton had shown some fantastic pace in pre-season testing, I was hopeful of a good opener for him; however I was soon disappointed as he retired in the early stages of the race. After dinner, I chilled out for some time before it was finally time for kick off in the United v Liverpool game around midnight. Unfortunately, our season just continues to get worse and worse, as our bitter rivals battered us 3-0 at home. It was an awful performance and we never looked like winning the game; I got off to sleep after the game, in a crap mood.

Monday morning meant I was back to class, still feeling pretty bad about the football the previous night. Classes dragged by a bit and I was glad to get home and chill out for a while. I played some FIFA with Jack, on the Playstation downstairs and watched the latest Top Gear episode before having dinner and heading to bed. On Tuesday, I had another day of classes, after which I played football in Victoria Park again. Again, we played FIFA afterwards before I headed to bed. At home, Tuesday meant the return of Champions League football - Chelsea and Real Madrid were the latest teams to book their place in the quarter finals. After class on Wednesday, I headed home and made dinner before getting an early night in eager anticipation of the football the next morning. I was up early, around 6.30am, ready in time for kick off. United needed a 3-0 win to overturn the deficit from the first leg against Olympiakos and progress to the next round. After a penalty and a free kick late in the half, we went in at the break leading 2-0, before Robin van Persie scored his third goal - completing his hat-trick - early in the second period. The remainder of the game was particularly nerve-wracking, but the team managed to see out the result and we were through! Thursday at uni was rather more enjoyable after that great start to the day!

I don't usually post any other pictures in this blog, other than ones which I take myself, but I feel that this one is well deserved. It could be the highlight of our season, so it's warranted. Ooohhh Robin van Persie!

On Friday, I had a chilled morning before getting some uni work done in the afternoon. Later on I headed off to Victoria Park for football and met Jessica afterwards. We walked home via Woolworths to get something for dinner, then I chatted to Kerry at home on FaceTime since it was her birthday. Gladly, she was happy with her headphones and was buzzing on her first driving lesson later that night! The other interesting news of the day was that I got an email inviting me along to an Apple Retail interview; I replied to the invite and was allocated a time slot at 3pm the next Thursday. After having applied some time ago, it was great to finally be asked along to the next stage and I'm really hopeful that I'll bag myself another job! After dinner, we headed out to meet Alex and his girlfriend for a drink; we headed to the Palace Hotel where Alex managed to twice order the wrong drink for his girlfriend. Very smooth! Haha!

On Saturday, Jessica and I headed to Bondi for a day spent trying to get a tan before winter returns. Once we had spent a few hours spent on the beach, we headed to Bucket List for the routine steak sandwich and chips, after which we returned to the beach for a while longer. Soon after, the clouds rolled over and it looked like it was about to rain, so we gathered up our things and caught the bus back to Central. I ate dinner and then it was time for an early night, since I was back up at 4.30am to watch United away to West Ham in the late Saturday kick off. Luckily, it was well worth the alarm call, since Wayne Rooney scored one of the best goals of the season - actually, one of the best goals of the decade - as he smashed in a full volley from near the halfway line. Immense talent and supreme execution. What a goal.

Sunday was spent relaxing before getting the bulk of the work done for the presentation in my Criminology class for Tuesday. I was looking at the American sociologist Robert Merton and his theory of strain and it's relation to deviance and crime, as well as how his general theory has been developed and built upon by Robert Agnew. As I'm sure you can tell, it was riveting stuff. Later that night, it was time to FaceTime home again since it was now Dad's birthday. We got him the London Grammar album, a book about the 1998 yacht disaster in the Sydney to Hobart race, some chocolate and finally got him a sim-card for his iPad. I got off to bed at a reasonable time, since I needed to get up at a decent time the next day to finish my presentation for Criminology. We had a reading week in IP, so I only had my Private International class in the afternoon; however, the weather intervened and I decided not to go to class since the rain was bouncing off the pavements. Instead, I got some more of my work done for class the following day. My presentation went quite well on Tuesday, but as ever, I was glad to have it over and done with; for the next again Tuesday, I now have a 1200 word essay due, on the same subject as my presentation, so that'll be the focus of my attention over the coming days.

On Tuesday night after uni, I played football in Victoria Park again, before the run cut things short. After Jessica had finished classes, she came to mines and we made fajitas, which were excellent, it has to be said. The next morning, I was up bright and early to watch the Manchester derby - what a shambles that turned out to be. We conceded the first goal inside the first minute and that was followed by two others in a comfortable 3-0 victory for City, which was never threatened by United. Another awful performance to add to a season of woes. My class that afternoon dragged in and I was glad to be home and spent the evening playing FIFA with Jack once again. Today, I got up and headed in for my Criminology class before returning home and getting ready for my Apple Retail interview. I was due to be at the interview location, on King Street, near the Apple store itself, by around 3pm and waited to be collected by an Apple representative. The interview was a group format, which isn't my preference, but it went quite well I think and I managed to make a few points and contribute to the discussions which were had. Fingers crossed that I'll hear some positive news back soon! This evening was again spent relaxing in front of the television playing FIFA. It's a hard life. It's almost 2am now and I am shattered - bed time I think!

Until next time,
Jamie

Spring break!

This week I have enjoyed my spring break from uni - although unfortunately Chad Hogan was busy so he didn't manage to throw a party. The weather has been pretty good all week and I've tried to make the most of it and continue to attempt to catch a tan.

After the football last Tuesday night, I enjoyed a quiet morning on Wednesday before quickly becoming bored of having nothing to do. It's always really strange that when you are incredibly busy and have lots of deadlines to meet, or tasks which need completed, you can't wait for some time off to simply do nothing and when that time eventually comes, you inevitably get bored after only a few hours. By the early afternoon I had decided to go for a swim at the free swimming pool nearby which one of my flatmates had been telling me about a few days previously. A quick bit of research on Google told me that the Prince Alfred Park, and swimming pool, was literally just at the other side of Central Station and only around 5 minutes walk away - and it was totally free! Superb! I headed over and enjoyed a few lengths of the large, outdoor pool before finding a place on the grassy hill to lie and chill out with my iPod plugged in for an hour or two. Excellent afternoon spent in the sunshine.

On Wednesday night in my pursuit of a new TV show to watch after Breaking Bad (which mum and dad have just started watching on my insistence) I began to watch the Walking Dead. It had been recommended to me quite a while ago by Cary and Fraser; the first four episodes were watched consecutively before I had to give in and go to bed since I was getting up around 4.30am to watch the football. It always amazes me that when my alarm goes off in the middle of the night, there is no hesitation in jumping up out of bed and getting my laptop powered up, excited by the prospect of the football - if someone woke me at that time for practically any other reason I would be beyond crabbit. Just remembered that 'crabbit' is one of the words on my Scottish dialect dish towel which Kerry, mum and dad gave me before I came to Australia and I've been using it to teach my flat mates some words! So far we've nailed "eejit" as well as "braw" and "wheesht" - all the key stuff really. The word "yes" has almost entirely been replaced with "aye" too, which really helps the place feel like home I think!

Speaking of home, I also found out on Wednesday that whilst Auntie Jean has booked her flight to come out and visit me as planned in January, my mum is also coming with her! Brilliant news, very much surprising to hear and it'll be great to see them both before Kerry is here next July. Wonder if dad will manage to land himself a Fitzcharles trip to Australia at some point...? Haha! Anyway, the football was a moderate success as United drew 1-1 away in the Ukraine to Shakhtar Donetsk and played fairly well. I went back to sleep for a couple of hours satisfied with both result and performance. On Thursday it was raining and pretty windy, which wasn't much fun so I spent the morning watching some TV, then made lunch and headed out to hand out some more CVs to some shops on Broadway as well as some coffee shops and cafes near Central Station. I also took a walk up to Coles to pick up some groceries which I needed; it's funny that as soon as there is a little rain here I seem to go into complete shut-down and hardly get anything done. I'm already completely used to the sunshine and have no idea how I will handle going home to the harsh Scottish winter next year!

On Friday I had another relatively quiet day; watched some more Walking Dead after having a shower and breakfast in the morning, caught up on some of the latest football news from back home and then had lunch and headed out to play football. I'm currently playing with a pretty large hole in the front of my right boot and I've emailed Sports Direct to try and get them to send me a new pair - I only bought the boots back in July before I left the UK and I've been using my law skills in order to try and force the issue a bit! Hopefully I'll have some new boots soon enough. After the football, a few of the guys were chatting about the plans for that night and suggested we meet up, go for some food and head out for a few drinks in Newtown. I hadn't been out in Newtown at all yet so I was definitely up for it and headed home to have a shower and get changed.

We decided to head to a Thai restaurant on the main street, but went to the liquor store along the street first and bought a bottle of wine. In Australia, restaurants either sell alcohol or allow you to simply bring your own and don't serve any alcohol themselves, which is quite cool and certainly helps keep the cost down when dining in restaurants. I enjoyed a dish which I seem to remember was called chicken pad kapao - sort of spicy chicken and veg stir fry with chilli and basil - it was excellent even if I can't remember the proper name. Afterwards, we headed to a bar above the Marlborough Hotel called Miss Peaches, which was a really cool place, although the music was very hipster and retro and there were quite a few middle aged women who were pretty drunk, which was strange. We then headed to another bar which I can't remember the name of at the moment, but the bar tender was a nice guy. Finally, we ended up in an Irish bar called Kelly's which was great, as are most Irish bars - they had pretty decent Guinness and the first song which was playing as we walked in was "There is a Light That Never Goes Out" by the Smiths. I knew I was going to like it from that moment. I headed home not long after 3am, quickly stopping into the local shop to get some milk for breakfast the next morning.

On Saturday morning, I hauled myself out of bed with a little bit of a headache, had some breakfast and a shower and soon felt spot on once again. Since it was such a nice day, I decided to head back to the pool at the Prince Alfred Park and enjoyed an afternoon in the sun with my iPod and my car magazine which I brought with me from home. The plan for that evening was to have a barbecue with my flatmates, which had been organised by Claire since her sister was visiting from Melbourne with her boyfriend. She had booked the communal cooking area downstairs for us and we were all chipping in with some contribution to the night. After returning from the pool, I got showered and headed to the Broadway Shopping Centre in order to pick up some food and wine - I also went to K-Mark to buy some more boxers, since I seem to have plenty of clothes, except underwear which is a bit annoying. I picked up some food in Coles and was pleased to see that my receipt had another 'Buy One Get One Free' deal for some particular bottle of wine in Liquorland, so headed off to find it; I'm still not really used to the supermarkets not serving alcohol. Anyway, I got two bottles of Counting Sheep Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand for $14 and headed home. It turned out to be really nice, especially once it had been chilled in the fridge for a while.

The communal area where the barbecue is here also has a ping-pong table which we made great use of throughout the night. The food was excellent and it was good to meet a few new people once more - I've found out through meeting such a number of new people since I've been here that I am very good at remembering people's faces but horrible at keeping track of all the names. I'll need to work on that. My personal highlights from the night were the baked potatoes, complete with sour cream, chives and bacon pieces, as well as one of Claire's friends arriving with two big bars of Toblerone - fantastic!

Before heading back upstairs, two other lads arrived in the living room and put the football on the TV, so I sat and watched the second half of Man City v Everton with them. I had never met them before, even though they live here too and it was good to once more meet some decent guys who enjoyed football. I went off to bed just before midnight since United were playing at 5.30pm at home, which meant a 2.30am kick off here! However, the clocks moved on Sunday night, which meant that at 2.30am it would actually be 3.30am and I had completely forgotten! Luckily, my iPhone is an incredibly useful piece of technology and not only corrected the time, but adjusted my alarm to the appropriate time too. I was very impressed when I woke up thinking that I had missed the first half of the game, but had simply been tricked by the clocks moving. At home, dad was driving a local youth football team down from Falkirk to go and watch the game, however he didn't manage to get himself a ticket unfortunately. It was a great game, even though United went 1-0 down, as Adnan Januzaj marked his first Premier League start with two stunning goals to win us the match! What an impact from a guy who is only 18 years old! Incredible!

On Sunday I had another quiet morning before heading to the pool for another day of swimming and sunbathing, since it was a scorching day. Afterwards I headed home, made dinner and watched some more Walking Dead - finished season 2 already! After showing mum this picture of my dinner from Sunday, she said that I'll be cooking more when I come home. So I reckon I'm going to stop showing her my excellent meals. Later on, I was on FaceTime chatting to Kerry as she baked at home but I was almost asleep whilst talking to her since I was totally knackered from my weekend, so headed to bed.

I must have been even more tired than I thought from my busy week, since my alarm went off at 9am on Monday morning and unfortunately, after turning it off, I closed my eyes just for a minute and next thing I knew I woke up again and it was almost 12 noon. I hate when that happens. I checked my phone and had a text from Jessica to see if I wanted to join her and Jordan for some lunch - I hadn't had breakfast yet. I jumped in the shower and after drying off, found another text to say that the plan was to meet at Town Hall station at 1pm which was only 20 minutes from then. I got dressed in super-fast time, made my way to Central and jumped on a train to Town Hall; we decided that I would just meet them wherever they decided to pick for lunch at Darling Harbour, so I arrived at a place called Margaritaville where the pair of them had already found us a table. There are still several tall ships and navy boats in the waters around Sydney Harbour at the moment after the International Fleet Review on Saturday, where Prince Harry was attendance marking 100 years since the naval fleet arrived in Sydney. I managed to snap a picture of one of the tall ships, which you were able to go on board and explore, except the queue was massive and the boat was so busy it looked like you could barely move, so it seemed totally pointless.

We ended up waiting quite some time on our food and after questioning how long it was taking to our waiter, another guy - who I assume was a manager - came out and suggested that he would sort us out with another round of drinks, which we were quite happy with. We weren't in any rush to go anywhere and the food barely took another 5 minutes after that. Lunch was really good; I had grilled barramundi fish with rice and salad and enjoyed a nice cold beer sat looking over the harbour. We headed home afterwards and the girls in the flat fancied another game of table tennis, so we played until late in the evening before moving back upstairs and making dinner. I watched some more Walking Dead and retired to my bed. Shattered once again.

Today it was supposed to be raining so it was pleasantly surprising to wake up and find that not only was it dry, but it was quite sunny outside. However, since there had been an expectation of rain, my motivation to do what I had planned to do quickly drained. It ended up taking me until shortly after lunchtime to get showered, have breakfast, put some washing in the laundry downstairs, tidy up my room and watch a couple of episodes of the Walking Dead. Around 1pm there was a post on the Soccer Society Facebook page asking if anyone fancied a game this afternoon, so I decided to head up to Victoria Park shortly after 3pm to see how many people would turn up. There ended up being 6 of us there so we played three-on-three with a short pitch and small goals; it was surprisingly good fun and a really good workout in the heat.

Until next time!

Lots of work and Extreme Gelato!

It feels like ages since I've written and yet it has only been a little over one week since my last post. In that week I've been working hard and kept very busy with work at uni, however I haven't really been up to much else unfortunately. I'm going to try and remember the interesting parts of the past seven days - those moments where I wasn't stuck behind my laptop writing assignments!

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

Diary of my week!

I thought I might try something a little bit different for my next blog post, so I'm going to keep a daily diary for the next week or so and see if it helps to ensure I don't miss any details.

Tuesday 10th September
No classes today, so I had a long lie again. When I say I've been having a long lie, usually it's only until around 10.00am roughly, since I set my alarm for around that time and then maybe lie for a little while reading the latest news and sport headlines from during the night back home. However, today I must have still been partially asleep when I turned my alarm off, rolled over and went straight back to sleep, since I awoke again some time later to check my phone and saw that it was 11.38am. Must have needed it. I had missed out on another hour or so which I had planned to use for some more uni work so I quickly hopped out of bed, made some breakfast and had a shower.

The big news today is that the demo for the new FIFA 14 is launching today, which in previous years would usually mean that I would be rushing home from school, work, or maybe a lecture at Glasgow to get on to my Playstation and download the game. Unfortunately, I don't have a console here so I can't join in with all the other lads playing the new game, which is a bit disappointing - I know that's quite tragic but I don't really care.

After getting some of my Competition Law essay done in the early afternoon, I got changed and headed for Victoria Park to meet up with the guys from the Sydney Uni Soccer Society. It was 32 degrees here today and I was definitely feeling it during the game; our team played pretty well though and I scored a couple of nice goals too, which is always pleasing! I hope that I'm getting acclimatised to the heat so that I can continue playing throughout the summer and so far it feels alright - fingers crossed it continues! After the football I headed home and really couldn't be bothered cooking so in an attempt to come up with something quick and easy I made myself some ham and egg fried rice with some boiled carrots. Not a particularly traditional combination and not very exciting either, but I just needed some energy back in me after the football.

It's Claire's 21st birthday tomorrow - she is one of my flatmates here - so the rest of us have got together and bought some balloons and other decorations which we're going to put up in the apartment around midnight and wake her up to say happy birthday!

Wednesday 11th September
Woke up to the news this morning that the hot water is off in the whole building - they don't know why it's not working and they can't tell us how long it will be until it comes back on. Not a good start to the day, especially seeing as I have always had some kind of routine of having a shower every morning before I really go and do anything else. I was supposed to have a class at 2pm and the water didn't come back on until around 1.30pm which meant it was too late to get a shower and go to uni - unfortunately, there was no chance I was going to uni without a shower. Fortunately however, it was my only class of the day and it happened to be a stand-in lecturer since the usual lecturer had a meeting, so not much was missed. Instead of my class, I tried to spend my day as productively as possible by getting some more of my essay done for Competition; a first draft is due for peer review on the 16th of this month, so I have another few days to get it finished off. Whilst working, I played the Arctic Monkeys set from the Roundhouse at the iTunes Festival for some background music. They've really stepped it up in the past few months; headlining Glastonbury, the new album, "AM" and now the iTunes Festival set - smashing it!

Since it was Claire's birthday today, we decided we would all go out for some dinner tonight. We met in the flat around 6pm and headed up George Street before heading to a Korean restaurant near World Square - I forget the name of the place! I had never had Korean food before but had enjoyed some Thai dishes as well as Chinese and some food from the airport in Singapore which was nice, so I was sure I would find something which I liked on the menu - I'm not a fussy eater by any means. When we arrived it was decided that we would have a sort of buffet-style meal where we ordered a number of dishes and left them all in the centre of the table. I won't pretend like I know what the dishes were called or exactly what they were made with, but I do know that each of them was really nice and that I would absolutely have Korean food again!

The girls also suggested that we order some Korean wine and discussed whether one or two bottles would be best; I had no idea what the stuff was like so allowed them to decide and one bottle was deemed plenty - what a good decision it turned out to be. The bottle arrived at the table and it was no bigger than an average bottle of beer - I wondered if this was actually wine at first, before the waitress dished out a shot glass to each of us and filled them with the "wine". I smelled the little glass of clear liquid which had a scent which could only be described as something like vodka - this was not wine as I knew it. We drank them back in one go and surprisingly there was no burn, but it was quite a strong flavour and a pretty pleasant drink overall. It turned out that the stuff was 17% alcohol and I wondered why the girls had been debating whether to buy two bottles when there was only five of us around the table! We returned to the flat where Claire sliced up some birthday cake to share with us all before events were cut short by the fire alarm. Here's a picture of us all enjoying our wine!

Thursday 12th September
This morning I had another tragic effort at getting up when my alarm went off at 10am - I quickly had a read of the news and flicked through Twitter, and thought I would close my eyes again, just for 5 minutes I told myself. Stupid mistake. The next time I checked my phone it was almost 11.30am and I'd missed most of the morning which I had been planning to use in order to get some more uni work done. Anyway, I got up and went through to the kitchen to make some breakfast - made myself an omelette with some onions and tomatoes through it, which I had with some toast. Afterwards I had a shower and got dressed before I sat down to get some work done.

Around 2pm I got changed into my football stuff, stuck my boots in my bag and headed up to the Square, which is another grass playing field in the middle of campus. However, it turned out the rest of the people weren't playing today so it was a wasted trip walking all the way up there, however it did mean that I got to chill out in the sunshine with my iPod playing whilst I waited to see if anyone else would turn up. I went into Coles on the way back home to get some milk, bread and other groceries that I was needing.

When I came home I got back to writing my first essay draft for Competition Law, which is due on the 16th of September - only 4 days away now. Getting close to having it done now though and then it'll be on to the next one! Busy time at the moment! For dinner tonight I made myself some fish - last week I bought two basa fillets at the supermarket, so I covered them in flour and shallow fried them. Had the fish with some boiled carrots on the side; just a quick dinner before I got back to writing some more of my essay. I also had some apples left over which were starting to go a little bit soft, so I sliced them up, once more covered them in some flour and fried those as well. They were really tasty but they certainly didn't look very good! I'm just about to go and watch some Still Game episodes before I go to bed - I've got my Commercial Dispute Resolution class tomorrow morning at 10am so I'll need a decent sleep.

Friday 13th & Saturday 14th September
I didn't have a chance to write on Friday, so I'm going to cover Friday and Saturday in one post. I got up fairly early on Friday morning, had a shower and made some breakfast before my Commercial Dispute Resolution class. I had porridge for breakfast, which I bought last week in the supermarket - it was only around $1.70 for a fairly big bag of oats, which is pretty good! The class was another enjoyable one and I'm fairly sure it is my favourite class of this current semester. The class finished at 2pm as normal and I headed straight home to get changed, have some lunch and head back out to go and play football. I met up with the guys from the Soccer Society in Victoria Park and played there for a while before moving to St Paul's Oval to play with the other group for a while too.

Afterwards I walked home and quickly got showered and changed once more since we had plans to meet up and discuss the trip to Cairns which Jordan had suggested. I met Jordan and Jessica just outside my flat and we decided to go and get some food first of all - I hadn't had any dinner yet, having played football for a few hours in the sunshine and it was now after 6pm, so I was starving. We headed up to World Square, which is a shopping centre in the middle of the city, but it also has quite a nice food court. We ended up eating in a place which pretty much only sells burgers; they do all different kinds of burgers with various toppings and stuff - it's pretty much like Ketchup back in Glasgow which was great since I miss that place! Anyway, I had a sweet chilli chicken burger with chips and it was brilliant! They have a really cool scheme in the restaurant where when you buy a beer or a bottle of some kind, they give you the bottle top and then there are three different jars - each of which represents a different charity or initiative. The idea is that you read the little "blurb" about what each of them stand for and then pop your bottle top into the jar of your choice. Nice concept whoever came up with it.

Afterwards we met up with Alex and then Connor and went to a pub called the Three Wise Monkeys which is across the street from the Sir John Young - possibly one of the biggest dive pubs in the world and yet we have been there two or three times. The Three Wise Monkeys was a much nicer place, with big screens showing the rugby, lots of couches, live music and bars on three different floors. I bought myself a pint of Guinness which set me back a full $8.90 which was a bit of a shock, but it was well worth it so as not to have to drink a "schooner" for once! The highlight of the night was probably the strange, drunk woman in her mid-30s who approached our table in the pub asking if she could sit with us since she was, "bored of her friends." Then she told us how there was some guy there who she fancied, but he didn't like her back - Jessica suggested she should tell him how she felt and her response was that she already had. Many times. This was getting tragic; however she soon left us to return to the "boring friends" much to my delight. As usual the night escalated beyond where we had planned and we ended up leaving Star Bar and heading home shortly after 1am - another good night had by all.

This morning has been filled with another long lie after our night out, before I dragged myself out of bed, had some food and got a shower. I planned on getting some uni work done before the football was on TV later on - a 12.45pm kick off back home meaning a pleasant 9.45pm kick off here. The game was a success as United won 2-0 and we played fairly well, albeit far from our best. I only managed to get some work done before I was distracted by all the usual suspects - Facebook and Twitter mainly. After lunch I had a quick nap to recharge the batteries; didn't get much sleep the night before and sat down to watch the game. The only truly productive thing which I did this afternoon was book my flight for our trip to Cairns to take in the sights of the Great Barrier Reef. We're going from the 31st October to the 4th November, which will take in my 20th birthday and I can't think of a more brilliant place to spend it! Already really looking forward to it! The day just flew by today, don't know where the time went really. Bed time now.

Sunday 15th September
I got up sharp at 9.30am today in order to get the rest of my essay finished for Competition Law - again, it's only a first draft but I was intent on making it a good first draft so as that my work to do a finalised copy was minimal. After a few hours work, consisting of reading, writing, researching, erasing and re-writing I went and had a shower and had a break for a little while. I caught up on the latest news from back home - mainly the sport stuff, I have to admit - and was delighted to hear that both Chelsea and Man City had dropped points during the night, which really improved United's early league position relative to our rivals. Happy days. Around 12.30pm - or 3.30am back home - I had a surprise FaceTime call from Andy and Hayley who were not long back from pub golf in Linlithgow. There was no surprise that they were both a little bit worse for wear and the call was cut short when Andy's dad came downstairs from his bed to remind him of the time! Haha!

After a few more hours essay writing I stopped to have some lunch before returning to my laptop in an attempt at a final push to get it completed. At this point motivation was lost, which is always an infuriating stage of essay writing in hindsight; at least three or four hours were passed by watching Match of the Day on BBC iPlayer from last night, scrolling through Facebook and Twitter and unfortunately falling asleep for about half an hour. Must still be feeling the effects of the late night on Friday. However, after a dinner of omelette and beans - which was boring, but quick and that was key - I got the essay done. I've since been down to the shop to buy some milk for breakfast tomorrow, FaceTimed home and got this blog up to speed. Now off to watch some TV before I go to bed. Got a new episode of Breaking Bad to look forward to tomorrow after my classes are done - can't wait!

Monday 16th September
Today it has been pouring rain all day. Even in Scotland this would be considered a pretty miserable day; the rain is properly bouncing off the pavements! It wasn't too bad when I headed to my first class of the morning but it still required me to look out my waterproof jacket unfortunately. I'd gotten very used to the sunshine every day and this weather was a timely reminder of what we usually experience throughout the winter, going to uni in Glasgow.

First class of the day was Anti-Discrimination which was cut short after only one hour since we were just going over the recent exam which we'd sat. This would usually be a good thing, but since my next class wasn't for another 3 hours it just meant a long time to be sat around bored - there was no chance I was walking home in the rain for the sake of an hour or two either. Then I had my Intellectual Property class followed by Competition Law in the early evening. In the Competition class we had a guest lecturer today and at the end of the class he gave us his email address and mobile phone number in case we needed to ring him up with any questions about what he had taught us - how weird.

The walk home was miserable as my jeans were literally soaked through and when I got home I realised that my socks were wet, as well as my boxers. Minging. I got dried off and sat down to watch Breaking Bad which was INCREDIBLE! Another strong contender for the best episode of the entire show. It's undoubtedly the greatest TV show I've ever seen - no question. Afterwards I had dinner and chilled out for a while watching some tele before going to bed.

I'm not sure if I prefer writing this way, or just doing one big post covering the whole week. I'll give it some thought before my next post.

Until next time,
Jamie

Job hunting and a brilliant weekend

Hello! It's been a fairly busy week so this should be a good post I think and importantly, I have some nice pictures to add to it from this weekend. I last wrote on Monday last week, so I shall continue from Tuesday...

I had a long lie again on Tuesday morning - no classes for the day so when I got up I had some breakfast and then caught up on the news and latest football gossip. The plan for the rest of the day was to sort out some uni things which I had neglected to do until now and then play football in the afternoon. I had to complete my SAAS student funding application, which basically ensures that my tuition fees at Glasgow are paid for, as well as completing my student registration for the new year at Glasgow. Even though I'm studying in Australia, I still have to be registered at Glasgow and have all my financing in place for the beginning of the semester. I quickly hit a stumbling block however after realising that I couldn't remember my SAAS username and password in order to access the website, but I knew the details were on some paperwork at home - I just had to wait until someone was awake back home to retrieve them for me. Productive plans postponed until later in the day, I went off to play football.

On Wednesday I had classes once more, but my Intellectual Property class still had a reading week which meant I could head home after my first class and have some lunch before returning for the later class. I used the remaining time between my classes very productively, by watching some Ready, Steady, Cook whilst having lunch, followed by some other mind-numbing daytime TV to really set myself up well for the rest of the day. After my second class of the day, I came home, made some dinner - after ANOTHER trip to Coles for some groceries - and watched a few episodes of Arrested Development before going to bed.

Thursday brought about a spur of productiveness - I'm not sure if that's actually a word, but it hasn't been underlined by this spell-checker, so I'm going to stick with it. No classes today, but I got up quite early with the intention of heading to the library and doing some work. After breakfast, a shower and the daily ritual of catching up on the latest football news from back home I got dressed and headed to campus to find myself a spot in the library. I'm sure mum and dad will be pleased to know that I was finally getting round to properly pursuing a job here and planned to write myself an entirely new CV from scratch and start handing them out to local shops and cafes. Just as I found a spot in the incredibly packed library - do none these people have homes to sit in, I wondered - and got my laptop out, I realised that I had left the charger at home and had less than 20 minutes of battery life remaining. Mission aborted. I trudged home after stopping by the bank in order to FINALLY pick up my card. I've been here over a month now and only just got it from the Commonwealth branch on the uni campus - totally crap service, and I'd recommend anyone coming here to use a different bank.

After heading home I sat down to get my CV written; I ended up deciding to make an Apple store-specific version with the intention to try and get a job in the Broadway Shopping Centre. After ensuring that I was happy with the final version, I walked to the library at uni to use a printer, before going to the Apple store to hand it in. Getting to grips with a new library and learning how to print things was quite a task, but I eventually managed it and got my cover letter and CV looking pristine - signed it off and everything. Happy with my efforts and feeling confident that I could get myself a position working at Apple given my experience in Comet and Currys, I headed to the top floor of the Broadway Shopping Centre. After chatting to a member of staff in the shop who had only started two days previously, I was informed that Apple deal with all of their job applications online - I had essentially wasted my time, and my printing credits, so headed home once more.

On Friday we had another really good Commercial Dispute Resolution class and afterwards I headed home to have some lunch before heading out to play football again; the plan was to play for around an hour with the Soccer Society lads in Victoria Park and then immediately up to St. Paul's Oval to play with another group. It proved a little too much and I've been suffering from a really tight right hamstring since, after being forced to head home early from the second game. I don't really get injuries playing football - at least none which actually stop me from playing, so it's been a bit unusual for me. I'll need to give it a bit of a break before I play again, which is frustrating.

Saturday morning was another fairly early rise so that I could tackle a new, generic version of my CV and I returned to the library and printed off a few more copies. The rest of the morning and early afternoon was spent walking around almost every shop, cafe and restaurant in the local area attempting desperately to have someone offer me a job. It felt like for every CV which I actually handed over there must have been two or three people inform me that they simply weren't taking anyone else on right now. It was a relentless task and one which brought back memories of doing the same trip around all the local shops back in Falkirk a few years back. It was a fairly unsuccessful trip in general, however the guy in the Nike store said he'd keep me in mind since vacancies often came up in the shop, and a cafe nearby are also taking people on, so fingers crossed. The cafe itself would be my ideal choice I think, since it is really close to my flat and it's also a chocolate themed place! It's called Max Brenner's - I've just Google searched it and had no idea that it was a massive chain of places! They sell all sorts of chocolate which is just right up my street - chocolate pizzas, chocolate cake, chocolate bars, chocolate drinks - pretty much everything you can think up! I think I'd enjoy working there, and it's definitely a place Auntie Jean would enjoy! Haha!

On Saturday night, Jessica, Alex, Jordan and I made our weekly visit to the Morrison for one dollar oysters, before we headed to Darling Harbour to meet up with some other international students and watch the fireworks. Pretty much all year round here, they have fireworks on a Saturday night at Darling Harbour - probably the nicest part of Sydney, where there are countless fancy yachts, lots of cafes and bars, a massive IMAX cinema, as well as the Hard Rock Cafe and other nice seafood restaurants. The fireworks were great and totally free, which meant there was a huge turnout of people to watch them. We ended up going to a few bars afterwards and ended up in Sidebar, which is a sort of nightclub/bar close to Central Station - it's also really handy since it's only a 2 minute walk home at the end of the night!

Here's some photos, some of which even include me!

In order: Alex, Jordan and I, then Jessica and I, and finally Jordan and I - all taken at the Morrison.

This next picture isn't a very good quality, and doesn't really do the place justice, but it's Darling Harbour overlooking the pontoons. The lights around the waters edge are all cafes, bars and restaurants. The next picture is the fireworks, which are very, very difficult to take photos of!

Today is now Sunday and after a long lie from last night, I headed to Bondi Beach this afternoon to meet up with Jordan and Jessica who had made their way to the beach much earlier. I caught the train and then a bus from the city centre out to the coast; Bondi is such a lovely area and exactly like you would imagine it - full of surf shops, everyone wears flip-flops and shorts and it has a real "beachy" vibe to the whole place. First thing I did when I got off the bus was grab an ice cream for a little shop before heading down to the beach to meet up with the other two. The first suggestion which was made was to go to the official Ben & Jerry's shop to get some ice cream; even though I'd just had an ice lolly, I wasn't kidding myself and knew some Ben & Jerry's would go down a treat. The ice cream was really brilliant and the flavours on offer made choosing one or two really difficult. I eventually settled on a tub with a scoop each of Chocolate Therapy and Coconut Seven Layer - both of which were excellent!

This is a photo of Bondi just as the sun was starting to go down and people were heading home. The beach was so busy today and I can't even imagine what it will be like in the summer! You can still see quite a lot of keen surfers catching the last waves of the weekend in the water.

I'm now totally shattered, it's almost 11pm and I can barely keep my eyes open. We had a big dinner in the flat tonight, and I think I overate after skipping lunch - except the ice cream - so I think that's definitely added to how tired I feel now. Here's a picture of dinner - the dish on the left was a kind of spicy noodles with fish, almost certainly the hottest thing I have ever eaten although it was really tasty too. The dish on the right is Korean style fried rice, which was excellent! I'm going to have a brilliant recipe collection when I come home!

Class tomorrow, so I'm off to bed now.

Jamie

One month gone already!

Mum and Auntie Jean have been pestering me to keep this updated again, so I'm forcing myself to sit down and write another post. I have a week of events to catch up on, but it has been a quieter week really, so it shouldn't be too long!

Tuesday 13th August was the first day after my last update, and I had another chilled out morning after a long lie - no classes for the day. I feel like I keep repeating myself on this with respect to which classes I have but my mum keeps asking me which classes I have on such-and-such day and I don't think she's quite grasped that it's always the same yet; Dad correctly pointed out, "If she read the blog she'd know that!" After my quiet morning, a friend and I met for some lunch in Chinatown in the afternoon. I had sticky honey chicken, which was excellent and there was definitely a huge choice of dishes you wouldn't ordinarily see in any Chinese take-away back home - only solution will be to try them all out, I think! Before our food was served, we were presented with a little tea-pot filled with warm, weak tea, which was pretty strange and not particularly palatable, however I did drink a cup in pursuit of good manners. This plan was promptly wasted when the waiter practically ran over and filled my cup from the teapot once more - thanks for that, mate. Afterwards we bought some cakes from a Chinese bakery and ate them in the sunshine in Victoria Park - excellent afternoon, centred around good food.

Wednesday was another day of classes, however Competition Law was cut short half way through as the lecturer had a child minder issue; in truth it had been a long day and I was glad to get home sharp. I went into Coles on my walk home and did some more food shopping. I feel like I'm in the supermarket every other day or so, picking up odd items for the flat. Wednesday night was spent watching some episodes of Still Game after cooking dinner - I had totally forgotten just how funny a programme Still Game is since it had been so long since I watched it. I've stayed up late three nights this week watching it and I've seen nearly 4 full series worth of episodes!

Early in the week I also had a look around the University of Sydney Social Societies website to see what clubs and societies there were to join during my time here. I saw quite a few which caught my attention - mainly the Soccer Society (obviously!) as well as the Wakeboard and Water-Ski Society. The Soccer Society play every Tuesday and Friday and the lads I've been playing with the last few weeks play Monday and Thursdays, so it means I can play 3 or 4 times most weeks which is great in this weather! The Wakeboard and Water-Ski Society is something which I'm really keen to try once or twice before I go home but I think it's too expensive a hobby for me to be taking part on every trip to the water. Must get a job soon!

Thursday brought another long lie and a chilled out day before doing some shopping - again! - and then some uni work in the afternoon, followed by some TV at night. I caught an old episode of Australia's Got Talent, before the new series started on Sunday; it's a totally mad programme over here, Dawn French is on the judging panel and it's hilarious! Thursday night also brought about the FA Centenary match between England and Scotland at Wembley, but I decided not to stay up late to watch it since I had my 10am class at uni the next morning. Turned out that Scotland did alright and lost 3-2, but the biggest positive for me was that the United players did quite well. That reminds me, in order to try and keep any football chat in this blog to a minimum, I've started another United-specific blog to share my thoughts and views on the team this season and beyond. I'll post the web address at the bottom of this post if anyone fancies reading it. Friday brought my final day of classes for the week at uni and on Friday afternoon I met up with the guys in the Soccer Society for a game in the afternoon.

The plan on Saturday was to go to the Morrison once again so we could keep taking advantage of the $1 dollar oysters for the month of August and get some cheap drinks into the bargain. Afterwards, my plan was to meet up with the people from the Soccer Society once more to go to a different pub, not far from campus, in order to watch the first match of the Premier League season. However, I ended up going out with some mates to a few bars instead and arrived home at a pleasant 4am. We went to one place called the Scary Canary near Darling Harbour, which was a great little bar/club and I actually met a girl there who was in my school year at Beaconhurst - unbelievable! We had a great night and after a trip to McDonalds I arrived back in the flat to watch the United game; I managed to find an online stream showing the game, saw we were 2-0 up and decided that it was time for bed. Poor effort from myself, but it had been a long night, in fairness.

Sunday brought a bit of a hangover after our long night, and I spent the day watching TV - Australia's Got Talent and X-Factor were the highlights. I'd urge everyone to go onto YouTube and search for the video from Australia's Got Talent of the guy in the wheelchair who does acrobatics - and yes, you did read that correctly. It's amazing, go watch it! Today is now Monday and I've had another day of classes today, except Intellectual Property where we have a reading week this week. I came home after class, watched the new episode of Breaking Bad and made some dinner. It feels like this post has been a bit rushed and I've promised myself once again that I'm going to keep it updated more frequently to make it easier to remember all the things I've been doing. I'm not sure what my plans are for the rest of the week, but I also promise that I'll get a few photos for the next post too!

Today marks exactly one month to the date that I landed in Sydney, and I've had so many great experiences already - several months more of a similarly brilliant time would be great!

Here's the address for my United blog:

keeptheredflagflyinghigh.blogspot.com

Until next time,
Jamie

Another busy weekend

This update is a little overdue given that I had to go back and re-read my last post to check where I was up to and what I had already written about. I shall pick things up from Friday 9th August.

Friday morning is my 'early' start for uni during the week, where I'm faced with the unenviable task of getting up and taking the short walk to campus for my class which begins at 10am. It's a hard life. Since my timetable doesn't change from week to week, I still only had the one class - 4 hours of Commercial Dispute Resolution. After being a little shocked at just how much I enjoyed the first seminar of this particular course, my fingers were crossed that it wasn't simply the lecturer filling the first class with all the interesting, fun content, which would then be followed by drab legislation and power-point slides. However, I wasn't dissapointed and the class was once again one of the most engaging and enjoyable of the week. During this particular class we had an hour long talk from Derek Minus, a barrister who also practices in the fields of mediation and arbitration - his expertise and knowledge were vast and it was really interesting listening to his real life applications of the theories we were learning. Another good day at uni done and dusted.

The rest of Friday was pretty much my ideal day - totally football orientated. I went home after class, made some lunch and fired up Football Manager on my laptop. This was just a little stop-gap before I got changed and headed back up to the uni campus for the now weekly game of football with a collection of truly mixed students - guys, a couple of girls, people from Europe, Brazil, Australia and several countries in Asia too. It was another really enjoyable game and we played until the light forced us to call the next goal the winner, and I headed home. Shattered. Friday night meant that it was time for Rio Ferdinand's testimonial match, which would be kicking off at 7.30pm back home in the UK - I had the pleasure of setting the alarm on my phone for 4.25am in order to get up and watch the game. By the time the full time whistle was blown I was half wishing that I hadn't bothered since my team lost 3-1 and we didn't play very well either. Back to bed and I slept in till around 12 noon on Saturday before I got up, made some 'breakfast' and had a shower. I didn't really do very much on Saturday afternoon, except go to the shops for some groceries, and a look in some clothes shops which I hadn't been in before, and finally to go into the post office to find the prices for sending things home. Turns out it's quite expensive, so I may have to rethink my plans to send anything back until I get a job!

The weather forecast for Sunday was for wall to wall sunshine and warm temperatures - granted, it is often like that here, but we're moving towards the real nice weather now! Jessica, Alex and I made plans to go and visit the Royal Botanical Gardens, near the harbour front and enjoy a day in the sunshine. We caught the train at Central which took us down to Circular Quay, taking in another stunning view of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House - we commented that we didn't think the novelty of seeing that view would ever wear off! The Botanic Gardens are literally right next to the Opera House in Sydney, so we took the opportunity to walk around the famous wave-shaped building before wandering around the gardens for a while. Most of the gardens aren't even in proper bloom yet, and they're still spectacular - it's quite amazing that I'm actually living and studying in such a nice place right now. I'll let the photos speak for themselves, once more.

In order: from the gardens looking back towards the skyscrapers of the CBD; a very brave duck who wanted some bread whilst we were eating lunch; and a whole load of people enjoying food, drink and music in the sunshine by the harour-side.

Almost every day I have to sort of remind myself that I'm actually on the other side of the world. The other thing is that the time is simply flying by - I've been here almost a month already, and we're into our third week of classes at uni! Unbelievable! Karin told me before I left that I had to make sure to try and be aware of all the things I was doing, take everything in, and appreciate it whilst it lasts and I'm certainly trying to stick to her advice.

After returning home, a few of us in the flat decided to cook dinner together - we overestimated things a bit and ended up with considerably more food than required, but it was a strong effort for Sunday dinner. Below there's photographic proof that I'm eating well, for the benefit of my mum! Sunday night brought another football match, this time the season curtain raiser as Man Utd took on Wigan in the Community Shield. This time since it was only a 2pm kick off back home, it meant a much more respectable 11pm kick off over here. I can tell it's going to be a season of long nights and tired days in pursuit of supporting my team this year!

Today is now Monday and I've had another full day of classes at uni. Afterwards I came home, chilled out for a little while and made some dinner for myself. Stuck the TV on when I was cooking to see that there was an episode of Top Gear on; it's really strange watching it here because it seems lasts for much longer given the inclusion of adverts! I've also just not long finished watching the first episode of the new series of Breaking Bad and it was even better than expected! Anyone who doesn't watch it, then start from the beginning and you'll be hooked in no time at all. Great show!

A quick mention of things which are happening at home right now; good luck to Cameron on his sailing trip - it'll be mega, but you'll probably be sea sick at some stage! Hope Andy and Hayley have a brilliant holiday in Tunisia; and lastly the same for Jason, Dean, Jack and Gareth in Cancun. Definitely missing my pals!

Also, I forgot to mention in my last post a massive well done to my sister, Kerry, on doing superbly in her Standard Grades. I hope if you haven't pestered mum and dad into buying you an iPhone by now, that it's definitely on your to-do list!

Until next time,
Jamie