A long overdue catch-up!

This post is likely to be quite long and also quite patchy in places since it's been almost two weeks since I've written an update, so there may prove to be some difficulties in remembering everything that has been happening in the mean time. 

My last post was Tuesday, 8th October and since there was a law school reading week it meant no classes until the following Monday, however on Wednesday there was an optional revision lecture in my IP class. There was strong internal conflict of whether to attend it or not, but eventually I got the preparation work done and went along; I was quite happy that I did since it turned out to be quite useful in covering some of the more difficult issues of the course. I hope that my eventual decision to put a bit of effort in even where none was required might pay off when it comes to exam time! After class I headed to the Post Office on campus to enquire about the cost of posting my football boots back to Sports Direct in the UK because they had burst open around the front seam on the right boot after only three months of use! I sent a firmly worded email to the customer service department and they suggested that I post the boots back for inspection - clearly, they didn't read my email properly and missed that part where I said I was currently in Australia since they provided me with a free-post address which only works within the United Kingdom. It turns out that the cost to ship the boots home would have been around £50, which seemed crazy since the boots were only worth a little over £50 themselves. I emailed Sports Direct once more and suggested that a refund may be more appropriate, which was then sorted out for me. I'm now looking forward to going to find myself a new pair of boots. I also spotted these Harley Davidson motorcycles, parked just outside the Quadrangle at uni - very cool!

On Thursday the weather was supposed to be excellent - as warm as it had been since I arrived in Australia - so Jordan, Jessica, Alex and I decided to head to Manly Beach. Although they had each been previously, it was my first time venturing over to the other side of the harbour and I enjoyed the short ferry ride from Circular Quay, taking in views of some truly amazing houses on the waterfront. The temperature was around 35 celsius for most of the day, but the water provided a welcome cool down; it was actually the first time I had been swimming in the sea in Australia - taken me long enough! We headed to a little burger place for lunch which did a deal on Tuesday and Thursday where you can get a burger, fries and a drink for $10 - the burgers are great and the portion of chips is almost too large to finish comfortably, but of course I managed them. After another hour or two at the beach, we got changed and headed back towards the ferry terminal, although we stopped at the Four Pines Micro Brewery before catching the boat back to Sydney. The beer sold in the pub is brewed at Manly and they have a range of different beer types as well as some ciders - they do offer a taster selection, however I opted for a pint of Pale Ale which was fantastic! Might just have to make time and go back to try the taster menu I think! We headed back on the ferry and then caught the free bus from Circular Quay to Central Station; Jordan headed off to go and meet his friends from the airport who were arriving from Brisbane whilst Alex and I went to the Prince Alfred Park to relax at the swimming pool for the rest of the afternoon.

It's a hard life!

Here is a picture outside the brewery and then one of Alex and Jordan enjoying a beer at the Four Pines Brewery, in Manly.

On Friday, I spent most of the day just chilling out in the flat after having a long lie. I've started watching Orange is the New Black on Netflix, which is alright but it isn't great - I really need to find another good TV show to watch. The plan on Friday night was potentially to go to Jordan and Connor's place for a party, but Alex, Jessica and I met up for a drink before we headed there. We went to Bar Broadway, just near my flat, then went to a liquor store to pick up some wine for the night - I also spotted a bottle of the Four Pines Brewery Stout which Jordan enjoys so I bought him a bottle. Unfortunately, they didn't have the Pale Ale which I prefer, which was a shame. Jordan's friends, Joe and Tiffany, from back home in America were there since they were visiting from Brisbane for the weekend and Connor also had three friends over who he also knew from back home - Alex and Mike also joined us too. The night was really good and I think everyone had an enjoyable night - I was a bit worse for wear the next morning, so it must have been a big night. Moving on.

The plan for Saturday was to go to Coogee and spend the day at the beach - another place which I was yet to visit. Most of the people who had been at the party the night before came along and it was another scorching day. It was great to just chill out and relax on the beach; although I did go in the water and have a swim for a bit, I spent most of the day half-asleep on my beach towel with my iPod playing. Afterwards, we caught the bus back to Central, although we ended up on a bus which took us to Newtown, where the driver informed us that it would be the last stop. We got off and headed towards the train station to take the short journey to Central using an alternative mode of transport, only to find that the trains were not running due to track works - some orientation work was required but we soon found the correct temporary bus stop to take us back towards home. Whilst waiting on the bus, an Australian bloke approached us to ask for directions, to which we did our best but pointed out that we were not locals and should really have been asking him for the directions. He said he was from Tasmania and asked where we all came from - which was a bit odd since Mike was wearing an 'I Am Canadian' t-shirt. Seriously. The conversation went something like this;

Tasmanian bloke: "Ahhh where you all from?!"

Connor: "Some of us are from the United States..."

Mike: "I'm from Canada, as you can see." (pointing towards his t-shirt)

Tasmanian bloke: "Woah! How's that going?"

Connor: "It's alright."

This was followed by 30 seconds of total silence as we looked at the guy and he looked at Connor, each waiting for someone to say something. Mike and I just gutted ourselves laughing and the guy walked off; it was such a strange experience and the guy had such a weird, uneasy manner about him. In hindsight, it won't seem very funny to anyone reading this, but I'll always look back and remember the total awkwardness of the entire situation - it still makes me laugh now, just replaying it in my head. 

Anyway, here is a picture from Coogee. 

On Saturday night we headed to Darling Harbour to watch the fireworks again, which was actually quite enjoyable. I think when there is less expectation with fireworks the better they are - realistically, firework displays are all a bit too similar really. Afterwards, we headed to the Noodle Festival in Hyde Park, near the city centre, where there is currently lots of market stalls set up with hundreds of tables and chairs set up, under fantastic lights as well as a DJ playing chilled house music. It's all very cool and we were all starving after rushing out after returning from the beach without any dinner, so the noodles were very much appreciated. Once we had eaten, we walked to a bar called Shady Pines which Mike had been to before and highly recommended - it was on Oxford Street, where most of the gay bars are in Sydney, but I took his word for it. On the way, we walked through some 'modern art' in Hyde Park - essentially a whole load of mirrored columns with lights on them, which make for a very strange experience, especially at night! It turned out that the bar was excellent and we decided we would definitely return another time. Later on, a different place was suggested which had a stage where a live band was playing, as well as a dance floor where the DJ had some awesome song selections - including the Bee Gees, which proved to be popular! However, far and away the strangest thing about this place - which I cannot remember the name of - was the glass room which separated the two halves of the building and contained a large, bald headed man dressed up in stockings and twirling feather boas. People were queuing to have photos taken with him and every now and then he would come up to the glass which looked into the dance floor and make scary faces in the darkness. It was all very weird and certainly not anything like I had ever seen in a bar or a club before. I also wasn't brave enough to snap a picture of him, so imagination will have to do the work.

On Sunday I just chilled out and watched TV really - totally lazy day which was well needed after a busy weekend. I also had the exciting prospect of having to go back to classes on Monday, which meant I had to get some work done for those as well. Mum text me some pictures of the illuminations at Blackpool - I'm not really sure why they have chosen to spend a few days of the October holidays in Blackpool because I'm quite sure they hate the place, but there you go. I was delighted to hear that they had spotted a convoy of Focus RS's driving along the promenade but when I asked to see some photos my excitement turned to disappointment upon learning that between mum, dad and Kerry, they hadn't managed to get on single photo which wasn't fuzzy. Some photography classes could be in order for that lot!

Monday brought around the harsh reality of classes once again; the day dragged on and I was very pleased to get home and chill out. The weather had also taken a cold turn and I realised that I am now totally acclimatised to Sydney temperatures when I was wishing I had brought my parka from home and it was only 14 degrees celsius. How times have changed. On Tuesday I spent most of the day writing my Competition Law essay which was due on Friday, as well as doing some more work for Wednesday's classes. I was really looking forward to getting this essay done since it was the last piece of submitted work which I had to hand in before the exams, and it also meant the last deadline which had to be met before our trip to Cairns! On Tuesday afternoon I went to Victoria Park to play football with the Soccer Society lads and got some promising news on the employment front - my friend, Ash, from football works in Harvey Norman at Bondi Junction and he had said to his manager that I was looking for a job. It turns out that the manager is looking for some temporary Christmas staff and I've since passed my CV on to him - so fingers crossed I will soon be earning some pocket money! 

The next day was another long day full of classes, although the pain was subsided somewhat by the news that Still Game is coming back! Fantastic to hear that we are going to be treated to some more of the best comedy on TV! Afterwards, I headed home, made dinner and watched some more of Orange is the New Black before heading to bed - almost finished it already, so needing another thing to watch once more. Thursday meant that I had one full day to get my essay done before the deadline on Friday, so I spent most of the day indoors working behind my laptop screen - always a chore. There were some quite serious bush fires around New South Wales on Thursday, which caused the sky over the city to be filled with smoke, which had an eerie orange glow as the sun shone through behind it - very apocolyptic-like. I didn't manage to go out to get some good photos myself, since I was inside doing my essay all day, but I got this one from the window in the flat, and my iPhone weather app told me there was "smoke" which was quite cool! Also heard the news that mum and dad have been looking at a new motorhome - which is a fairly regular activity, to be fair - but it seems like this time it might actually be happening and the current RV may be going after 7 years. We'll wait and see, I guess!

Most of the smoke had dispersed from the skies by Friday morning, but we kept the windows in the flat closed regardless, to save the place getting all dusty - although the fires raged on and even made the news back home in the UK. Must be serious! I headed to my Commercial Dispute Resolution class, then to the library to print off my essay before handing it in to the Law building. It was a fantastic relief to have it handed in, so I went and had some lunch before heading back out to play football in the afternoon. 

I was planning on probably having a quiet night after the football, however Mike and Jordan texted me to find out if I wanted to go out to Shady Pines - the pub on Oxford Street - again, along with Connor. I didn't take a lot of convincing and said they should head over to mines to meet up and have a drink before we headed out. We caught the train from Central to Town Hall and made the short walk across Hyde Park to Oxford Street. We had a strange experience in the line whilst waiting to get in, as a random girl approached us and asked us to keep an eye out for her Asian friend called Peter, who was very drunk, and asked us if we saw him to shout him over and take him into the bar with us. We were quite confused and asked her why she wasn't going to look for her friend herself, to which she responded that she was going back inside and didn't want to stand around waiting. Fairly poor friend, I thought; we never did see Peter either. Again, we had a great night in the Shady Pines - I'm not quite sure why I enjoy the place so much, but it is a great little pub. It's in a strange location and you would never even know it was there if you simply walked by; when you venture inside, you are immediately struck by how dark it is and your eyes take a second to adjust to the dim light. The whole place is quite small and lit simply by candle light, whilst you can't help but notice the enormous moose head and sets of antlers which adorn the walls - the place has character, certainly. There is also a beer menu which would put most wine lists to shame, as well as a fine collection of whiskeys and bourbons. The music is also very appropriate and we enjoyed some Bruce Springsteen tracks - although the highlight was the entire place singing along to 'Sweet Caroline'. What a great bar! 

Here is a picture of Jordan with potentially the most feminine drink on the menu, in the Shady Pines! Haha!

After a long night, which ended up in the Abercrombie, I headed home and got to bed. I will admit that the Abercrombie was really good, even though I have previously slated it and called it a sticky-carpet joint. I had a long lie on Saturday morning and spent the whole day eating and watching TV - I have started watching the West Wing on the recommendation of dad, who says I'll love it. It has a hefty seven seasons and it has been excellent so far, so I'm hoping I can really get into it like I did with Breaking Bad or Lost beforehand. On Saturday evening, a few of us in the flat headed downstairs to play table tennis for a while before dinner - I was totally shattered and could barely concentrate on the game, so got myself some Solo - which is like Fanta Lemon - and a Snickers out the vending machine and chilled out for a bit. I tried to get to bed early seeing as I was really tired and wanted to watch the Man Utd game at 1am, but literally could not sleep; the result of which was that I could hardly keep my eyes open during most of the second half of the football. I was soon wide awake and alert when Southampton netted a late equaliser though and willed the team on to get a winning goal, but it wasn't to be and we trudged to another home draw. It has been a tough start to the season.

Me and Khurram battling it out at table tennis.

Today I have had another quiet day after sleeping in until after noon this morning - must have needed it! I spent the afternoon getting some washing done and then cooking some pasta for dinner. It's also taken me the best part of an hour to write this blog post because it was so long since I last updated it - I seriously need to start doing it more regularly. 

Anyway, only two more weeks of classes until we go to Cairns and I celebrate my birthday - exciting times! Goodnight!

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

Weekend Trip to the Blue Mountains

This post is mostly going to cover our weekend in the Blue Mountains, but I'll quickly round up the rest of last week first.

On Tuesday I spent much of the day essay writing and working on some problem questions which we were to do for the Wednesday Intellectual Property class; a pretty boring day which passed without anything noteworthy happening really. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, around 5am, I awoke to the sound of the alarm in order to get up and watch the first Champions League game of the season. United beat Leverkusen 4-2 and we played really well so I went back to bed for another hour or two of sleep feeling very happy with our performance. The first class on Wednesday morning was a bit of a struggle after my late night, but a quick coffee soon sorted me out. After classes on Wednesday, Jessica and I met up with Alex and Megan, two other girls from Glasgow who are also here in Sydney on exchange this year, but they are studying at the University of New South Wales, so this was the first time I had seen them since bumping into each other in the airport in Dubai almost 2 whole months ago! We went to Nandos - which is cheaper here, but not as good, I don't think - and then to the Three Wise Monkeys pub for a few drinks before heading home. I was totally shattered and we contemplated going out but I knew I had to finish off my essay the next day before it was due on Friday, so I took the sensible decision to go home and get to bed. 

Thursday was spent writing the remainder of my essay, which took up the vast majority of my day. On Friday, I had my usual Commercial Dispute Resolution class before Alex and I went off to print hard copies of our essays and hand them into the Faculty of Law office. With the hard work out the way, it was time to look forward to the weekend - I headed home, got changed and went out to play football for a little while before returning to the flat to make dinner and pack my bag in preparation to leave on Saturday morning.

Myself, along with Jordan, the two Alex's and Jessica had agreed to meet at Central Station around 9am in order to catch the 9.18am train from Sydney to Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains. However, Alex got a bit lost on his way to meet us from his place out near Coogee and we ended up getting the later train at 9.48am - giving us some well appreciated time to go and grab a coffee and a bacon roll. At the first stop, Mel also caught the train and found our carriage to join up with us. The train ride up to the Blue Mountains was quite picturesque, once we were out past the suburban outskirts of Sydney, but it was still interesting to see some more of the city which I currently call home. The journey took around 2 hours in total and only cost us around $4 - generally, public transport seems to be fantastic value for money here. At one point over the weekend it was mentioned that it would be good to write down all the little, funny or enjoyable moments which we've experienced, since those are the bits which you always forget, so I'm going to try and include some more of those details in my blog - there were quite a few from this past weekend alone! The first of these was at a stop on the train journey, which I believe might have been Penrith, but I'm not totally sure - whilst stopped in the station we spotted a hairdressers on the street called "Hakuna Matatas" like the Lion King song, which was pretty strange. Also, one of the next buildings along the street was a reasonable looking hotel and on the outside of the front of the building there was the customary "stars" to indicate the quality of the establishment - except this place only had two and a half black stars secured to the wall - properly went to the trouble of getting half a star made! What's that all about?! Haha! 

A quick snap-shot of "Hakuna Matatas" taken from the train.

Once we arrived in Katoomba, we got off the train and walked along the main street to find our hostel; it was a little place, which truly felt like someone's house called the Flying Fox. It felt very homely in some ways and as it turned out our first impressions turned out to be absolutely accurate. After dropping our bags in the room - which was able to sleep seven, including the six of us and one unfortunate bloke who had to be the stranger in beside us - sorry mate! The first thing we did was head up to the local Coles supermarket in order to buy some food for a barbecue which planned to have that night after doing some walking in the afternoon. The highlight of the trip to the supermarket was definitely finding Irn Bru and Tunnocks Caramel Wafer biscuits in one aisle and I certainly wasn't going to pass up the chance to enjoy some Irn Bru on the other side of the globe! After taking our shopping back to the hostel, we headed out walking from Katoomba towards Echo Point, which overlooks the famous Three Sister rock formation. It didn't take us too long to get there and the views were spectacular - although it was a bit touristy, it was really close to an information centre and an ice cream shop and there were a few coach-loads of people all milling around. It didn't take away from the views but it didn't really feel like you were experiencing the mountains properly.

Photo of the Three Sisters rocks from the Echo Point viewpoint.

We had been told by the woman at the hostel that there was a really good walk which we could start from near the top of Echo Point; she described around 900 stairs which went down to into the forest, wound along the cliff-side for a while and leading to the cable car or railway back up - we thought it sounded like a good plan for the afternoon and set off on the path. We quickly realised from the state of the people who we met climbing up the stairs as we descended that this was clearly going to be a fairly rapid descent and we were not disappointed. The stairs were precarious at times and could more accurately be described as ladders at times. It didn't take us too long to reach the bottom, nobody had fallen or tripped, I managed to get some great pictures and I think we were all glad that we didn't have to face the prospect of climbing back up! The cable car or the railway sounded like much better alternatives at this stage!

No photo could do it justice unfortunately, but this is a picture taken on the stairs leading down from Echo Point.

Upon reaching the bottom, we began to walk through the forest, stopping quite frequently to take some pictures or have some water - I was quite conscious of drinking plenty and not getting dehydrated since it was a brilliant, sunny afternoon. After walking along the flat forest path for maybe an hour or so, we reached the railway to take us back to the top of the cliffs once more. At one point we stopped and met a group of guys who had ventured off the path and up to a large rock which they said gave some great views, so Alex and I climbed up and took some photos. Here's a photo of me perched on the edge of the rock, overlooking the mountains in the background. 

It turned out that the railway we were heading towards used to be used for transporting coal from the bottom of the valley to the top of the cliff-side. Furthermore, it now acts as the worlds steepest passenger railway service - well, we had to have a go on that! Forget the cable car! The incline is an incredible 52 degrees and it looks quite unsafe looking up from the bottom, as the tracks disappear into the darkness of a natural rock tunnel around half way up the cliff. Clearly there were a lot of people standing in the queue to get on the carriage who were more than a little unsure about their impending journey back to the top and questioning whether those stairs weren't so bad after all! I took a video on the train as we were on it and I think I may upload it to YouTube later - I'll post the link in a later blog post if I do upload it.

Again, this picture doesn't do the steepness of the tracks much justice, but it gives some idea of how crazy this train ride was!

After surviving the amazing train ride back to the top, we set off walking back towards the town. Before heading back to the hostel, we wanted to get some beers to enjoy with the barbecue so we stopped into a shop called Dan Walker's, which is a liquor store around the same size of a small to medium sized supermarket - it even has underground parking and a drive through! For such a small town, most residents must be raging alcoholics to keep this place in business, it was seriously unbelievable. Unfortunately whilst walking back to the hostel Jordan managed to drop one of the bottles which he'd purchased, which made a huge pop as it bounced down onto the pavement. We did the responsible thing and collected all the glass, however even on Sunday as we headed home the beer stain remained on the tarmac - Jordan certainly left his mark on Katoomba! 

We got back to the hostel and fired up the outdoor barbecue, which we used to cook burgers, sausages and corn on the cob - which were fantastic! Some of the other residents got a wood fire burning to give us some extra heat and there was even some speakers underneath a gazebo-type structure which we were able to plug our phones into and play some music. I introduced the Stone Roses to the group and it was met with mostly positive reviews, which I was very pleased about! There was also a cat wandering around whilst we were outside which I quite liked - I'm by no means a fan of cats, and much  prefer dogs - but this one was very likeable and I've no idea why. It was also hilarious watching Jordan talk to it like it was a baby, something which he was still being reminded of some time later! I really enjoyed the barbecue and we were all properly well fed, except Jessica who was a bit sick - however she swears it wasn't the food since she was chef!

After we cleaned up from dinner, we headed into the living room inside the hostel where there was a 'social time' from 6pm till 9pm - meaning no phones, laptops or any other technology. There was a brilliant wood fire blazing, some excellent music played - Arcade Fire, I seem to remember - and we sat around chatting to some other visitors from all over the world, enjoyed our beers and played cards. I learned a couple of new card games - 'Presidency' and 'Kemps' which are both ones to remember and we also had a good laugh at both Alex's having valiant attempts to play the didgeridoo. Not long before we headed to bed we cut up Mel's cake which we had brought along as a surprise since it had been her birthday during the week. A good night had by all and I was shattered. 

We arose fairly early on Sunday morning in order to try and make the most of the day. Another funny little memory, when Jordan jumped down from his bunk-bed in the morning darkness, he landed straight on top of a big bag of crisps we had bought the day before, making a huge noise and splitting the bag open - perfect start to the day! Haha! Included in the price for the hostel was a complimentary breakfast, consisting of a choice of cereal, bread, tea, coffee, juice, fruit and one resident even started making pancakes for people - although I'm sure he only set out to make a few for himself before beginning to deal with several requests from other people! We departed our room, tidied up any mess which we had made and folded the bed sheets before setting off on our walk for the day.

Sunday's planned route required us to jump back on the train and head down two stops back towards Sydney, which only took around 10 minutes, to a town called Wentworth. The plan was to go and see Wentworth Falls, descend more stairs down to the bottom of the same waterfall and then follow the National Pass cliff trail around the side of the valley, before climbing a different set of stairs back up. We suspected it may take around 3 to 4 hours and had began walking by around 10am. From the very beginning, the entire day was just encapsulated by stunning views and scenery - even more impressive than the day before, which had been fantastic itself. At one stage, we decided to take a detour along a side path which ultimately led to a dead end and forced us to return from where we had originally walked from - however it proved to be a great opportunity to see another viewpoint which probably isn't enjoyed by most walkers in the area, so I took a selfie of me with the falls in the background.  

We continued to walk around the trails until we found ourselves at the top of the falls looking down into an incredible valley below; the bottom seemed like miles away and I never did actually manage to see where it ended - quite awe inspiring standing at the top of such a place. After crossing over the top of the falls, we negotiated another set of steep stairs down to meet the bottom of the first half of the falls - Wentworth falls is like a double waterfall, which has two distinct parts, each huge in their own right. When we reached the middle point, or the bottom of the first waterfall, we sat for a while, took some photos and had lunch. 

These next photos are the same waterfall as the one seen in the photo of me above; firstly from right on top of the falls looking over the edge and secondly from below looking back up at the cascading water. 

It was amazing standing at the bottom of the falls and a really strange sensation to feel the mist from the water cooling you down in the warm sunshine. A pretty brilliant lunch spot. After leaving here, we headed around the cliff path, which took us by several more smaller waterfalls, up and down some more stairs and passed some really great photo opportunities. The path was much less worn than we had experienced the previous day and you had to be careful to watch your footing - Jordan almost fell a few times, but had some incredible luck in never actually falling; I even managed to catch him twice! Again, at the end of the path we were faced with a wall of steps which felt truly endless as our legs burned from the constant ascent up the steep cliff; reaching the top to find a bench and catch our breath was quite a relief. We soon set off again though and made our way back to the train to go back the two stops to Katoomba, in order to collect our remaining things from the hostel. After a quick change out of a sweaty t-shirt we made our way back to the train station once more and waited on our train to take us back to Sydney. It was mentioned on Sunday that it felt strange to feel like you were away from home, and it was good to be heading back to home from our weekend away - except of course Sydney isn't what we called "home" only a few months ago. It was a very strange thought when considered. 

I had an absolutely fantastic weekend and I would certainly recommend a trip to the Blue Mountains for anyone who might be considering whether it's worthwhile or not. I've walked a few mountains in Scotland and seen a lot of great scenery, but I thought the Blue Mountains were truly spectacular. I've got many, many more photos but I'll just add one more good one, although unfortunately Alex took it so he's not actually in it. I'm off to bed now, since I'm totally shattered. Night. 

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

One exam down and roasting tatties

About time for an update I think; I last wrote on Monday last week so I'll pick up from Tuesday. I've just had a storming dinner so hopefully I'll get this written quite quickly and I'm going to go and watch a film before I go to sleep.

Last Monday night, as many people around the world watched on in the hope that there would be some massive, last minute moves in the football transfer window, I had to be sensible and eventually retreated from my laptop to bed just after midnight. However, in a move which could only be described as obsessive, I set my alarm first for 4am and latterly for 7am in order that I could check up on the latest news before the window closed at 8am. Each time my alarm went off in the darkness, I reached out for my phone still half asleep before remembering exactly why my alarm was going off at such a stupid time in the middle of the night - needless to say, it was a pointless exercise since hardly anything happened through the night whatsoever. Bit of a let down really, but at least United signed a midfielder finally! It's been a long time coming - 6 years to be precise.

I've had a reading week, so luckily didn't ruin my body clock for a week worth of classes after my long night of news updates and enjoyed a nice long lie until almost lunch time on Tuesday. After eventually rising from my slumber, I had a flick through some of the reactions to the football news and had some breakfast. I also downloaded the new Arctic Monkeys album called "AM", which has instantly become one of my all-time favourite albums - it is seriously that good. I hope it isn't one of those albums full of songs which you get sick of though and I'm trying to avoid over-playing it in to avoid that happening. Due to my extremely long lie, Tuesday seemed to fly by and before I knew it I was making dinner and chilling out to watch some TV before going to bed once again. I hadn't done much studying so knew that the rest of the week would be busy.

On Wednesday I got up around 10am in an attempt to return some kind of routine to my sleeping pattern and began studying for my Anti-Discrimination Law exam, after some breakfast and a shower. This is the first year at uni during which I've used my laptop to take notes in lectures and so far it's proven to be a preferable method not only for the purposes of making efficient notes in lectures, but also for reading them back and studying. I found compiling a concise collection of all my notes for the exam was really simple and it seemed to take a lot less time than it usually does to compile handwritten notes. I would definitely recommend a laptop or tablet over pen and paper for any students who might be considering whether it's worthwhile. On that note, I am absolutely in love with my MacBook - it is a total joy to use and never ever seems to slow down or be anything other than perfect. Well worth it.

In before one of the lads "humble brags" me...

On Thursday morning I got up fairly early again and continued my studying for the exam, which had a deadline of Friday afternoon sometime. However, since a few of us were planning on going out to Ivy on Thursday night I had decided to get the exam done by Thursday afternoon in order to avoid doing it with a hangover on Friday! After a final few hours studying, I had a shower, made some lunch and sat down to do the exam. For the Anti-Discrimination class, the online exam was worth 25% of the total grade for the course; it took the format of a choice of 5 out of 7 short questions relating to the basic concepts that had been covered in the early weeks of classes. I felt it went quite well and was fairly happy with the answers which I submitted, which meant I could look forward to our night out later on. Around the back of 6 - does anyone know what that actually means because us Scottish students over here have tried explaining the saying to people and none of us even know what time it's supposed to mean - anyway, I made myself some pasta and then took a walk up to Liquorland to buy some wine. It's a bit of a strange set up for purchasing alcohol here since supermarkets aren't allowed to sell any at all - not beer, wine, spirits, or anything, which is very unusual and I have no idea why things are done that way. Luckily there are quite a few liquor stores scattered around the city because of this rule. I returned to the flat with a box of "goon" which is essentially cheap white wine, but it's palatable since it's quite sweet - I also got myself a can of Guinness for $4.90(!) in order to enjoy something nice before we started on the wine.

We had decided we would pre-drink in my flat before we headed out to Ivy. After getting showered, I headed downstairs to let Jordan, Alex, Connor and Jessica inside, finding that they had also brought two more boxes of "goon" - I didn't think we were going to go short on drink anyway. The second Alex, who knows Jordan from back home in the US, arrived some time later and we started some drinking games - Jessica had brought a pack of cards with her so we set up a game of Kings, which is potentially the best drinking game ever. Usually at a party or pre-drinks we'll manage one, or maybe two rounds of Kings, however we managed almost three full rounds before it was decided that it was time to head to Ivy. Rather than get a taxi down to the far end of George Street which would likely be quite expensive, we headed to Central Station and got the train to Wynyard Station, only a few stops away. Whilst we were walking to Ivy, Alex hit the wall and was sick in a bin, so in a very responsible move, Jessica and I marched him back to his flat and headed home. So I still haven't been to Ivy, but we'll try again no doubt!

Friday morning was mostly spent in bed, only interrupted to go and get a McDonalds hangover cure - it was one of those kill you or cure you McDonalds and I felt like crap for a little while afterwards. Brutal. However I soon perked up again and felt spot on again an hour or so later. After chilling out for a little while, I made myself some lunch and decided that I would go and play football in the afternoon, even though I was still pretty tired. The game totally passed me by, as I misplaced pass after pass and could barely left my legs to chase anyone; I had a total shocker, but still scored two goals - the sign of a world class player, when you score even if you're not playing well, right?! Before we played, I took a quick picture of the oval where we play, called St. Pauls' Oval - essentially a cricket pitch, but it does the job and the grass is really quite good to play on.

On Saturday morning I awoke to the news that Scotland had been comfortably beaten 2-0 at home by Belgium in another World Cup Qualifying match - the national team really are going through a truly tragic time just now, not that I get too bothered about international football anyway. Club over country when it comes to football for me, personally. On Saturday afternoon I did some more work on one of several assignments which are due in the next few weeks, watched a film and made some dinner. I also went down to the mailbox for the flat and found a postcard which Andy and Hayley had sent me from their holiday in Tunisia - which had been around 3 weeks ago! Postcard took ages to arrive here after they sent it! Yesterday, I had a long lie before getting up and having a fry-up of sorts - I didn't have any bacon, beans or bread for toasting, so it was just scrambled eggs, sausage and a fried tomato. A trip to the supermarket was in order, I thought. Jordan and I had planned to go to Bondi Beach for the 'Festival of the Winds' which essentially a big kite festival, but the weather was cloudy and rainy on Sunday morning and beach plans were aborted. It was only the third time I've seen rain since I've been here, so you really can't complain. Instead I headed to Coles and after I had been to top of my food supplies, I got down to some more essay writing before watching a film at night. I hadn't seen Men in Black before, but had heard that it was really good, so found it on Netflix and it found it really enjoyable. I'll need to watch the sequels at some point, highly recommend it to anyone else who hasn't seen it.

So, today is Monday once more and time continues to race on by here in Sydney and with another busy week ahead of me it won't be slowing down anytime soon. In just over a week, it will be two whole months since I arrived in Australia - can't quite believe that! Anyway, today it was back to classes at uni, although not Anti-Discrimination which has a reading week - so the day started with Intellectual Property at 2pm followed immediately by Competition. Today's Competition Law class was another guest lecture from a judge of the High Court here in Australia called Justice Hayden. I found his talk reasonably interesting in parts but in truth, was glad that he only spoke for one hour of the two hour class. The remaining time was spent discussing our essays which are due in a few weeks and allowed an opportunity for some questions to be asked about exactly what was expected from the submitted work. Some people raised concern over the deadline dates, stating that they, "had a lot of work due just now" which annoys me somewhat. We are all busy and we all have lots of work to do, unfortunately you still need to work to the deadlines which are set.

Tonight after class I returned home and immediately raced to my laptop to watch the new episode of Breaking Bad; it was another brilliant episode full of drama and surprises. I seriously cannot wait to see how the writers wrap it up and finish the story - I think there are only around 3 episodes still to go now, which is sad because it means it will all be over soon enough. After that I began making dinner which tonight consisted of steak, sweetcorn, fried onions and roasted potatoes. Now, before tonight I considered roasted potatoes to be something which were rather difficult to cook properly and get right since my mum can sometimes get them wrong, and she is an excellent cook generally, but I thought I'd give them a try regardless. The results were fantastic; genuinely brilliant. I passed on the good news to her and she says I can take over cooking duties once I'm home - you know mum, I think I'll pass actually! Again, I've been somewhat boring and busy this week so haven't got any decent pictures to post, however I'll attach one of dinner from tonight. There were some truly brilliant photos from Thursday night on Jessica's phone I believe, but she hasn't been brave enough to share them yet! I look forward to seeing those!

Until next time!
Jamie

Getting busy at uni now!

Good evening - it's transfer deadline day back in the UK today, but I'm a little bit bored of watching Sky Sports News already so thought I'd get this updated.

Last Monday I got up at the usual time for my Anti-Discrimination class, which turned out to be one of the less interesting ones and it dragged on a bit; I may still have been feeling the effects of a tiring weekend. My next class, Intellectual Property was back this week having enjoyed the first reading week and it was a good class once again. I really quite enjoy it, in terms of a subject area and the classes themselves are interesting and engaging. The lecturer is also someone who has a bit of personality, which makes a massive difference I think. Whilst I had been in Anti-Discrimination law on Monday morning, I had read a post on Twitter by StrettyNews looking for someone to do live text commentary for the football that night. Basically, StrettyNews is a Manchester United-dedicated website, where blogs, articles, discussions and analysis are posted - as well as live text coverage of games. I responded to the tweet, pointing out that my experience of doing such things amounted to zero, but that I would be keen to do it. A few messages exchanged back and forth and I was set up and raring to go.

The game wasn't kicking-off until 8pm at home, which wouldn't actually be until 5am on Tuesday morning for me over here. So, after my third and final class of Monday, I walked home, made myself some dinner, watched a truly brilliant new episode of Breaking Bad and had a reasonably early night. It seemed like barely a few minutes later when my alarm erupted in the darkness but I quickly remembered why I was getting up and was instantly awake and alert. The game itself was David Moyes first league match at Old Trafford as the new manager and it was against Chelsea, managed by Jose Mourinho - huge! The match was a bit quiet and less dramatic than predicted; it finished 0-0 but my text commentary was well received. Pretty decent night - or morning, to be more accurate - and I headed back to bed for another few hours sleep. 

On Tuesday I had a few things on my "to-do list" but no classes as usual so it was a fairly quiet morning before I got showered, had some breakfast and headed out. First task was to go to the bank in order to activate my card and choose a pin number - even though you're able to activate your own card online, it requires a registered mobile number with the bank in order to do so. Since I hadn't received my Australian sim card yet, it meant that my mobile number wasn't registered with the bank, so I had to return to the branch to do it there - a bit inconvenient, but all sorted now. Afterwards, I walked around a few more local shops, cafes and restaurants to hand out some more CVs before I returned to the chocolate cafe which I spoke about in my last blog post. I spoke to the manager of the cafe and he said that unfortunately he did not have any positions available for new staff at the moment, which was a bit disappointing, however I'll keep searching for a job somewhere! Too many expensive things I'd love to do to not be able to get a job - I've looked at prices for skydives, bungee jumps and diving, so it would be great to do some cool stuff here! After heading back to the flat I filled out my profile page on the Apple jobs website and submitted an application for a position in the local store here - fingers crossed.

Wednesday brought another day of classes for me and when I came home I cooked and watched some TV for a while. Later on I watched "The Dictator" which is the latest film by Sacha Baron Cohen and it was totally brilliant - absolutely hilarious - well worth a watch but not for the easily offended! Haha! Weather has been gradually getting better the past few days and it's set to continue for the rest of the week - I guess this is the start of Spring now. It's been consistently in the 23-26 degrees range, lovely sunshine and hardly a cloud in the sky; picture postcard weather every day of the week, which is great! On Wednesday night back home, Celtic pulled off an incredible result to reach the Champions League group stages for the second consecutive season - didn't expect them to manage it at all, great achievement. On Thursday I had another day off so had another long lie and a chilled out morning - in the afternoon I had to go and try and chase up my Australian sim card which still hadn't arrived! I managed to get it sorted to be sent to me express post and it arrived the next morning - over a month in Australia and I've just sorted a phone number, not exactly what you would call organised.

On Friday I got up early and headed into uni for my Commercial Dispute Resolution class and just before reaching the campus it dawned on me that we had a reading week. Wasted journey, up early for no reason and a minor annoyance. I decided to make the most of my morning and headed to the library to begin one of several essays which are due in the coming weeks - I managed to smash out around 600 words of it in a couple of hours, which was a good start. Also on Friday, a few of us booked up a hostel in the Blue Mountains for the weekend of the 21st September, which should be really good - it's one of the nicest, most picturesque areas in this part of the country, so there will be a lot of great photos to post when we come back! 

Saturday was another quiet morning filled with breakfast in front of the TV and catching up on some of the latest transfer news from back home, before I headed out to get my haircut. This would be my first haircut since coming here and I was a bit unsure of what to expect - it ended up being a pretty decent job by the guy though and only cost me $10 at a local barbers. After lunchtime, Jessica and I took a walk around Paddy's Market in Chinatown, which is just an absolute haven for stalls selling rubbish, but there are a lot of Australian themed items such as t-shirts, towels and other novelty items which will be great for souvenirs. I'm also needing to buy myself a beach towel but didn't manage to see one unfortunately. Later on we met up with Alex and headed to Bar Broadway - just next door to my flat, and they do student discount drinks at any time - and had a few drinks. The night continued to a karaoke bar close to uni, which was totally empty and the hosts attempts to coerce us into singing to a deserted bar were unsuccessful. Sorry, I'm not that drunk, pal. After a quick stop at Subway to refuel, some of the lads came back to my flat and brought a box of "goon" - the name given to cheap, box wine here. It's basically $14 for 5 litres of quite sweet white wine, popular amongst students for obvious reasons. We eventually headed back out to Star Bar before heading home late.

On Sunday I had a long lie before getting up and making myself some breakfast. I was totally starving having skipped dinner on Saturday and only really having the Subway to eat since lunchtime - pretty much the whole of Sunday was spent eating and chilling out. I watched two films on Netflix and read some previews and analysis of the Man Utd game against Liverpool which was kicking off at 1.30pm back home - 10.30pm over here. The game turned out to be a total disappointment as we lost 1-0 and played really poorly. I went off to bed in a raging mood.

It's now Monday night and we have a reading week for all classes this week, which means lots of free time, although I will need to push on with the essays and assignments which I have due. There is also an online exam which I need to complete for Anti-Discrimination law before the Friday deadline, so that will require some studying for before I do it - it's optional when we start the exam, but once we begin then there is a time limit on completing it; hopefully it goes alright since it'll count towards the first 25% of my grade in the class. Again tonight I've caught up on the latest episode of Breaking Bad which was brilliant - the show is heading to a massive finale! As I said at the start, it's transfer deadline day so I've spent the night watching Sky Sports News to find out the latest happenings at home. I also made some French onion soup for dinner, with enough left for lunch tomorrow - and strong compliments go to the chef, it was great! That's all I've got for now.

Until next time,

Jamie