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Published: September 5th 2009
Decorations
fabric draped over the ceilingOk, I wanted to post earlier, but the website wouldn't work. First I'll answer a couple of questions I got:
It's getting warm here, but I still wear long sleeved shirts most of the time. Or a tshirt with jacket. It rains more than they say it did I think.
The educational system: they usually spend a lot of their money on high school rather than college, so almost the exact opposite of us. The public schools are thought of as poor generally, and almost everyone pays to go to a private school through middle school and high school. For college, they pretty much don't have to pay anything, the way I understand it. As long as they go to one of the Universities within their state. And there are only 5 (or 6?) states in the whole country, so the states are large. So for instance, here in Perth there are 4 or 5 colleges/universities to chose from - University of Western Australia (where I go), Curtain U, Murdoch U, University of Notre Dame, and then there might be one more? Then generally how it works is you just go to the University without paying anything. Then depending
on what your degree is in, there is a certain salary you have to reach before you start paying any money towards your college degree. So if you never reach the average expected salary for your career, because you have trouble finding work, etc. then you just never have to pay for your degree. One girl here is going to med school and its only 8600/year. and their Medical School degree program is only 6 years. So she's paying to be a doctor what I pay to go to Denison for one year. So it's a lot cheaper to go to school here in general.
The portions of food are really small here compared to home. Even in the super market. I try to buy the family size of everything if I can find it. For instance, how at home when you buy oreos and its a big rectangle with about 4 or 5 rows of oreos inside. They only sell them by the sleeve here. So you get like one row of the oreos for 4 or 5 dollars. Then when you go out to eat and pay $20 you're only getting the main meal - like the
steak or chicken for the $20. There's no bread, drink, salad, or sides included.
On Wednesday we had MultiCultural Night here at the dorm. It was nice, they try to represent a lot of cultures here, but it ended up being predominantly Indian themed I felt. There were decorations - like drapes across the ceiling and big cut out elephants. We had to sit on the floor to eat, on our pillows (ew), and they gave us banana leaves for plates. They didn't give us any silver ware, we were supposed to use our hands to eat. Here was the menu:
Vegetable balls for an entree, Chicken marinated in yogurt, spices, and tomato sauce or a vegetable mix over rice, Dhal (slightly spiced lentil dish), Vegetarian Massaman Curry (Massaman curry paste, coconut milk, spices - cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, cumin, ginger), and then a dessert called Gulab Jamun (dough made with cream and flour in sugar syrup) - think dough in maple syrup, sort of like a doughnut, but not as good.
I didn't really like any of the food, I made myself food after, but it was a good experience. I liked the atmosphere. People put on performances
- sung songs, did skits, played instruments. So that was really nice and fun. It was hard to take pictures though, because it was fairly dark. I put the ones I have up!
Thursday was my last day of class until the 14th. Tomorrow I leave to go to Singapore. So I will write about my time there when I get back!
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anonymous
non-member comment
Fun! They should have had carrot halwa for dessert! It's my new favorite (since yesterday). Haha.