Student Bloggers

Hi everyone! For the most part, everyone back home is done with finals and starting their summer vacations while I am still a few weeks away before the end of my semester. This post is going to be short (apologies to those who enjoy my long posts – it’s SWOTVAC and finals time so studying, meeting deadlines, and sleeeeeeeeep).

SWOTVAC/SWOT VAC = Study Without Teaching Vacation; it’s similar to Reading Day (or the brief period between the end of the semester and the start of finals), but SWOTVAC is a week long ☺! I have three papers due within the first week of June (finished two, and halfway done with my third paper…currently taking a break from that to do this), and a final exam on the third week – two days prior to my departure flight! Okay, enough about my finals…

Last month, my friends and I did a bus tour to the Great Ocean Road with an explorers group in the Melbourne area. It was a planned 12-hour trip with a tour guide, with stops at the Kennets River (where we hand-fed wild Australian birds which landed on our heads and shoulders and saw a wild koala), Memorial Arch (with the famous Great Ocean Road signage), Anglesea Beach, Apollo Bay, Twelve Apostles, and Loch Ard Gorge. I decided to play around with a video-editing app and tried to make a short video clip of some of the photos and videos I took on this trip instead of doing the usual slideshow on the page. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s still a pretty cool 2-minute clip ☺. On a different day last month, my friends and I had brunch in Melbourne and ordered rainbow bagels! We then visited the National Gallery of Victoria for the Van Gogh series. Since it was a special exhibition, you have to buy a ticket to get in, but the rest of the art gallery is free entry!

This past Friday, we went to the Melbourne Museum, which is the largest museum in the Southern Hemisphere. It is a natural and cultural museum, and is free entry with your student ID. We spent a couple of hours there before our Arcadia-hosted farewell group dinner at the Abbey Road Café, which is near the house. We have a new Student Services Coordinator, so it was a chance to meet him and to also reconnect with the regional director, who we first met during orientation in February.

This is all for now (I have a paper to finish!!!) but I promise that my adventures aren’t over until I step on that flight in a few weeks.

Cheers!