Here’s a summary of our first week of uni! We both started at 9 am on Tuesday because we don’t have any classes on Mondays.
Tuesday
We biked to uni with a fair bit of time to go, but still, we arrived just in time for class. It’s about 5 km to uni when biking and much of the way to campus is at a slight incline, plus at one point we have to cross an extremely busy road. We’re still getting used to biking in Australia as it’s quite different from biking back home in Sweden.
Gustav had a lecture in Supply Chain Decision Support in the ICT building, aka the car park (as it is built on the third story of a car park). Linnea made her way to the Architect “island” on campus, where the faculty of Engineering and Built Environment has its headquarters. Three of her four courses take place there. The course she’s taking on Tuesdays is called Design Development and Management.
At noon, we met up and ate lunch together. UON was serving a “free BBQ lunch”, where BBQ refers to your choice of veggie burgers or sausages on a slice of toast bread. It was quite alright; it was after all free… and what student can say no to free stuff?
Gustav went to his second class at 1 pm, which was a tutorial in the same course as earlier. Linnea only had a lecture that day, so she stuck around and had some coffee with the Swedish crew on campus, and later went to play squash with a campus association called GOALSS.
Wednesday
On Wednesday, Linnea started at 9 am and Gustav at 11 am. Nevertheless, we biked to uni together. While Linnea went to her lecture in a course called Furniture, Form and Function, Gustav went to study and prepare for his class.
Linnea’s lecture was over at 10 am, so she went home while Gustav went to his class at 11 am, a workshop in Introduction to Entrepreneurship and Innovation. After that class, he had a break until 3 pm, when he had his lecture in Business Analysis.
In the evening, we bought some Thai food for dinner and went back to uni to Black Light Party @ Bar on the Hill, our first student party in Australia! It was interesting to see how Aussies party. Compared to Sweden, it started kind of early as it started at 7 pm and stopped at midnight. We had a blast, and we randomly found a doppelgänger for Linnea’s friend Svante. The doppelgänger both looked and acted like Svante, so we were stunned.
Since the buses stopped going quite early, we tried Uber for the first time to get home from the party. We were picked up by a guy who had been a student at UON before, and overall we thought it was a very convenient way to travel. We’ll probably try it again sometime.
Thursday
On Thursday we both had only one class each, although at different times. So, Gustav went to uni for his lecture in Leadership and Entrepreneurship at 10 am. After the lecture, he biked home again to find Linnea still anticipating her first workshop in Introduction to Management which didn’t start until 3 pm.
Overall, a bit slow (and hungover) day. Stopped by the store on campus to get some sketching materials. Otherwise, we had our hands full trying to get back into ‘study mode’.
Friday
Finally, on Friday, Linnea had her last introduction lecture of the week in Computational Design and Modelling. The lecturer in that subject reminded her a lot of a professor back home at Linköping University, so she felt quite at home in her courses already after the first lecture.
While Linnea was at uni, Gustav was home enjoying his day off.
When Linnea got back from uni, we ate lunch together and went into town. We stopped by the doughnut shop Doughheads and had some fika.
Then we continued walking out to the beach and made our way alongside Newcastle Beach while the sun was going down.
We walked all the way through the Memorial Walk to Bar Beach.
Once there it was dark, and we headed back into town to catch the bus home.
We went to bed early in order to get up for the low tide on Saturday morning, but more about that in the next post.
Hugs and kisses,
Gustav & Linnea