I have two more weeks of classes, one study week and one exam week, during which I'll have two exams. Halloween marks the end of my studies at Curtin University (4 weeks countdown). I'm looking forward to finishing all of my assignments, most of which I completed this past weekend. Many of my friends went out of town so I took a ME weekend to relax, catch up on sleep, cook, shop, do homework, and do my own thing.
For the next month, I'm focusing on creating and completing my ICRP: Integrated Cultural Research Project. I wrote my prospectus for it and sent it off to my advisers. Hopefully they'll have some encouraging feedback on it; they seemed to like my ideas when I met with them last week. I am completing my ICRP with SERCUL (South East Regional Centre for Urban Landcare), the organization at which I've been volunteering. I've volunteered there for about 40 hours now over the past month, during which I've done re-vegetation, removal of invasive species, assisted with education programs and researched and entered data.
Today I sat in on their monthly meetings which was different than their weekly ones: the entire staff team was there. About 15 people total sat around in a circle on the porch while the head honcho directed conversation. It was great to be a part of something official. I still need to pitch my ICRP ideas to them though, make sure it's okay for me to interview them. A lot of the research I have been doing is casual (asking questions, online research, looking at their brochures) and I hope that I can muster up some good inter-cultural writing material. I need 10-15 pages and a feasible topic and all I have now is a lot of ideas.
Other than the minor uni assignments and the ICRP, I'll also be going on two volunteer weekends. One is this weekend in Toodyay and the other is a 'weekend' that lasts 5 days during the second week of November. It's a remote indigenous trip to Wiluna; uni flies us out to an Aboriginal town. The theme is 'Make a Splash' and I may be helping teach kids how to swim. After the trip, I also hope to stay in Fremantle, Perth's port, for a week before traveling to the east coast. If all works out well, I'll be flying into the Great Barrier Reef with all of my belongings, taking a hop-on, hop-off Greyhound bus down the east coast and fly from Brisbane or Sydney back home to Chicago.
I really miss home. A lot of people here really miss home and want to go back. It's not that we don't like it here, it's that we've done almost everything we've wanted to do in Australia (classes, coastal tour, snorkeling, diving, hiking, biking, internship, clubbing, etc.). That's why completing my ICRP to go travel to Wiluna and the east coast sounds super appealing. I'm booking my tickets this week.
A note on food and cooking: I love it...but my recipes are too often recycled. I feel like I'm eating the same foods. I'm also trying to use up my foods because of the small amount of time I have here. I also miss corn. My body just hasn't quite adjusted to there not being corn in every food product. Also, I made fish last night and I put it in a super hot pan of oil. It caught fire and almost burned the stove/flat down. I was trying to get the fire extinguisher off the wall (was it glued??) and it settled. Crisis averted.
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