Rugby Rules

I'm finally getting into a routine here in Manly. The first couple of weeks were so much fun. I loved going on adventures, meeting new people, tasting new food (even though I wasn't too impressed!) and just enjoying my life as an Australian tourist, but of course all of that is now settling down. This past week was almost very normal. I went to my 16 hours of classes and learned about a ton of projects, papers and other monotonous assignments. I'm still up in the air as to whether or not I'm going to like the classes-- most of them involve a ton of group work and even a group paper of 3500 words. I guess it wouldn't be too bad if my other group members were native to the English language, but they are not. And do I even begin on the fact that most of the international students do not even know the meaning of a thesis statement? Ohhhhh geez! I'm feeling the workload on my shoulders already.

Other than class there hasn't been much excitement in my life. I went down to the beach a couple of times. The weather has been getting a bit warmer during the day when the sun is out. Unfortunately, I am getting a little pale and have not seen the results of this "tanning" and laying out. I'm perplexed by the sun here because I heard that there is basically no ozone layer over Australia and this place has the highest rates of skin cancer and melanoma. Well, if that is the case then why can't I get a tan after a week of tanning?! Maybe that's the problem- the sun gets soaked in differently and turns into cancer instead of a tan, who knows?

Finally, last night was a HUGE Rugby match between Australia and England. It was honestly bigger than the Superbowl. The fans here are outrageous. I've only seen a little bit of Rugby here or there, so this was the first time I really attempted to pay attention and learn some of the rules. It's actually a cool sport. The guys here were astonished that I had never watched rugby and were really into telling me about what was going on and how they scored points. For a minute I was confused until I began putting it in American football terms and getting the fact that they have sort of a two point conversion, but no extra points. I was excited to watch more games. Too bad Australia lost though- that was the not so fun part of the evening.
So, the summary of my week: going to class, the beach, and learning the rules of rugby.