Typical Tassie Day
As I’m nearing the end of this program, I thought that people might be interested in what a typical day looks like for me. Although this whole trip has had a lot of different excursions planned out for us that deter from the regular schedule, there are days here and there that consist of similar activities.
Since we are living in a hostel that accommodates middle schoolers through university students, a staff member will go around every weekday morning providing a courtesy knock. This dialogue may be different from others in that we have class every day, so it being Saturday or Sunday doesn’t mean much. There have been times that our professor realized that a full day off would be nice to go hike or visit a landmark, so he’ll double up lectures on one of the days before. On weekdays, the hostel serves breakfast at 7:30, including a sandwich bar where we’ll prep our lunch for the day. Breakfast usually is a choice of toast or cereal, or both. The sandwich bar has a selection of meats and veggies and breads. When we had first gotten to Hobart, we went down to the KMart to get phone plans; however, the employee who sold us the plan had sold us the wrong one. As compensation, we received 50 AUSD, which we used to buy a panini press for our sandwiches!
We have a two-hour lecture every day from 10 AM to 12 PM. You can usually catch our professor having a cup of coffee outside the classroom we are in around 9:45 AM. Again, as we are in a hostel, we had to be creative in finding a room that was fit to be a classroom. The hostel has a second dining room that we have officially taken over for the 6 weeks we have been here. There’s a magnificent fireplace that came in handy the first few weeks when we thought the weather here was brutal. The room had no whiteboard at first, but the administrator did some engineering himself and was able to somehow fix one onto a cupboard. The reason that we have two hour lectures every day while we are here is because Fluid Mechanics is generally an intense course that requires a longer amount of time (this is why this program is also longer than other dialogues).
After the lecture, we usually would eat our sandwiches while debating what we were going to do for the rest of the day. For those days that our professor would give us the day off, we’d usually plan a day trip to go hike a mountain. Days like this where we had to be back in time for dinner at the hostel (6:30 PM), we’d plan things a little differently. There have been a lot of days that I have gone downtown via metro to grab a coffee or bagel. From there, if I had an exam coming up, I could go to the library that had a lot of empty space to spread out. The Hobart library is a really nice place to study. A group of us also signed up for a two week membership at a small yoga boutique. They had hot yoga classes running at 5:30 PM every day, which I’ve attended a lot. If you’ve never tried yoga, I highly recommend it! It’s a great way to end your day, and is also very healthy for your body. If I’m going to yoga, I usually throw my name up on the whiteboard in the hostel kitchen for “late dinner”, meaning that the chef will set aside a plate for me. Sometimes our group of 16 students would go out to dinner either in the neighboring town or downtown for some really good Indian, Chinese, or Italian cuisine. But on ordinary nights, the hostel food was always there for us.
After dinner, most of us would either work more on assignments or classwork, or just hang out. There’s a TV in the classroom that we use, as well as one of the rooms that three of the girls live in. Half of us are huge Game of Thrones fans, so that takes place once a week usually. Other than that, we’ve had movie nights, card nights, etc. One night, we took a lot of wood from the hostel and found a beach nearby to make a bonfire at. It was actually one of the most memorable and fun nights I’ve had on this trip. At the end of a long day, we’d all crawl into our beds ready for another.
After class one day, we decided to go to some waterfalls near Mount Wellington, and ended the day by visiting Cascade Brewery, where a few of us went on a tour.
