Exploring and Analyzing the Global City of Sydney

"Sydney is a vibrant, dynamic and accessible city
waiting to be explored"



After being in Sydney for almost 3 months I am finally writing about my "education." Most of you know that I am doing an internship while abroad in Australia. I get 6 credits for the internship and another 6 credits for taking two classes. When applying for this program I was able to select what two classes I wanted to take (there was only eight to choose from.) 



The main reason for me taking the exploring and analyzing the global city of Sydney class was the ability to learn in depth about Sydney. The best part of the class was that we took three field trips around the city. 



My teacher is a local Australian named Cameron. He was a geology major and has done lots of work in the Sydney area. He has taken part in many multi year research projects that have resulted in many scholarly newspaper and magazine articles and journals. He explained to us that his wife is in the entertainment industry and was in charge of most of the opening ceremonies at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. He even got to help on the project which sounded like it would be an awesome job.



This class was a huge help for a student who was studying and living in a foreign country. While I learned so much about Sydney's past and have taken looks at their plans for the future, I wan't to highlight my favorite parts of the class.



Those favorite parts are the field trips of course. The first field trip was a walking tour that started at the oldest part of Sydney known as The Rocks. This area is adjacent to the area most of you would think of: The Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. There was a huge cruise ship in the Harbour and he explained to us that 27 out of the 28 days in February were to have cruise ships take off from there.


We continued on to a museum where we learned even more about the history of Sydney. We continued on to what was called the Sydney observatory which had views unlike any other of Sydney. 



We continued walking (yes we walked alot!) to a place called Darling Harbour. This could be my favorite place in Sydney, it just has a great feel to it. While there I made a friend at the LEGO park (he wasn't made out of LEGOs.) I also found the location for my boat in the near future. We finished the field trip there as we had to get back for another class.



The next field trip we took was to the more inner-city of Sydney. This was mainly to get us out of our element for a change as well as to look at some graffiti. My instructor Cameron had done a two year research on graffiti in and around Sydney. This was the most prominent place in Sydney with graffiti. 



They had problems with graffiti being used as vandalism in the past and they knew they would never be able to stop it. So what they did was hire professional graffiti artists from all over the world to come in and paint so it would look "cool." We actually got to see some people paint that day which was pretty cool. That being said here are some pictures:






The third and final field trip was out to a place called Cabramatta, which is mostly an asian population. I think during the hour and a half we were there I didn't see but three Caucasians not in my class. Anyway it was chaotic getting there as some of the buses were down, causing us to be delayed. 



Part of the deal for going there was we were getting free food. We went to a Vietnamese restaurant. This was my first time at a Vietnamese restaurant and will be my last. He ordered all the food for us so we didn't have a choice. We each got a beef salad and a beef soup. The beef salad was shared by the whole table and was actually not too bad. However the beef soup was terrible. It came out in a huge bowl and I ate one bite and was done. Cameron came up to us right after my first bite and said the beef that was in there was tendons. I about threw up on the spot, luckily I didn't. 



Despite the bad food this class was a great experience. I loved the field trips and the class lectures were interesting as well. My next post will be about my International Business class. Only a week and a half left in my program. I can't believe how fast it has gone.
Category: 1 comments

1 comments:

Nava K said...

graffiti - surely a great way of showing one's skill.

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