Ooooff my arms hurt a bit from doing 'Body Pump' at the gym with Goose and Alex last night. (Body Pump, did you hear that!? I am officially a new woman). I turned up a bit late and was blatantly such a newbie, and so the lovely (but scarily muscly) instructor woman helped me through the session. It was a good work out but hilarious at the same time as I am such a weakling...! Some of the boys in there were lifting pretty heavy weights on their bars, and there I was with my 2.5kgs.... oh well... onwards and upwards!
This morning I went to go talk to the UK and Enrolment Advisor about my modules and FINALLY managed to get everything sorted, so now I am doing three modules in Music, and one in Spanish. I'm excited to be taking up Spanish again as it's such a useful language and I think it will be good for me to do a bit of something else.
After that was all sorted, some of us (from the big group of us that is steadily forming) met to have a hungover brunch at one of the amazing cafe/food places in the complex where our halls is. There was an event hosted at The Roundhouse last night on campus, and even though it was disgustingly cringey and very 'FRE$HA$ 2K13', after a few more drinks I started to forget that I was in our student union, and got on with enjoying meeting lots more international people, and just pretended that I was in an incredibly cosmopolitan bar. Anyway, needless to say, everyone hit the Goon pretty hard last night and were suffering badly because of it.
The food near our halls is pretty good, there's some really nice coffee shops (our favourite is Coco Cubano which has free wifi and really good food - and some tasty barista boys) and a burrito place opened up yesterday called Guzman Y Gomez - and they had a whole promotional day where they gave out free burritos. A HELLS YEAH....
Once we were done, I then went to meet up with a girl called Grace who my friend Fran from Newcastle put me in touch with. We met at The White House, a little cafe/bar place, and chatted for a bit - mainly about how much we were not really enjoying re-freshers. I invited her to come and join Goose and I as we were going to go and meet Tally at the Museum of Contemporary Art later on, and so three became four and she hopped on the bus with us.
The MCA is right on Circular Quay so it's really easy to get to as you just get off the bus and walk round to the left along the waterfront.
We grabbed a programme and headed round a few of the exhibitions.
The first one was by Wangechi Mutu and was a bit odd... it felt like walking around a dreamscape or something. My favourite parts of her work are the ones where she collages together cut outs from fashion magazines and ethnographic journals, as well as porn magazines, and layers over with drawing, pain, fur, and beads. The end pieces are strangely beautiful.
She also did some pretty weird stuff, like these hairy mountains...
It was cool to look at though, it was interesting to see how she draws together her thoughts on beauty, colonialism, race and gender through her work.
The next exhibition we went to was called Volume One: MCA Collection, and featured lots of Australian artists.
We found this piece (above) which is just mirror strips hanging from a piece of string. So simple, but amazingly mesmerising to look at as they turn. We also found another (below) which was a whole wall of little colour flip-down things, which are all timed differently and create this random splattering of colours as they fall.
There was one other photography exhibition we missed, which looks quite good, but the museum was closing and so we agreed to come back another time to do it properly. We then headed out to a bar (of course) on the waterfront to have a few drinks before we headed home.
It was great to meet Grace today and she said she'd join us in our adventures of exploring the city, so no doubt I'll be writing a lot more about her. Also, Goose's sister is here in Sydney on an exchange and she dropped by with a friend just say hi quickly, which made Goose get a little emotional (not helped by her hangover...).
Finally we said our goodbyes and we headed back to Randwick (the area where our halls are) whilst Tally hopped on a bus back to Manly.
Hopefully many more cultural days out and waterfront bars to come!
Until next time,
B
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