At Long Last

I am finally online! In a manner of speaking, anyway. I am at the State Library of Victoria using their wireless (which as of yet won't allow me to upload pictures), so I can sit down and give something of a real update on my life down under.

This is (seeming) hugely long, and no doubt many of you will find it unspeakably boring. If you can follow my often errant train of thought. It's mostly a chronicle of my week, except the last paragraphs at the end. If nothing else, read those :-)

I flew KC to LA direct, and was pretty famished by the end of the trip, taking from around 3 CST to 8 CST. The warm chocolate chip cookies they served on the flight did help though :-) I got to LA airport and walked around and called my parents to let them know I was there, and ended up having to ask for help to get out of the domestic flight building and into the international terminal. I got over there and ate some Mcdonald's - hopefully for the last time in a long while - and then walked around the terminal reading magazines and such. After a while a few more people from the program showed up, and we all walked down to the gate.

After a three hour wait at the gate (or something like that - I was asleep for a good twenty minutes of it) we finally got on the plane, something like 45 minutes after we were supposed to. And thus began our 15 hour flight... Good times. Minus the part where I was on a window seat and could only get out by making two other people move for me. I slept about 6 hours of the flight, watched a couple movies (Borat and 300, neither of which I think is worth seeing again), and did some reading.

We arrived in Melbourne airport and spent an hour getting our luggage and getting through customs, and were then greeted by Dr. Walters (the head of the religion department at Houghton) and TK, our faculty advisor. We hopped on a bus and made our first sighting of Kingsley College, where we are studying and staying for the semester, much to our relief.

The problem was that we had about 2 hours before they were going to serve us lunch, no food, and no local currency. So 5 of the 6 guys (minus Scott, one of the other Houghton guys on the trip) decided to walk around the neighborhood and get a feel for it. I was much excited to have a soccer field only two blocks away, and there is also a milk bar (a convenience store) and a video ezy right across the street. We slowly made our way back to campus and called home and then had our first lunch. The rest of the day was unpacking and getting into our flats; which took Tucker (from Seattle Pacific), Scott and I quite a while. There was someone living in the flat the three of us have for the semester, and he was just moving out. Before the end of the day, we got our $75 for food for the week and they took us down to Safeway to do our first shopping. After that, we settled in to watch our first Footy match!

Footy is Australian rules football, and it is insane - I've heard it called "organized chaos" many times. It's similar both to rugby and football. It's played with a rugby ball (or something close to it). It's played on a huge oval field - there are two 5o meter arcs, with another 50 or so meters inbetween them - and the players sprint the entire game, which is four 20 minute quarters. They can only pass the ball by punching it or kicking it to each other, and when the ball is in the air players are fair game for just about any type of hit, grab, shove, or tackle you can imagine. There have been something like 10 injuries in the 3 games we've watched, including two in the one we got to see live last Saturday :-)

We all crashed pretty early the first night, going to bed around 9. the next day we got up and took the train down to the Queen Victoria market, a huge outdoor area full of shops for food, clothing, and pretty much anything you can imagine. We walked around the market for a couple hours and then a group of us (Jeff and BJ from Messiah, Tucker, and then Jeremiah, Lydia, Janelle, and Aimee and I, all from Houghton) walked around downtown and explored. On the way we found a huge indoor climbing gym, where we spent most of our Friday - we climbed for about 5 hours with an hour break for lunch, and all for only $27.

Sunday I went to St. Paul's Anglican Cathedral for church with TK, Dr. Walters, and a group of about 10 other students. The service and the choir and the sermon were all excellent. The sermon was on the passage in Luke where Jesus says that he comes to bring division, not peace, and both in the sermon as well as chapel Monday morning we explored what that meant. I took those thoughts and ended up writing a rather long rant about faith that may find it's way up here in due time.

We travelled down to St. Kilda beach for lunch, and then tried to meet up with the rest of the group for an evening service, but ended up horribly lost. Michelle, Rebekah A. (from Houghton) and I walked around the city 'til around nine, exploring downtown and one of the parks we ran into.

Monday morning we got up and had all our Kingsley orientation, as well as our first "class period for Engaging Australian Culture". Really all it amounted to was TK going through what he wants us to accomplish for that "class" for the semester and how he hopes that we will be encouraged to interact with the culture and the people of the culture that we are surrounded by.

Tuesday started classes, with Australian History in the afternoon and Christianity and Postmodernism in the evening. Australian History was a typical intro class followed by a movie (we have three hour class periods once a week). Christianity and Postmodernism looks to be a good ride for the semester, but much of the intro material was stuff that I have previously read, so it was a bit hard to stay on task. It is, however, the only one of our classes with Australians in it, so the discussion will be much broader on many topics and I'm excited to see where that leads us.

Wednesday Michelle and I went exploring in downtown and worked on our Independent Study materials for The Doctrine of the Trinity. We found our way into the beautiful Royal Botanical Gardens and spent most of the afternoon there. We also ended up on a little side-street cafe for dinner, and that was a fabulous experience :-)

Thursday we had Life in the City class, taught by one of the nine city councillours for the city of Melbourne. He did a lot of intro, including giving us a lot of his story - pastoring a church in the slums of St. Kilda, getting two psych degrees, being the head of Kingsley College, and finally ending up in politics where he is working to be a missionary to the city as a whole. For our final project in his class, we will have to take one of the sections found in the city report and work out our own ideas for it, criticize it, and come up with a plan for where we think it should go. It all sounds pretty fascinating.
We stayed around campus Thursday afternoon and had Australian Literature that night. The first hour of the class was fantastic, and I'm excited for the potential of where we could go for the semester. Unfortunately, the rest of class was disappointing and frustrating, as he read the 20 page syllabus to us, and then read the first reading to us. We ended up feeling a bit like we were in kindergarten - or that we wanted to pound our faces into the desks.

Friday, as I said, we went rock climbing and exploring, and Saturday was taken up by Footy.

Yesterday we traveled to the Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary, and got to see a lot of the native Australian animals: kangaroos, koalas, dingos, wombats, Tasmanian devils, and a huge number of birds. One of the coolest parts of the day was that we got to see a display of the Australian birds of prey, which was amazing. the trainers would stand at the back of the crowd and have the birds fly right over your heads - I was almost hit once!
When we got back we did some reading for class and then played some poker :-) Today has been sleeping in, breakfast, and coming down here, where it's already 3 in the afternoon!

Hopefully the picture situation will work out soon, as there are a lot of pictures from the above mentioned things I'd like to put up. Also, in my mind I am a much more disciplined person, and write my blog posts out ahead of time so that they don't ramble all over the place for pages and pages and pages. Props to those of you who read this whole thing!

Speaking of discipline, however, I have done very well (in my own eyes, at least) when it comes to forcing myself to have some kind of a routine and get my responsibilities done. I finished all my History and Postmodernism reading by last night, with class not even until tomorrow! I have journaled every day - or at least for every day, if not on the day itself. I have gotten into the habit of playing the piano a little bit every day. And most importantly, I've also been trying to spend good time reading my Bible and praying and meditating, which has been a mostly enjoyable experience. The one area that I still need to work on is communication, but there have been issues with that (see the last post if you haven't already...)

I should probably go and do my IS reading for Wednesday, and maybe start on my Thursday reading.
What happened to the good old days when I never had to read anything more than a day in advance because it would take me an hour tops?

Oh well.

Oh yes, I keep forgetting to mention. If you want/need to get a hold of me, fly to Australia. If you want to contact me, you can use my Houghton e-mail address (Shane.Marcus@houghton.edu) and it will forward everything to my Kingsley account, which is the only one I can access from campus. If you want a reply, it will be hit and miss until I get my laptop working on the network there; or, there might be a way in your own e-mail server to recognize my address here: smarcus@student.kingsley.edu.au (or smarcus@kingsley.edu.au I'm never sure which). If you want to send directly there, there is a chance I'll be able to reply straight to you, which would make everyone's life easier. Or at least my own. I haven't explored that option/possibility yet, but hopefully someone pc savvy can work that out. Until then, I can't send anything to anyone because it rejects my domain.