A Refreshingly Brief Update (kind of)

So I've been to school three days now, and everything seems to be going well. I'm still not sure what exactly I'll be teaching yet, which makes it difficult for me to catch up on reading that I haven't been assigned. Though I do feel like I'm falling behind a bit as far as that goes, I am doing a lot of observing, and I'm getting to know the school. I'm also starting to feel a little less nervous about teaching with every class that I observe. I have my ID card for Trinity now, although the first time they made it, it said "Kayla Zeisla," which is, I suppose, how Zeisler kind of sounds with an Australian accent. But that got fixed, which is good. I thought it was pretty funny though. Today was also jersey day at school, where the boys got to wear the jersey of their favorite sports team, or just casual clothing instead of their uniforms. My teacher was telling me about how they do this 2 or 3 times a year for charity - they get to wear casual clothes as a reward for donating a dollar or two to charity. They also had relay races at lunch where the faculty departments and the school houses raced each other. One of the English teachers who was signed up to race wasn't feeling well (or, as they put it, was "crook"), so I actually ran in his place. Which was pretty fun, although we lost. Some of the boys in Mr. Hirst's afternoon class recognized me and told me later that I had run well. Haha. I guess it just felt good to be recognized. I wore my Red Sox shirt (because I don't have a Giants shirt), which was fun, because some of the boys recognized it and I got to actually talk to them. One of the boys even had Tom Brady as his wallpaper on his laptop. Though most of them wore rugby jerseys, I actually saw a Packers jersey and a Chargers jersey - American culture just seems to take over. It's interesting, too, that they discuss American culture in class - as I mentioned before, one of the classes I observed was watching Hitchcock's "Rear Window," and they were discussing American society of the 1950s. In a different class, the students were preparing for their HSC (high school certificate) exam, and the unit topic is belonging. One of the articles in their preparation packet was an American article from a study on belonging at the University of Michigan. It just seems strange to me that American studies are so present in the English classes here. We don't learn anything about Australia. But I'm continuing to be as observant as I can - including picking up on some of the Aussie sayings: "how you going?" instead of "how are you", or "have a go" at something, they tend to say film instead of movie, at least in class, but when a film is in the theaters, it's called being "at the movies." Like when our movie ads say "only in theatres on x date," theirs say "only at the movies." They call granola meusli - so a granola bar is a muesli bar. Bell peppers are called "capsicums," and sunglasses are "sunnies" -that's one of my faves. I'll try to post more as I think of them; they're pretty funny.

I'm also in love with Australian TV. There is much less censorship, and by much less I mean none at all. So anything flies, which is usually hilarious. Some of the shows are just Australian versions of American shows - Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, Australian Idol, Dancing with the Stars, Millionaire, etc. But there are some hilarious original series, too. And I've been watching a lot of news, too, and there are some great late-ish night talk shows. We only get 6 channels, but we still manage to find things to watch. I especially love when I stumble upon an episode of Friends. We're now watching a documentary about Skippy, the Australian version of Flipper, but with a kangaroo. It's pretty funny. We also just watched Glee! There has been a lot of promotion for it here, which is great, but they only showed the pilot tonight (I was hoping for a new episode). I still enjoyed it immensely (even for a 3rd time). That final scene when they are singing "Don't Stop Believing" reminded me of our performance this summer, and it made me miss everyone from Orientation! They're going to start showing the new episodes starting next week, although it's tempting to just watch them online since they've already aired in the US. It's just tough to stream video with this dodgy internet. So I'd rather wait for Glee than not have Glee at all!

Tomorrow will conclude my first week at school; hopefully next week I'll get to observe some more teachers and some different classes, and get a book list so I can start reading. I'm also going to have to start doing work for my class, too, as I have a paper due next Friday. Tomorrow is also the first night of Rosh Hashana here, so I will hopefully be going to services somewhere here in Sydney (we're still working on where, exactly). I'm also very interested to see what the Jewish culture is like here in Sydney - at least, the active Jewish culture, as I've seen the museum and the Great Synagogue. And later this weekend we're going abseiling and canyoning up in the blue mountains - abseiling is just the Australian word for repelling, like down a rock. Canyoning, on the other hand, is repelling down the face of a mountain into a waterfall. When I think about it, I'm actually pretty scared. But I'm mostly excited. It should be an exciting adventure!