School's Out, Scream and Shout!

I finally finished my classes at CDU this past week! I can't believe it went by so fast, it honestly feels like I just got to Darwin yesterday. This semester has been full of crazy twists and turns, late nights doing homework, weird teachers, a strange class structure, and so much more. It's been a really crazy twelve weeks, but I'm honestly really sad to see it go.

At the start of the semester, I had been enrolled in Visual Arts Foundations 1, Piano (Applied Music Practice 1), and Drawing. However, in the middle of the first week, I ended up switching out of Drawing and into Chinese and I am so glad that I did. When I went to orientation, the Chinese teacher made the class seem so fun and she really got me hooked on the idea of learning Chinese. Getting to learn a new language has always been something that interested me. I took French in high school and loved getting to speak in a new language so much that from that moment on I've wanted to learn as many languages as possible. However, had I not done this now, I would have never done it in the future and I would have missed out on learning such an amazing language. It honestly seemed so daunting having to learn how to write and recognize the Chinese characters and before this class, it just looked like a bunch of random scribbles to me. But it was surprisingly pretty easy to learn.

Not only did I get to learn a new language, I got to meet a ton of new people from all over the world. There were Chinese students, Vietnamese students, Japanese students, Australian students, and obviously American students in that class. Our teacher, Amy, actually used to teach Chinese at NAU before came to CDU which was such a crazy coincidence. It was really cool though getting to meet somebody who had actually been to America. Besides her, I think I've only met one other person this entire time that has been there.

Piano was where the real fun was at. Music has always been such a huge part of my life and it was so nice to dive back into it. I've always wanted to play the piano, but my parents never had the money to pay for lessons, they barely had enough money to pay for my flute when I was in band. Even though I'm not very good yet, there's just something about playing that feels so freeing. A lot of the exercises that my teacher gave us were so awkward, especially the staccato chords, but it was so fun. I learned how to play Lavender's Blue, The Can-Can, London Bridge, Spring Song, a few other songs, a bunch of chords, and even more scales. It was really awesome.

Visual Arts was a whole other story... It was a good class, but also really awful at the same time. At first, the class was absolutely terrible! There were two lectures in one day, one being 10am-1pm and the other 2pm-4pm. Five hours for one class in one day was overly ridiculous and when we walked in on the first day the teacher straight up told us that she and the other professor didn't know what they were doing, they just blocked off the whole day so they could figure it out later. The teacher of the second session was an awful teacher which didn't help the situation at all. We did get to do some interesting projects though. We got to use photoshop, we learned how to use a Mark Tansey painting technique, we drew in reverse using complimentary colors and erasers, we learned about function vs composition, and we also learned about 3D objects and how to manipulate them.

Even though I didn't learn anything that would actually help me with my future career, this semester really helped me a lot. I was able to step back from the stress and pressure of NAU and really figure out what I want to do with my life. I know I say this in just about every blog post, but I seriously am so grateful to have gotten the opportunity to study here in Australia and I'm so sad it's almost over!