Great Ocean Road

Last Saturday we 23 teachers took a day tour to Great Ocean Road. On the way the driver and tourist guide Diana showed us the places of interest and stopped at several spots for us to enjoy the beautiful sencery and took pictures. The landscape is really beautiful, blue sky, blue seawater with white wave and with people's surfing, spacious land with green grass and with sheep, cows eating them. It is a life that we are dreaming of. And we saw the sunset. Beautiful sunset. The tour is really worthwhile. We all enjoyed our time.

Cultural Crash

Living in the homestay family is the direct way to experience the different culture, different customs. Having been with my homestay family for more than two weeks, I find sharp differences between our lifestyle and theirs, which will be illustrated as follows.
First of all, we have different diet. The breakfast is almost the same, bread, milk or coffee. however, the lunch is really different. In China, we seldomly have sandwiches, which we have to eat here everyday. It's really awful. Sometimes I feel sick when I think of sandwiches. But my homestay hostess said one day that the sandwich is beautiful in Australia. Oh, I cannot stand it. I swear that I'll not touch sandwich any more when I'm back home. But I have to have it for lunch in Australia, otherwise I 'll buy something to eat. Sometimes I do buy something different to have for lunch.
In addition, Clothes washing. In China, we usually wash socks and underwears separately. But here, my hostess puts all the stuff in the washing machine. Cissy talked with the hostess about washing our underwears separately for several times, finally she agreed. But on last rainy
Sunday, our clothes were outdoors hanging on the line. We wanted to get them indoor, but the hostess declined our request. She said the rain water is very clean and could rinse the clothes again. But in China, this kind of things will never happen, only except that nobody at home collects the clothes indoors.
Moreover, we cannot help other boarders to do something without the hostess's permission. Last Sunday, two teenagers from China came to live with us. They are very polite and timid. They are very quiet and afraid of talking with the hostess. Last night, they told us that they were not accustomed to drinking cold milk from the fridge in such cold weather. So we told them that they could heat the milk in the micro oven. Then Cissy showed them where the micro oven was. At this time, the hostess asked Cissy who told them about the micro oven. She said this is her home and she is the mother. If they don't know something or want to do something, they can ask her. We should not do the things like this. Maybe she is right. I don't know.
The ways of doing things are quite different between us Chinese and Australians.

RMIT Library

Last week, we had a tour around the RMIT campus, and visited the library. In the library we showed our student cards and found that we could not borrow books because the library didn't have any information about us. Then Tina went the library to solve the problem. On Monday I went to the library again, where one of the librarians put the barcode on my student card and input my information into the library's computer system. At last I could borrow books. It was really comfortable to go around the library, to use the computer there to sesearch the acdemic articles, and to find the books on lingustics and language teaching. Today's afternoon, I really wanted to go to the library, but I wasn't feeling very well. I felt dizzy, tired, and very sleepy, yawned, yawned, yawned. So I came back home to have a sleep. I plan to go to the library tomorrow afternoon to find some books on classroom games and activities. I hope I can be lucky enough to have this kinds of books.

Longevity County

Bama, a county consisting several villages with a population of 250,000 near the Vietnam border in Cina’s Guangxi Autonomous Region, comprises a “longevity cluster”. It has a population of 74 centenarians, including one said to be 113 years old. The reason why people there live longer is the water, air, soil and life-style. The water from the local river comes from springs and is considered so pure that it is drunk without treatment or filtration. It is sweet and fine. And people eat healthy and different meat because local animals drink the local water and eat local plants. People live a relaxing life with less stress by breathing fresh air, eating healthy meat and vegetables, and drinking sweet water. What a beautiful place it is!

The Trip to Puffing Billy and Yarra Valley Wineries

The weather is quite changable in Australia. On Saturday it was windy and cloudy, while on Sunday it was clear and sunny. After getting up early on Sunday morning, it was still very dark. I was worried about the weather, because we were going to have a trip to Puffing Billy and Yarra Valley Wineries. When I getting out of the house, I saw a lot of stars shining in the sky. How lovely. On the traveling bus, we enjoyed the beautiful scenery, pastures with cows and sheep on and riding horses on the road. The first stop is the place where we could tea and some cookies, where we could feed birds, gorgeous birds, cockatoo, silly galah and parrots. Then we went to take Puffing Billy with our legs out of the train. It was really fun. we took some picutures for the future memories. Then we had a big, delicious lunch, beef, vegetables, soup, coffee. After lunch we visited two wineries. Although it is not the right time to see the process of making wine, we still knew something about it through the tour guide's expalnation. We enjoyed the relaxing time by tasting some wine. It was fantastic.

Week Reflection

We been in Melbourne for a week. We did a lot things during the first week. It was excitin g, interesting, but also tiring, for we travelled a lot. On the first two days, we walked at night around the house where we live, we found few people went out at night, and it was really dark. It seemed really boring at night. But when I visited the South bank on Friday night, I found it quite different, crowed, noisy, flourishing. Along the bank of Yarra river, there are some bars, with a lot of people drinking and talking. And in Casino, people were gambling in full play. But I don't know the rules of gambling at all and I'm not interested in it. Then I stayed there for only a few minutes. Although I was really tired at the time, I think it worthwhile to experience the different life style.
About the course, I think different sessions have different features. David's session is very useful by making full use of the internet. It is a trend in the 21th century. To be candid, I'm not quite good at using the intenet in my teaching, so I'm looking forward to learning more about it. Denise's session is very instructive, quite useful in language teaching. I like the techniques she offered, eg, the dictgloss and some games that I can use in my English class. I would like her to give us more techniques that we can use for intermediate learners. Next week, on Tuesday afternoon, we will have classroom observation, from which we can experience the different ways of teaching, which may inspire us to using more appropriate approach in our own classroom.

Getting Lost

We have been in Melbourne for a week. For these days we have been to some places, such as, China Town, Parliament, Ferderation Square, St Paul Cathedral, Melbourne Central Station, South Gate, Bar along the South Bank, Casino, Victoria Market, Puffing Billy and Yarra Valley Wineries. We travelled a lot within the last week. And we got lost for several times. On the first day to school, everything seems all right. The hostess told us to take the No 64 tram to school and to get off at Stop 8. We were quite alert that day and counted the numbers of the tram stops. After we got off at Stop 8, we asked a nice guy to show us the way, and he asked us to follow him, because he also was studying in REW. We acrosses the street, the Building 36 was there. We were quite lucky that day. however, the next day, I was quite neverous when we were about to reach REW, I loooked out of the window of the tram, and found the sign with number 8. We got off immediately. Then we were puzzled after crossing the street, for we couldn't find the building. We had to walked on and on for about minutes. At last Building 36 was on our left. We found we got off at Stop 11, three stops earlier. Another day, we decided to take the train instead of tram. On the first day after arriving at the homestay family, we went out to find out the tram station and the train station. It seems we were quite sure where the train station was. So after leaving the casino, we walked along the bank of Yarra River and walked across the bridge, we found the train station. So we took the train back home. After getting out of the train station at Gardenvale, we were confident that knew the way back home. But after several blocks we were wild because we found everything was new to us, the surroundings, the streets' names. We wanted to ask someone the way, but no one surrounded us. Then we walked down and up again and again, then we calmed down, and decided to walked on. Thank God, we found our house finally. Now we are familiar with the areas, we will not get lost again in these areas.