Class begins

Another week has gone by and lectures have begun. This week I attended the much anticipated lectures in philosophy and politics; they all seem fun and interesting, in their own way. Monday, I had my first ever film screening of my entire philosophy degree. Each week we view a film, this week it happened to be 'The Matrix’. We then have a lecture and a tutorial each week, where we critically analyse the film from a philosophical slant.

I have also enrolled on my first ever politics course, called ‘Money, Power and War’. Interesting title, very attractive! However, when I share with you a small detail concerning opinions of the lecturer one’s expectations may swiftly change. Rick Kuhn, my lecturer for this module, is a self-stated "revolutionary socialist/marxist”, causing him to be tremendously bias in all aspects of our investigations of these fundamental political elements. It’s interesting, having such an opinionated lecturer, for he admits his biases and even (implicitly) condones playing to his subjectivity in the course. I’m currently reading 'Zombie Capitalism’ (it’s exactly what one might expect from the title) for my first ever book review - looking forward to writing it!

What is also very interesting, is the difference between course syllabi in Nottingham and the ANU. At Notts everything felt very much analytical and toward the logical side of study; however, at ANU things seem more arty and there is a lot more literature to focus on, especially French post-modern writers, such as Sartre and Derrida just to name a couple.

Today I woke up early along with Jeffrey or just “Jeff" as we all call him, he’s a committed future olympic athlete in the field of archery; Lina, who is one of the four columbians at ANU (that we know of anyway); and Trisha, a Singaporean whom we all like to have around to keep us laughing. We woke to go on a one-hour trip to Tuggeranong to see some kangaroos/wallabies and shoot some arrows at the archery range Jeff always goes to. We all loved it and are considering making it a weekly or at least fortnightly activity. We ran back to make the AFL game against Burgman (another college/hall); we started well and finished pretty good too, but somewhere in the middle we lost our drive and Burgman made up a significant lead. It was a quick week, next weekend a group of ten of us will be going to Sydney - it should be fantastic!