Today I attended the second POL165 lecture, which was excellent, and the first ABST100 lecture, which wasn’t quite what I thought it would be: I thought it would be actually more meeting Aborigines and learning about the digeridoo (did I spell that right?), and stuff like that, and instead it seems to focus more on tolerance-related issues. We did see one cool movie in it, though: Babakueiria (sp?), which basically imagines what would have happened if it had been the Aborigines that had colonized an indigenously white Australia. (The movie’s title comes because the aborigines got off the boat, at a barbecue area and asked the Australians what the name of the place was, and one of them said “Barbecue area.”)
Anyway, I decided to drop ABST100 in favor of POL167 (the equivalent of an Intro to Politics course), which will count for one of my IA major requirements. I hope I’m making the right choice — besides meaning that I probably won’t learn as much academically about Australia, it also makes it a lot more difficult for me to go on weekend excursions with my study abroad group. Luckily, all of the lectures are recorded, so if I have to miss one or two I will, though I would prefer not too. I made the hard decision to skip a surf trip that my study abroad group is going on in some beautiful remote area of Australia between Sydney and Brisbane (Point Plomer) this weekend in favor of going to the first lecture. Anyway, I’m feeling kind of upset about that, and that I’m going to have to make those choices on a regular basis.