ACU Melbourne : Study abroad university

Hey mates! Tudo bem?


I'm going to talk in this article about our university, ACU. The acronym stands for Australian Catholic University. It's located in Fitzroy, a walk-able distance from the CBD and about 30mn walk from my sharehouse.

Classes started on 21 of February, and we're currently in the week 8 out of 12. The welcoming offered by the uni was very good, with an interesting welcoming speech followed by a trip to the zoo with all international students. I met there a fair bit of French students, but also people from Singapore and Malaysia in nursing with who I talked a lot.

Please teach me how to be smart

To choose my 4 classes, I tried to pick some interesting subjects such as Business Economics and Human Resource Development, which are issues I appreciate and the classes are very intersting. However I had to pick Management and People + Reasoning and Communication in order to pack my classes on 3 days and find a job aside. And the problem with these classes is that they are first year classes, designed to teach you how to think "university-style", and not like a high-school student any more. Consequently these classes appear to me as too scholar and quite dull most of the time. Even if the teacher is funny, interesting, and fan of France & motors sports (lifelong dream : attend the 24h of the Mans or Monaco GP),  he's trying to force us to think in his "one right way" and it is not very pleasant.

The homework asked by teachers is different in its content from what we're doing in France. We have to write 5 essays, ranging from 1500 words to 3000, with a lot of references in them. Your thoughts should always be backed and supported by academic journal analysis, and this doesn't let a lot of place to critical thinking and innovative ideas, which are contained to the choice of your plan and your conclusion's opening. The workload is very similar, even with only 12 hours of classes, I have to study some day at the library from 9am to 6am on some presentations, essays, or similar B.S. Theses 12 hours are divided between 5 hours of tutorials (20 people classes) and 7 hours of lectures (~100 people classes).

Footy match with ACUMates

The campus is not very big, because it is so close to the centre of Melbourne. Accordingly, no accommodation is provided by the university, and you have only a small snack in the university itself. Anyhow, the association life is very diversified, between ACUMates, SIFE, MCSA, the International bureau, Wired Radio and many others. The equivalent of our BDE is MCSA, which stands for Melbourne Campus Student Associations. They organise nice events for international students, working as icebreakers and allowing us to meet each other discovering the city. We had a lawn bowl event (not the one I described in my last article), a Australian football match, some free pizza in the Italian precinct.

Ninja turtle

Also they organised a few parties in the Vault, which is the basement of the ACU, with some pool games, a bar and sofas to relax. Sadly, I didn't attend because of the schedule of these parties, starting at 7pm and finishing at 11pm : Come on guys, I'm eating my dinner at 9pm, how I am supposed to drink Jaggerbombs at that time. Australian way of life is very early (lunch 11am, dinner 6am, appetizer 8pm, hit the club at 10pm, sleep around 2am), and as hard as I am trying to adapt, it is definitely too indie for me.

Great experience overall. I am just a bit disappointed I couldn't take a Spanish class (they only teach Japanese and Italian) and I was worried my level would dramatically decrease during these 7 months. Thanksfully, I can speak it a bit at home with my roomies Marc and Alex (Spain & Peru), and I feel like I'm learning some new words aswell. La basura está en la cocina

See you soon !

Australian sports : Lawn bowls sneak peek

What's up?

Since I arrived in Australia 2 months and a half ago, I've had time to see and play different Australian sports, the 3 most famous being :

• Australian football, also called "footy"
• Cricket
• Lawn bowls

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I went Sunday 3rd of April with the university to see a footy match in the huge Melbourne Cricket Ground and it was really fun (Thanks free meat pie). We also watched a cricket training next to Albert Park few weeks ago.

Although I will focus in this article about lawn bowls.

Fitzroy Lawn Bowling club

I first heard about this sport while we were in the Grampians. It's very popular in Commonwealth nations, and we saw a part of a match on TV between New-Zealand and Australian top women teams. Few days later, Elodie and Marika, two of my flatmates, asked to Lauriane and I if we wanted to go play at Fitzroy Lawn Bowling club, in Brunswick Street, with English friends of them.

We went there and paid 15$ to participate in a small tournament. This is not a lot considered we had 2 beers and a very good barbecue included.

The rules of this game are similar to pétanque, the French game. However, the population playing the game is quite young compared to it. We competed against 3 other teams of 4, not a person older than thirty. 

Biased bowls

The game has 2 steps : First the winning team launch the "Jack", a small yellow ball, then every player in each team launch his 2 bowls when comes his turn, trying to get the closest possible to the Jack. When every player threw his bowls, the team with the closest gets one point, plus one point for every other bawl his team own which is the closest.

So what's the difference with pétanque you will ask :

• You play barefoot on lawn, and drink beer. Carlton Draught beer taste way better than Pastis anyway.
• Bowls are biased : one side is heavier than the other. Hence when you launch the bowl, the trajectory is a curve. It creates special strategies where you can try to get around other bowls and in consequence this sport involves less "fire", or "strike", which are draw where you try to kick other bowls.

Lauriane, Marika, Benjamin

We won the first round, but then got our ass kicked in the final 18 to 3 by some regulars who won 5$ as first prize. It was a lot of fun and a very good experience, although with the winter coming we would better take a jacket next time we want to play at sunset.