Rainy

Hey friends, family, teachers and classmates,

So as most people from the Netherlands realised we had some pretty bad weather here. Last week we had a cyclone/tropical storm that travelled all the way from Airlie Beach (about 900Km north of here) to northern New South Wales (about 300Km south of here). It started raining on Wednesday night here in Brizzy and didn’t really stop until… I think it was Friday early morning, the total damage was 250 mm of rain. In comparison it rains about 80-90 mm each month in the Netherlands so that was 3 MONTHS! worth of rain, now you might think “Oh my, you must have drowned!” but nah, not really actually since I live on top of a hill here on campus. Parts of the city have flooded slightly but nothing compared the the Gold Coast hinterland where some parts experienced 600!! mm of rain, that is 3/4th of the rain we get in the Netherlands in a whole year.
But enough about rain, by now it has cleared up here and it looks like it will stay like this for the next couple of weeks. It is still 26+ degrees during the day but the nights are finally cooling down to around 15-20 degrees which is very comfortable.

Now on to my classes, I started of with 5 seemingly interesting ones and am not left with 3 of the originally intended classes and 1 new one. Most people here only take 2-3 classes but the HAN requires me to do 4. I’ll list each class below with a short description of what I think of it and what it is about:

- 1001EHR Work and Employability
- Interesting course about management and different aspects of running a business, some of it is pure logical thinking but all in all an interesting course to follow.

- 1001GIR International Relations
- In this course we look at how states and nations work together and what you can do to influence this. Our major assessment for this is a simulation of the UN council on the Syrian refugee crisis. It’s a little bit of history, politics, psychology and IR in one which makes it diverse.

- 2001LHS Learning and Teaching a 2nd/Foreign Language
- For my teachers and fellow students this is most comparable to TEFL 5 but a bit more in depth. Back home I already really enjoyed this course because I find all the theories and styles very interesting. For all the other people that do not go to the HAN, this course is about all the teaching methodologies and how each one could be implemented or be disregarded these days.

- 2013GIR Political Leadership
- This course I enjoy the most, each week we have a guest lecture with some of the most knowledgeable people in their field to talk about a style of leadership, think of Autocratic (dictators), democratic, party, indigenous, etc. And we also talk and discuss about topics like leadership and gender which always results in a fun heated debate. I can’t really give one specific example why I like this course but all I can say is that it is extremely interesting and I attended these classes with much enthusiasm.

Now that is it for now, next week Saturday I am flying to Melbourne to travel the great ocean road and experience the ‘foodie’ city of Melbourne, really looking forward to that! :)