Weekend

This last week has been crazy - I pulled some long hours during the week because I forgot (temporarily) how to write lectures. By the time I remembered, the week was half over and I was exhausted.
On Friday I spent the day with a series of Australians and others seeing the Apartheid Museum in Gold Reef City and the Hector Pietersen Museum in Soweto. We also went to a shabeen in Soweto for lunch. I had a great time, and the people (from TEAM Monash and the Edmund Rice Centre in Freo and a couple of others) were fantastic. Plus we had a local guide. It was thoroughly exhausting, though. The emotional drain was incredible. It's so close to the present that it seems different to say the history of the Holocaust. Anyway, I had the car this week due to the kind offices of Amanda. So I decided (in a fit of hospitality) that I should take out the Edmund Rice people, since it was their last night in Jo'burg. And here the fun begins. Long story short, I got lost and managed eventually to find my way through the CBD on my own and got there after a very, very long drive. At least I now have a much better sense of where things are and how to get around.
Then on Saturday we had Open Day. Which was very, very quiet, most unlike Caulfield last year. It was a fun day - we have a new caterer, and so we had a choice for lunch other than pap (African staple, made of maize, looks like mashed potato gone hard) and pork cutlets. There were salads! Real salads! And it was great hanging out with my colleagues. I went out to the movies that night and saw 'Caramel', a Lebanese-French film at Rosebank, at the art house cinema which was in a shopping centre (of course). It was a great film and we had great (although very odd) fusion-ish Thai at an uber cliched Thai restaurant called Cranks. If you can imagine a series of Barbie dolls in various compromising positions hanging from the ceilings and a series of large bad-sci-fi movie insects hanging from the ceiling on the verandah, then you have some idea of how the place looked at least. We had fun though, and only got lost four or five times. I can't wait til I get a GPS. And I never thought I would ever hear myself say that!
Yesterday I walked 5km in the annual 'Walk the Talk' fun-run/walkathon. It was great fun, although exhausting, and the I got sun burnt. Eish. I went out to a colleague's for dinner, which was lovely, and cooked with them - so exciting!
I'm getting a cold at the moment as well - sigh. So sun-burnt, exhausted and sick - that's me. And I have all the readings to do for my lecture and my honours kids... Still, I had a great weekend, despite the hecticness. And I discovered the area I want to live in - Westdene - it's right near Melville (an area that has bits that feel and look like Melbourne, specifically the cool end of Chapel, or maybe even a bit Greville st-ish) and is not a huge distance from work. Plus I have a number of excellent colleagues who live nearby.
Right, back to work... (and refreshing facebook until it loads properly!)