School, Food and Bugs...

Hello everybody!

Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while, I intend to make up for it right now!

Soooo, I have settled in to Akron Uni well, I have a nice little office that I share with some other 'Grad-students' who are pretty cool. I have taken my first few classes, one of which is 'The Ethics of Science' that I'm particularly enjoying, although the content is being delivered with some skepticism toward contemporary ideas in evolutionary biology, but makes for some interesting conversations.

The campus is HUUUUGE and very pretty, the uni services are excellent and everyone is very polite and helpful.

I have also delivered my first classes which are three hour labs in Principles of Biology, Last week I taught Introduction to Statistics, which is laughable as I try to wing stats whenever they crop up. I seem to have done a decent job as the written work I'm marking isn't complete B.S. so the students must have grasped what I was blundering to get across. The classes I'm teaching have some great students, some are little s**ts and others are keen to learn so I have the full spectrum, the education system here is pretty different. Instead of signing up to a degree program where all the modules (classes) are already in place and everybody learns the same stuff, here you can (as a student) pick and choose relevant classes to make up your credit-hours. This means that in the classes I teach there are 'freshman' (around 17-18 years old), juniors and seniors who can be any age really.

So, onto the real reason we are here. Food.

Yes, everything is fried. We went to swensons .....

Where as a vegan, Becky could order all her favorite vegetables. deep fried. (This is also were I saw a praying mantis, although he was not fried)

When we went to 'Frank's Place' down the road from us:


I had the almighty Jalapeño Poppers which are jalapeños, filled with cream cheese, covered in breadcrumbs and.....fried

I should also point out that we have been eating healthy too, and proclaim that I believe Mexican food may be the new curry. Becky has been cooking awesome chilies, burritos, enchiladas and more, and when we can't be bothered to cook it, there is a Mexican fast food place round the corner called chipotle (Chi-POT-lay) that will give you a monster bean, rice, salsa and rockamole filled sack 'o' joy (burrito) for a few bucks. Awesome.

This could go on forever, and turn into a culinary blog, so I will leave you with one last ground-breaking discovery...


So, onto things you shouldn’t want to eat, some wildlife! Yeah! Here is a picture of a lovely groundhog, I saw one of these when we first got here:


Cute huh? They waddle around looking a bit like badgers, without the Kiss make up.

I also mentioned I saw one of these bad-boys, quite a scary surprise...

He was a big bugger about 4-5 inches long, evil looking spud aint he? Look at those raptorial chelae, now that’s what I call a modified appendage.

We also have lots of these plastic-toy-looking critters about...

... Cicadas, make loads of noise ALL DAY and are very crunchy when you accidently step on one. Yummy.

Well, that’s enough crazy wildlife for now, I'm sure I've lost half of you to Big Brother at some point during you reading this blog. Your loss.

Anywhoo, we’re off to have a BBQ in the park with some chums as its approaching tea time and it's still about 30c outside so HA HA! We earnt it, we finished all our laundry in record time and Becky has eaten nothing but ice poles and tortilla chips today.

T

x