Sore feet and too much drawing

Sunrise at the training oval- around 7.30am

This has been such a busy week! We tend to have a rest day on Sunday, which is the weirdest thing, given our devotion to the Church of the Long Sunday Run at home, but it's very nice after a race. On Monday, both my Drawing and Design teachers decided to hand us a project with a tonne of work to be done before Wednesday. Thanks for that, guys. Classes go on so late it's difficult to get any work done afterwards, especially when we spend a long time in the dinner queue, so while getting through homework generally isn't that difficult, trying to fit in a lot in the space of one morning is a bit stressful.

Some sketchbook homework- drawing Greta's laundry

And stressful as well that my shins hurt. It was really quite bad on Tuesday, so I ended up not doing the session and just running around on the grass. They were a bit sore when we started today, but I did not get out of bed at 5.30 to stand around getting starving for two hours, so I ran. I did well actually. We had a tough session this morning; 4x 1600m. Our first one was supposed to be slower, and then Coach set me a target time of 5.30 for the last three. How mean is that? The boys were doing 2000s, because they're really wussy. We pointed out to them that they were only doing 75% of their race distance, while we were doing 130%, and therefore we were tougher. Max got pretty hissy about that, but he should just accept that we are the real men on the team.

It's Thursday! Hurray! Tomorrow we don't have to wake up! We wanted to go up to a waterfall place in north Georgia this weekend, but there is a 'gas' pipeline problem at the moment, so the price of fuel has gone crazy over the last few days. Gas station? Why do they call it gas? Surely they run their cars on petrol, or diesel, not 'gas'?

Look! It rained, and then it got misty on the big buildings

Classes here are quite strange. I wonder if maybe they're just trying to get us to think 'outside the box', but in Design we have to draw music- translate the sounds to shapes in a certain format on the page. and then make it adhere to principles of design. My English teacher keeps telling us to write however we want, which is understandable because apparently the way essay writing is taught in high schools here is ridiculously formulaic, but it does feel like her insistence on overt expressiveness is nearly as repressive. Drawing class I like, although he is vexing me currently insisting I crop bits of my project composition. Mate, I arranged it that way. I don't want to chop bits off it now.

This is what music looks like, honest

Some more homework

For Design one of our pieces of work involves collecting our ten favourite artworks and writing about them. Greta thinks I'm fantastic because she can describe a painting she's seen, and I can usually give her the name or the artist so she can find pictures of it. This was my problem with History of Art last year; so much of what is seen as good art in popular art galleries is Italian Renaissance stuff, meaning that most people are visually familiar with 'good' or famous works just because it's such a relatively small collection. Frankly the one she was after yesterday, Raphael's Sistine Madonna, I think is damned boring, but nearly everyone knows the putti sulking at the bottom of the frame.

These lads

The people here are such a mad mix. There's at least one boy in makeup and heels I've seen so far. Most of them seem a decent bunch, if a bit too loud (read 'VERY loud'). I keep seeing people wearing t-shirts with big American Eagles saying things like "World War back-to-back champions", which seems a bit much. But then they do seem very respectful and conscious of the military here, much more so than at home. Cultural differences? Like shaking hands; apparently that's a normal way of saying hello, but I doubt I ever would at home except maybe in a professional or very formal context.