Sydney & Phillip Island

Sydney was really good! I got to the hostel around 11:30, put my stuff down & wandered around the city a little bit. Found a place to eat & then went back and took a nap until Gozi (my friend who is studying in Brisbane) got there at 4. Then we went & wandered around some more, had dinner, met a German guy who was sharing the room with us in the hostel and one of his friends who is Irish, and we hung out with them a little bit. Friday morning we got up early & walked around Sydney doing the touristy things. Saw some of the Darling Harbour, walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, saw the Sydney Opera House, which was SO cool to see. I was so excited to see it, which was surprising. We took a tour of the Opera House, which was beautiful inside. And then since we’re students & took the tour we got a HUGE discount on Sydney Symphony tickets and got to see the symphony in the Opera House later on that night, which was REALLY cool!!! I’d never seen a symphony before, and this one was doing “Crime Time” which was scores from movies like The 6th Sense, & The Matrix. The tour was really interesting. I didn’t realize the Opera House is so new. It was started in 1963 and wasn’t finished until the ‘70s, which I found shocking… for some reason it was placed in my mind in the category of things like the Eiffel tower & Big Ben, which is silly really because Australia was only found by the British in the late 1700s. But still, I guess I thought the Opera House had been around for at least a hundred years or so. We also saw some museums and stuff on Friday. Saturday was the tour of the Blue Mountains. We got to see the Three Sisters rock formation and other really cool nature stuff. I’ll put some pictures up. Sunday Gozi left after breakfast and I walked around the Darling Harbour. Went to Paddy’s Market- a huge flea market where I got a backpacker’s backpack for only $20. Also went to the Chinese Garden of Friendship which was beautiful.

This past weekend 2 of my friends and I went home with an Australian friend to stay with his family for the weekend. We were supposed to camp but the weather wasn’t nice so we just hung out and went to his friend’s house. It was so nice being in a home, and his family was so friendly and welcoming. We also went to Phillip Island which has amazing views and we watched the Penguin Parade, which is when the penguins come in out of the sea and find their little nests in the hill for the night. They’re so cute!!! They’re Little Penguins, so they’re not like the ones we normally think of, and they come in to the shore in little groups and get scared and swim back and forth until there’s enough of them to run out into the grass. It was a really good weekend.

This Thursday I leave for my One Fish Two Fish trip. 9 days of crazy rafting, bungee jumping, snorkeling/scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef, up from Brisbane to Cairns. Can’t wait to be in the sun!!!

I’m thinking about changing my flight coming home from November 16th to sometime mid December. If I do I’ll be able to go to New Zealand for 2 weeks and then some other stuff that I wouldn’t have time to do otherwise. I have to figure out the flight change prices & some little things though. We’ll see!

Quick Update

Quick update during my break in class!

I'm going to Sydney tomorrow morning. So exciting! I'm meeting a friend there who's studying in Brisbane, so I'm flying alone, and I booked everything myself and have to catch shuttles and stuff to get to & from the airport, so I'm kind of nervous. We don't really know what we'll do when we get there. The hostel is booked, but other than that we have no plans. Definitely going on the Sydney Opera House tour & maybe a tour of the Blue Mountains. Should be good pictures!

I figured out that I have at least 13 more flights, including the ones I take to get home. That's a lot of airport time!! I never in my life thought I'd be on planes so much. Good thing I'm not afraid of flying!

Last weekend I went to a Latin Fiesta fundraiser. It was so much fun... there were Capoeira & Samba shows and we spent the whole night dancing. Last week I also went to St Kilda, which is a suburb of Melbourne I guess and it has a beach and fun sights to see. Tonight is the Deakin Ball (my residence hall). Should be a lot of fun!!

Pancakes, Star Wars & Surfing

It’s been a long time!!! I’ve been so busy, but now that I think back, I’m not sure why. So much has been going on, but nothing extremely exciting. Art projects & papers that I should be spending more time doing, but instead I watch Star Wars & make pancakes. Ingredients are different here, so sometimes we get really flat or egg-y pancakes… it’s an adventure every time. The regular sized eggs are so small! And the jumbo ones are the size of our regular eggs and they’re brownish-red. The milk here tastes different in a not good way. Especially the skim milk. The mayo isn’t as thick, and is kind of sweet… and the only place you can find real ketchup is in McDonalds. I’m not really meaning to complain, just naming differences I never would have thought of.

Something else that shocked me was the fact that NOT everyone has seen Star Wars. No one understands why all the Americans love Star Wars, apparently it’s a geek thing everywhere else. And Macaroni & Cheese!!! I made it for dinner one night (from scratch in the oven, not box kind) and the girls I made it for had NEVER had Mac & Cheese! I was amazed!!! So then I felt very stereotypically American not being able to imagine people not having seen Star Wars & eaten Mac & Cheese.

I went surfing this past weekend in Torquey. It’s a famous surf town on the Great Ocean Road. It was fun. There were 17 of us who went & stayed in a hostel. We were the only ones in the whole hostel, so we got to be as loud as we wanted. We surfed in the rainy coldness, but it was really nice to be at & in the ocean. We had full wet suits & boots, so the only things that got cold were our hands, but after they went numb it wasn’t too bad. J I’ll put some pictures on here from it. It took 2.5 hours to get there, but it was worth it! I think I need to do some push-ups before I can get any better at surfing, because my arms were so tired from paddling & pushing myself up!