Days 62-70

Wow, this past week has been quite the whirlwind!

Monday started my scholarly attempt at writing 3 essays in 10 days (research and all). One essay on assimilation in Australia in the 1950s, one essay on soldier resettlement scheme in Australia post-WWI, and one about Imperialistic aspects of America's westward expansion. So far, I've finished the first two, and now I'm taking a break from researching and outlining the third. I plan on writing the third essay and being done with it by Wednesday. Three days to write a 2500 word research paper, if someone told me to do that in high school, I would have thought they were crazy! Now, I'm imposing it on myself (the last two papers mentioned aren't due until Oct 8th and 9th, but I'll be gone on Mid-Semester Break the week before, so I'm getting them out of the way before I leave). So I've been spending a lot of time researching and writing those darn papers, but I've still managed to have a social life as well!

Thursday night I went to see Cadavatar, the Med school review (All of the schools here- engineering, arts, med, law, architecture, etc etc- put on reviews making fun of things in the school and things in general) with a few friends. It was hilarious! Granted, some of it was lost on me, not being a med student and all, but I still found it quite funny. They did a great job putting it on.

Friday night, my friend at IH, Soo-Jae, hosted a party in the building. There were a lot of people there, and it ended up segregating to the people who didn't live in IH inside and the people who do live here were outside on the patio. It was still a lot of fun though.

Saturday, I didn't get any work done on my papers. Instead, I slept in (after the party the night before) and then went to the park with Claire and Adria after lunch for a little bit because it was a really nice day out. After dinner, we had one last practice before iNight. Then, iNight started at 7:30pm and we were the first act!   We performed the Napolean Dynamite dance while wearing full spandex body suits. There are tons of pictures up on facebook now, as well as a video of our performance. After all of the acts went, iNight wrapped up around 11:30pm. The after-party started at midnight and went til about 3:15am. Then there was an after-after-party, which I did not attend, but apparently that went til about 5am. The party was a lot of fun. Most of the people from my act just stayed in the spandex body suits all night.

Sunday was another lazy day of sleeping in, and then getting work done before and after church.

Today was a day full of library research. I have checked out way more books from the library here than I ever have at Tulane. Probably because I have never checked out a book from Tulane's library. I haven't taken enough history classes at Tulane to need to check out books. You can't really go do research on organic chemistry at the library....

Figure out which one is me!!

Days 55-61

This past week, I've been good and studious, in that I turned down party offers to stay in and study. That doesn't mean that I was holed up all week reading for classes, though.

Wednesday night, a few of us got together and did some yoga together in the house with a video Megan downloaded from online. That was good, a nice study break. We managed to get IHMA (the members assoc of IH) to buy us a yoga instructional dvd to use. It came in, but not until Thursday, so we'll use that next time. After yoga, I stayed in and read for classes while other people went out to a bar.

Thursday night a group of 9 girls (including me!) went to see and aboriginal dance performance at the Opera House. It was really cool, but completely unexpected! They mixed traditional aboriginal dance with modern and hip hop dance. It was also theatrical, though they didn't speak english throughout, so you had to follow the storyline by listening to their tone of voice, watching their expressions and movements, and listening to the music. There were undercurrents of racial prejudice and white dominance in it as well. It was called "Wrong Skin" if you want to look it up on the opera house website. After we got back, we met up with other people in the coffee room at the house and a bunch of the rest of the group went out to a club later.

Friday, I went to my internship again. It wasn't too bad. Friday night, I did some reading, then joined a bunch of people who were partying in the coffee room of the House. It turned into an impromptu dance party for a small group of us, which was a ton of fun!

Saturday, a group of us took the ferry ride to Manly Beach after lunch. I was so happy for it to be decently warm again and to smell the salty air and stick my feet in the ocean. It was great. Then the group split up, some people went to OceanWorld, which was apparently pretty small and ghetto. Dora went shopping and Megan and I got gelato, walked around the town and hung out some more by the beach. We made it back to the House just in time for dinner. After dinner, Megan, Claire and I took the train to one of Megan's architecture friend's apartment. He invited us over to watch a rugby game on tv. It was New Zealand vs. Australia. It was a good game, but I didn't end up paying attention much. Most of the time, a bunch of us just talked (the friend had 4 other friends there as well), mostly about the differences in american and australian cultures. After the game (new zealand won 23-22. apparently that was expected), we walked down to this lookout down the road from his apartment. We could all of downtown from the other side of the harbour than we're used to.

Today, is study day. We also have to practice our dance for iNight this saturday. I'll tell you more about that next week. After practicing, it'll be dinner time, then church time, then more reading.

The group (minus Claire) at Manly Beach

Days 50-54

This weekend was fantastic! Friday night we went out clubbing at this place called Home Bar (the same place we went for my birthday) in Darling Harbour. It was a lot of fun. I really liked it, partially because I think the DJ was American. He didn't play much house music at all and played a bunch of songs about states ("Empire state of mind", "califorina girls", "california love", etc). It was kinda funny, because some of the europeans of the group weren't quite sure how to dance to music that wasn't house music (that's all they usually play in the clubs here and apparently in Europe. maybe a normal song here and there, but mostly house).

Saturday, a few of us woke up early (8am, pretty early after clubbing the night before!) and got breakfast before getting in a 12 passenger van and driving for 2 hours to the Blue Mountains. We got there and immediately went to Echo Point, this overlook spot where you can see the whole valley, it was really pretty, but the weather wasn't great. It was really overcast and drizzly. Then we got some lunch and drove another hour or so to get to Jenolan Caves. The road to get there was so twisty, and parts of the road near the end was only big enough for 1 car to get through, but it was still 2 way traffic. It got a little scary sometimes. We did the Lucas Cave tour which was about an hour and a half and consisted of about 1000 stairs. It was really cool though. After the tour was finished, we drove back to our hostel in Katoomba. We checked in and got our keys and chilled for an hour or so. Then we walked to a pub for dinner, except the pub was completely dead. There were 3 old people eating in there before we got there. Then all of a sudden, a group of 16 showed up and the bar tender/ owner person didn't know what to do with himself. The food was pretty good, and we hung out for a while. Slowly, we all left and went back to the hostel. We ended up watching Toy Story 2 in the tv room, and I forgot how great that move is! Afterwards, we just took over the tv room hanging out and goofing off. Then sleep, finally.

Sunday, we had to check out of the hostel by 10am, so we woke up just before 9 to get a shower. After we checked out, we went to a nearby grocery store to buy stuff for breakfast and went back to the hostel to eat it. then when we went to leave for Scenic World, the van's battery was dead, so we had to wait in the hostel again while waiting for a mechanic. Then Chris, who drove his own car to the blue mountains, realized that he could just shuttle people to scenic world (it was only about 4 minutes away) while waiting for the van to get a jump start. I was in the first group to head over there, along with Desiree, Claire and Megan. We got there, decided what we were going to do, which was take the railway down (the steepest in the world! parts of it are a 52 degree incline) the valley, then walk around a bit down there, then take the stairs back up. Luke, the guy who organized the trip, told us that he would call us when the van was ready at scenic world and when to meet back up. Well, non of us realized that we weren't going to have any cell phone reception in the middle of a rainforest. In short, none of us got the text message saying to meet back up at the van at 1pm. We took the stairs (all 1200 of them!) back up, it was really exhausting. Quite the workout! We got to the top and we were all sweating, despite the fact that we all has sweaters and coats on before the climb and proceeded to take hem off layer by layer during the climb. The views were well worth it! Well we got back to the top at 1:45pm. Then all of the text messages and missed calls came flooding into our phones. Everyone else had been waiting for us in the van for almost an hour. Needless to say, we felt really bad, but they didn't hate us, so it's ok. Everyone else took the railway down and the cable car back up, so they took a lot less time then we did. When we finally got back, we left right away and I proceeded to fall asleep within half an hour of driving, and I slept the entire way home. All in all, it was a really fun weekend, and quite the bonding experience with everyone who went!

All of the girls that went to the Blue Mountains