Days 99-108

I meant to post earlier, but for some reason I kept getting distracted.

Anyways, last week was my last week of classes at Sydney Uni. It was a little bittersweet realising that, actually. Classes are still going on this week, but my classes were all cancelled. I love being an Arts student sometimes! Next week is StuVac (which is short for study vacation, no classes, just cramming for finals. Which Australians do a lot of. They don't attend lectures, and then during StuVac they listen to the recordings of all of the lectures online and study all week). After a week of StuVac, it'll be 2 weeks of final exams (Nov 8-Nov 19th). I only have 1 sit down final (Nov 10th), 1 take home final (Nov 11th-18th) and 1 final report (Nov 19th). Then I'll fly home on Nov 20th. I don't really want to leave. Yes, I miss everyone from home, but its so much fun here still! I haven't gotten to the boring bit of living somewhere new yet. I'm trying not to think about it.

On to what I did last week.

Wednesday night I went to another St. Paul's Party. St. Paul's is another residential college on the Sydney Uni campus, right down the street from IH. They have a fully licensed bar on property and host parties every wednesday night. I went to one earlier in the semester. This past week, it was themed as a Full Moon Party. Full Moon parties are common in Thailand and occur every full moon. Basically, everyone gets covered in Fluoro (neon) paint, and there are blacklights everywhere and you drink out of buckets. It was the most fun I've had in a while. After the party, we went to the park across the street and played on the playground and then to get some kebabs down the street.

Thursday we went to one of the on campus bars for Oktoberfest, but by the time we got there, not many people were still there. The party was kind of dead, so we went home and hung out. Then we went to the park across the street again. The middle of the night is the only time you can go to the park and actually play on the swings and the flying fox (aka the zipline) without small children everywhere.

Friday was my internship, which went as usual. I did find out about an event that was taking place on Monday, which I volunteered for (I need more hours..). It was the launch of Register4, this online database of people who are willing to possibly participate in breast cancer research. Anyone over the age of 18 can register, even international people (you can fill out online questionnaires, etc to help with some research). If you want to sign up: http://www.register4.org.au. So on monday I volunteered for that, I was there from 9am-3pm. Handing out pamphlets about it to people walking down the street. They they had a catered buffet back at the office for lunch.  and I went back to my internship again on Tuesday.

One last note: I went to the shopping mall this morning, and its already decorated for Christmas!!

The Full Moon Party at St. Paul's
Left to right: Tanco, Rachel, Mikaela, Me

Days 91-98

A few exciting things happened this week.

Tuesday, I went to water polo practice with the Sydney Uni club team. We just did swimming drills, and ball handling skills for the most part. No scrimmaging, which was odd. Thats the highlight of practice in NOLA. It still felt good to be back in the pool with a water polo ball. The girls were all very nice, and at the end of practice, the coach offered me the chance to play with them in a game on Sunday and offered me a ride to the pool where the game would be held (at the University of New South Wales, about a 20 minute drive from Sydney Uni).

Friday, I went to my internship, as usual. I got there and come to find out, Friday was some huge fundraising day for the foundation. So, instead of doing my normal task of sitting at the computer and typing up the same document in various forms, I helped out the rest of the office by counting money that way coming in, and sorting/counting merchandise that wasn't sold. The after lunch, the office mania calmed down and I went back to my computer for my normal tasks. I much preferred the counting and sorting, to be honest.

Saturday was the IH Charity night. We had a "slave auction" in which people in the house offered up various talents ranging from music lessons to picnic spreads and baking to tennis lessons. People then bid on those offerings. There was also a raffle and an extreme pie eating contest, where people could bet on the contestants. Well, I participated in the eating contest. It was really intense, with 3 different rounds. The first round was an entire apple pie in two and a half minutes without using your hands. The second round was three pieces of thick bread: 1 w/ mayo on it, 1 w/ chili sauce on it, and the last w/ vegemite. The third round was a large piece of especially dense chocolate cake without using your hands. I didn't make it past the first round. I ate the all of the filling in the pie, but didn't know we were supposed to eat the outer crust as well. Oh well, I'm pretty glad I didn't make it on to the next rounds. My friend, Claire, actually took 3rd place, behind 2 guys. Anyways, at the end of the night, we raised over $5500 dollars towards a children's hospital project in Sierra Leone and the Pakistani Flood relief. It was a lot of fun as well!

Sunday, I went to the water polo game, and was a little nervous because I hadn't played a game since March, and I'd barely swam much since then either. I also didn't know any of the girls on the team I was playing with. We ended up losing, but it was nice to be back in the pool playing again. After the game, I waited while Megan (the coach) coached the next team (sydney uni has 5 levels of water polo teams, basically. L1 is the best and play at a national collegiate level and L5 in the most inexperienced/ social level. I played with the L4 team, still pretty social, but slightly more experienced than L5) and then she brought me home. I got home at 6pm. Changed super quickly, and then went to a different church than usual with a girl from IH. The service was pretty similar. After the service, I ran into a friend and ended up going to a restaurant with a bunch of people from the service and hanging out. I didn't make it home til around 11pm, but it was fun, and I didn't really have anything to do anyways. After I got back, I watched a movie with a friend. Then went to bed.

Pie eating contest. I'm all the way at the end of the table. The guy at the beginning of the table is the person who won. 

Days 85-90

Nothing too exciting happened during the week this past week. It was full of lazy days of watching all the tv shows that I missed while on break. I did go to my classes though! The only thing mildly interesting which happened this week was switching my flight home to November 20th. It was not an easy task, but it got done.

Friday night, IH had its annual ball. It was held at Sydney Center Point Tower in downtown. It's the highest point in the southern hemisphere, and it looks kind of like the space needle, except gold. It was so much fun, we all got dressed up, the theme was decadence. We had a nice fancy dinner of twice baked goat cheese souffle, steak and mashed potatoes and some dessert with pistachios which was really good. Unfortunately, by the time dessert came around, I was so full from the souffle, the steak and the endless wine being poured into my glass. The party ended at 10:30pm, when most people went to Ivy (the really fancy bar/club we went to that one time. the one with the pool) and the party continued. I got there with the last group though, and could barely find anyone and left with Alison and Adria when I found them. It was way too crowded in there!

Sunday, Adria and I went downtown to get our underwater pictures developed. We dropped it off at 11:30am, and were told that the pictures would be ready at 2:30pm. So Adria and I went wandering around town. Our main goal was to get souvenirs, which turned into sightseeing. We went to Hyde Park, saw St. Mary's Cathedral, then on our way to the Royal Botanical Gardens we stopped into the Art Gallery of New South Wales and poked around in there. Then we walked through the park to Government House. We signed up for a free guided tour through the house, but we had to wait about half an hour, so we just laid in the grass. When we finally got back to the photo place, at 3:30pm, the doors were closed. They close up shop at 3pm on Sundays, apparently. So, I'm going back tomorrow morning to actually pick up the pictures. 

At the ball

Addendum to the Spring Break Post

I can't believe I forgot to mention the humpback whales!

The whales migrate to Antarctica to give birth in the winter here, then in the Spring, they migrate back north with their babies. Well, right now, they are migrating north. When we were in Byron Bay, we got to see some. They were pretty far off in the distance, and you could only see their backs every now and then, or their blow holes. It was still really cool. Quite a few of them (we estimated about 7-10 whales) were in the area where we surfed. Right before we got in the water, our surf instructors spotted a few and pointed them out to us. Then on our walk to the lighthouse that afternoon, we stopped and saw more from a cliff top overlooking the same area. It was so cool!!

It was near impossible to actually get a picture of the whales breaking the surface, but they were in this general area, hanging out. So cool!

Days 71-84: Spring Break

I managed to finish all 3 of my essays by Wednesday morning, which was fantastic! All I need to do now is edit them and writ up my bibliographies and I can hand them in! I will say that getting those out of the way before break was one of the best ideas I have ever had. Some of my friends are stressing about the work they have to do now, and I don't really have any work to do!

This past week and a half, I was on spring break with a bunch of friends, mostly from IH. It would take far to long to go into detail what happened in those 11 days, but I'll break it down a bit.

• Flight to Cairns
• I wasn't asked to show ID once the entire way through security, nor did I have to take my shoes off
• about 3 hours, but it felt longer. 
• the seats didn't recline, so it was pretty uncomfortable
• Cairns
• arrived at dinner time and checked into the hostel
• room had 1 bed overbooked (they had 7 people booked into a 6 bed room), so they upgraded the four of us staying together into a 4 bed room, which costs more than the 6 bed room. So we ended up with a room to ourselves
• lounged out by the pool all day (they don't have a beach, only a lagoon which Adria and I learned that the lifeguards don't appreciate you walking around in)
• got our free "meal" from a nearby restaurant (the hostel provided vouchers for these free meals) which ended up being about 10 noodles and a teaspoon of sauce
• we ended up getting kanaroo burgers afterwards. They were quite good actually
• Jungle Tour/ Cape Tribulation
• Daintree Rainforest is the oldest in the world
• Day 1-walked through a gorge, went on a riverboat cruise to spot crocodiles, visited a bug museum, had lunch grilled for us (steak or fish), scenic drives, dropped off at our hostel in the afternoon, explored the beach across the street.
• Day 2- explored the beach again in the morning, picked up by our driver (who vaguely resembled steve irwin), more scenic driving, tropical fruit ice cream, lookout over the Daintree rainforest, short hike, saw a cassowary (the deadliest bird in the world), back to Cairns to hang out for a few hours before our bus
• Airlie Beach
• hung out around town all day and laid on the beach a bit. Very pretty city with very nice weather
• a few of us attempted to make pancakes for dinner, which turned out to be a disaster. Hostel cooking utensils aren't the best for making anything more involved than pasta, lesson learned. They were still edible though.
• celebrated Annelotte and Theresa's birthdays after dinner
• Whitsundays sailing/ snorkling
• my favorite part of the trip
• 3 hour cruise to get out to the pontoon on the great barrier reef
• we went on the submarine, went snorkeling for about 2.5 hours, ate lunch and rode the 3 hours back to Airlie Beach
• I bought a disposable underwater camera and took pictures, I really hope they turn out well, I have to go get them developed sometime this week
• Hervey Bay
• quaint little town with a nice beach
• Megan and Teresa went skydiving that afternoon, so a few of us went to their landing site on the beach to wait for them and take pictures
• Fraser Island
• the worlds largest sand island
• the last population of pure bred dingos in the world, unfortunately we didn't see any
• the weather started off really cloudy and cold, but cleared up and got warmer as the day progressed
• we walked through Central Station (part on the inner rainforest on the island), then got lunch, then drove down the beach to Eli Creek, The Maheno shipwreck, the colored sands, Lake McKenzie (which was gorgeous and i went swimming in it. the water was so clear and blue with white sands. Gorgeous!)
• Hervey Bay
• Had to wait at the bus station for 3 hours after the McDonalds next door closed at 10:30pm and we arrived at the bus stop at 8pm, for our 1:30am bus
• Byron Bay
• a very hippie surfer town
• it rained almost the whole time we were there
• Day 1- we did some shopping (though I only bought some postcards) in town. Went to a bar called Cheeky Monkeys for a little bit that night
• Day 2- surf lessons were so much fun! We all stood up on our boards quite a few times, it was great! After lunch, a few of us hiked over the beach and up to the lighthouse, passing the easterly most point in Australia on the way. After dinner, we planned on going back to Cheeky Monkeys, but got too tired and went to sleep instead.
• Day 3- it was still really rainy, so we changed our bus tickets and left at noon instead of 9pm.
• Sydney
• back into town at 1am

In general, it was the best vacation I have ever been on! I had so much fun, and we are all so much closer as a group, which is going to make leaving in November that much harder. 

This is almost all of us in front of the Maheno shipwreck on Fraser Island