Low key week

Nothing too exciting has happened here this week. I've just been trying to get a lot of school work done. For my ecology class we have to design our own observational experiment with a group. Our experiment sounds cool--we're looking at species richness in low tidal zones verses high tidal zones--but it's turning out to be a pain. I guess that's how group projects go...even in Australia you end up pulling other people's weight. It was cool looking in rock pools around here though! We saw a bunch of starfish, urchins, and anemones! There were lots of dogs running around on the beach we were at, and it made me miss my little pupster. I wish Maddy could splash around in the ocean, can you imagine how much she'd love it!?

For my climatology class we had a mandatory field trip around the Illawarra region on Saturday. I almost missed the bus though because I forgot to turn on my alarm! Miraculously I woke up at 7:30am for no reason, and made it to Uni in time for the 8am departure. We drove to 7 different sites around the region, learning about geography and geology. Some of it was interesting, but it was kind of like sitting through an 8 hour lecture. The sites were beautiful (forgot to bring my camera--sorry!) and I saw some awesome beach houses that I decided I need to live in someday. Since I woke up late, I didn't have time to pack a lunch or eat breakfast, so by the time the field trip finished at 4 (and dinner didn't start until 5:30), I was so starving that I raided the package my Mom and Dad sent me full of Easter goodies. I was hoping I would have enough self control to make those Reese's bunnies last longer, but oh well!!!! They sure tasted amazing!

That's all I can think of for now! I leave for Tasmania on Thursday, we're hoping to do some hiking and maybe even go fishing! It should be fun!

love.love.love.

Photos

Surfing at Crescent Head!!

Surfer girls from our orientation group.

Isolated beach where we surfed.

Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.

This is where I go to school!

Pathway through Uni.

Little pond on campus.

More school.

Wollongong at sunrise. Mt Kiera is in the background.

Lighthouse sunrise.

Good morning world!

Wollongong harbor at sunrise.

Total concentration!

They call me Kelly Slater.
(haha this photo is actually me mid-wipeout...oh well)

Surfing!!

I'm not sure if this is real life.  Another amazing week has passed, and I have to keep pinching myself to make sure I'm not dreaming!!! So here we go with the weekly update:

-Weet-bix. This isn't so much of a highlight, but more of a new favorite food I've found.  Weet-bix are these cereal bars that kind of look like dog food, but when you put milk on them, they absorb the milk completely and take on a mushy/oatmeal consistency.  Add a little honey and peanut butter (you don't know how much crap we Americans get for loving peanut butter) and it's a delicious and nutritious start to my day!

-Mom & Dad are coming!! My parents booked their flights to come see me at the end of my session.  I'm so excited for them to come see where I'm living and introduce them to Australian culture!  You guys will LOVE it!!

-Soccer.  Lunchtime sports started this week, and I put together a soccer team for it.  Lunchtime sports are kind of like intramurals...but not as cool.  Our game was only 25 minutes, and we play 5 on a side (but had 2 subs too) so it went super fast.  It'll be fun to play each week though!  We have a pretty diverse team with people from the U.S., France, and Italy.  Our team name is the "Gophers." :)  This team doesn't compare at all to our U of MN intramural team.  I miss playing with you all so much!!!! 

-Sunrise.  My friend Allie and I woke up at 6:30 AM to go for a sunrise run.  We ran to the lighthouse just in time to see the sun rising above the ocean.  It was so beautiful!!  I'll post some photos of it soon!  We're going to make it a weekly routine.

-Surf camp!!  This was by far the best part of my week.  Several of us from our orientation group in Cairns signed up for a weekend surf camp and the date finally came!  We left from Sydney Friday afternoon and had a looong 6 hour bus ride to Crescent Head where the camp was.  We got there late Friday night, but the next day we realized the long drive was well worth it!  On Saturday we woke up early at 8, ate brekkie (Australian for breakfast), walked down to our own private surf beach (so beautiful!!!), got our surfboards, had a little lesson, then hit the waves!  I was standing up in no time!  The most amazing part--we saw about 12 dolphins 50 meters away while we were surfing!!!  I was a little freaked out at first because I thought they were sharks.  Seeing them so close in the water was surreal.  After our morning session, we ate lunch (the food was amazing), then went back for more.  The waves were a little bigger in the afternoon and we were getting pounded by them.  I now understand why surfers have such hot bods...surfing is exhausting!  This morning we woke up early again, hit the surf for a while, then got back on the bus to Sydney.  I definitely hope that I can keep trying to surf while I'm here!

This week and next week I've decided that I need to work really hard on my school work.  With my Tasmania and New Zealand trips coming up, I want to make sure I stay on top of things so I don't have as much to worry about when I'm there.  I'm sure I'll be able to fit exciting adventures in there somewhere though, so have no fear--more updates will come soon, and I'll post pictures within the next couple days!!

Much love to all! Miss you so much!

xoxoxoxooxoxoxoxooxox 

Photos

Our Royal National Park hiking group!  RNP is the 2nd oldest national park in the world-after Yellowstone!

Swimming in the beautiful rock pools in RNP.

At the end of our exhausting hike in the rain. We made it!!!!

 

Welcome to the Australian wilderness.  

At the top of a waterfall in RNP.

Cool trees!

Feeding the kangaroos at Symbio Wildlife Park!

I fell in love with this little guy.  Sorry Mom and Dad, don't think I'm coming home.

View of Wollongong from the top of Mt. Kiera.  So worth the hike/near death experience. ;)

  There were hundreds of these Blue Bottle Jellyfish washed up on the beach one day, and then the next there were none.  Pretty cool.

Time is flying!!!

I can't believe it has been another week already! I wish time would slow down!! Here are the recent highlights:

-Vegemite! I decided last week that I was going to force myself to eat a piece of Vegemite toast every day so that I could like it by the time I leave.  After a few days, I have found that I actually enjoy my Vegemite toast, and have even had cravings for it.  I guess it is an acquired taste!  For those of you who don't know what Vegemite is, here's a link to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/vegemite

-Mt. Kiera.  I need to start training for my New Zealand hike, so I asked around to see if anyone would hike Mt. Kiera with me.  Mt. Kiera is right up the hill from Uni, and takes a good 2 hours to hike to the top.  My Australian friend Scott said he'd go, so on Thursday afternoon we ventured out.  During our hike I was drilling him with questions about poisonous snakes and spiders, being what I thought was a paranoid foreigner.  He rattled off names of a few critters but assured me that I would not be lucky enough to see any of them during my short time in Australia.  Fifteen minutes after this conversation however, I was leading the way up some stairs, and all of a sudden a long brown snake, about the width of my arm, quickly slithered away.  Scott told me that it had been a King Brown--the 2nd most poisonous snake in the world.  I WAS FREAKING OUT!  After that I refused to go back down the mountain the way we came up, and we didn't have any more close encounters.  I feel lucky to have seen one, and also to not have gotten bit!  I doubt I'll be training there for my hike anymore though.  The rest of the hike was beautiful.  Neon green moss was growing the the boulders around the trail, colorful wildflowers lined the pathway in spots, and the view of Wollongong from the top was breathtaking.  

-Dinner club.  A few friends and I have decided that each week we're going to eat out at a new local restaurant.  This week we went to a really good Vietnamese place called Mylan.  It was such a nice change from our dinning hall food!  Afterwards we got ice cream and ate it while walking down the coast. I still can't believe that I'm living in a beach town! 

-Royal National Park.  Yesterday was probably one of my favorite days here in Australia so far! Me and seven other friends caught a train early in the morning to Symbio Wildlife Park where we got to feed kangaroos, pet a baby koala, and see other cool animals.  It was on a list of 50 things to do here in the Illawara region, which we're going to try to get through before we leave!  After the park, we rode the train up the coast some more to the Royal National Park and set off on a 7 mile hike through the Australian wilderness.  I was still very paranoid about running into some more snakes, but luckily that didn't happen.  The terrain we hiked through was really variable.  Sometimes we were walking down a dirt road, other times we were hiking through tall grass, and we also had to climb up and down boulders.  We saw a waterfall and went for a swim in crystal clear rock pools.  After our swim the sky got pretty dark and it started down pouring.  We were concerned about making it back in time to catch the 5:30 train because it was the only one leaving the station that day, so we ended up running up these muddy, rocky hills in the rain, just praying we'd make the train.  We made it though, and we were really proud of ourselves!  It felt like we were training for the Army.  

-Tasmania! I booked my flight to Tasmania today with a friend of mine.  We're going to go explore the island for a weekend and I can't wait.  It's supposed to be a beautiful place!  They also have the Cadbury chocolate factory there, so maybe we'll be able to snag a few free samples! :)

That's all for now! I'm going to learn how to surf next weekend, so I'll hopefully have more exciting things to say about that next time!  I hope the weather keeps warming up over there in the good ol' midwest! 

love.love.love. 

Photos

This place is a 7 minute walk from my bedroom....heavenly.

Getting up close and personal with Sydney's famous landmark.

Opera House and some of the Harbor Bridge

Nicole, me, Katie, and Alli at the Opera House!!!!

Another photo of the beach by our dorm.

The common space in our room. Photos of my bedroom coming soon!

Delicious Maxibon bar!

North Wollongong Beach, along the path where I run :)

Back to School in March?

After having a two and a half month break from school, it felt good to be wandering around a campus again.  This was our first week of school, which seems weird since it's March!  Classes went well. It was just the boring first day of school stuff so far though.  I was surprised to have a teacher without an Australian accent for my Ecology class, and found out that he is from Canada!  We get to go on a field trip to the Sydney Zoo for that class, which will be awesome!  My landscape change/climatology class has a field trip later in the session too!  The Wollongong campus is so much smaller than the U of MN's campus, so it was easy for me to navigate through the tropical forests and streams that weave in between our lecture buildings.  I'm also starting to recognize more familiar faces around campus.  Every day is a little bit more comfortable.  I'm hoping to take some pictures of the campus this week to post up here!  

When I wasn't at school this week, these were some of the highlights:  

-Experiencing Australian candies and ice cream-- Instead of gummy bears they have gummy babies..a little weird to eat babies but delicious just the same. Maxibon ice cream is the best ice cream treat I've ever had.  It's half ice cream sandwich, half ice cream bar.  Australian licorice is really good too, it's like the stuff from Trader Joe's. 

-Booking my spring break trip to New Zealand!  I'm going to hike the Milford Track, which is described as "the finest walk in the world."  It will be a 5 day/4 night journey.  I couldn't get any of my friends to sign up to do it with me, but this is something I've been looking into for several months, and I feel like it will be a once in a lifetime opportunity that I would really regret passing up.  Here's the website of the company I'm doing it through: "www.ultimatehikes.co.nz/mt_home.asp".  It has some cool pictures of the hike to look at!   

-Learning more popular Australian music.  They play a lot of techno music here and it gets kind of annoying, but I really like the song "Get Shaky" by The Ian Carey Project.  Here's the the link to the music video on YouTube: "www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZfWLs05bo0".  It's really catchy and fun to dance to.  The band Kings of Leon are really popular too.  

-Going to Sydney for Mardi Gras!  This was probably the main highlight of my week.  A ton of us from Campus East took the train yesterday to the city around noon.  It only costs 9.60AUD one way, which is pretty cheap, and it takes about 90 minutes to get there.  We went to the harbor and saw the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House.  It was spectacular and unreal to see it in person!  In the evening the Mardi Gras parade began, which was a gay/lesbian parade.  It was fun to be there, a little crazy, but definitely something worth seeing once in your lifetime.  We were exhausted from standing all day by the end of it, and caught the 12:10am train back to Wollongong.  The train ride was pretty interesting too, with all the Mardi Gras goers on board.  For example, at one point during the train ride my friend Eddie got a sandwich chucked at his face out of nowhere.  We're still not quite sure why he deserved that.  After yesterday I'm excited to go back to Sydney for an entire weekend to explore it.  There are so many cool things to do there! 

Those are the main highlights from this week!  I don't have much planned for this upcoming week, and I'm kind of looking forward to having some downtime to relax around here and get to know Wollongong better.  Much love to everyone! 

xoxoxoxoxoxo

Photos

Cairns-where we spent our first weekend

Koalas are so lazy

Abseiling down a 50 m. cliff- the first meter is the scariest!!!

Cute little kanga!

Blue Mountains- "Three Sisters" rock formation

BON IVER!!!

Ahh! I forgot to add something! I've been meaning to post this since I arrived but keep forgetting.  On our DOMESTIC flight from Cairns to Sydney a week ago, I plugged my headphones into the arm rest to check out the in-flight music selection.  I was just flipping through the channels and when I got to channel 8 I almost burst into tears because I heard the words "...come on skinny love..."

I couldn't believe that I was on the other side of the world and Bon Iver, a band from my home town, was there to to calm my anxious nerves as I began my adventure.  What a small and beautiful world. 

O-week and the Blue Mountains

I survived my first week of being an official Australian resident!  I live in university housing called Campus East with my 4 Australian roommates named Sarah, Matthew, Max, and Sally! They are all first year students here at Uni (the Aussie word for university) and are 18 and 19 years old.  I like them all very much, and feel that we are growing closer everyday.  We each have our own room and share a bathroom and common area.  This past week was O-week (orientation week) and there were a lot of planned activities around campus.  Many of them were parties, and let me tell you, Australians really love to party.  Our dorm even had an organized pub crawl one night.  The beverage of choice here is the oh-so-classy boxed wine, which we refer to as "goon."  Other O-week events that didn't involve partying were soccer games, BBQ on the beach, concerts on campus, and typical things like tours and information sessions.  It was  a non-stop busy week!   

The beach is a 7 min. walk from where I live, which is AMAZING!!!  There is also a bike trail nearby that goes up the coastline to a lighthouse.  There are a bunch of cute cafes and restaurants on the beach that I can't wait to explore.  Campus East is a 40 minute walk from Uni so I bought a used bike to get to school.  It takes about 10 minutes for me to bike to class, and I had my first class this morning!  The classes I'm taking are "Introduction to Aboriginal Australia," "Principles of Ecology and Evolution," and "Landscape Change and Climatology." The Uni campus is so beautiful.  It's nestled at the base of Mount Kiera, and I feel like I'm walking through the rain forest to get to class.   

This past weekend I went on an organized tour to the Blue Mountains with other international students.  I would compare the Blue Mountains to the Grand Canyon except it's covered in rain forest. We went abseiling, which is when you go down a  50 meter cliff in a harness (probably one of the scariest things I've ever done), hiked, rode one of the steepest trains in the world (goes up the mountain at a 52 degree angle), learned how to do Irish dances in a pub, and went grass carting.  The scenery there was gorgeous, and I made a lot of friends from all over the world.  

I'm still adjusting to my new home, but am getting more and more comfortable each day.  I'm learning my way around the city, meeting tons of new people each day, riding my bike on the left side of the road, using the metric system, and learning how to speak the Australian way. I'm hoping to get involved in some sort of club, that's my goal for this week.  Hopefully I can find a soccer team or something!!  I'm also going to try to run a half marathon while I'm here, so I'll start training for that!  That's all for now!  I hope everyone is safe and well.  Off to the beach I go!

Cheers!