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