1st week of class!

Hey!
Is anybody reading this? No one has left any comments, starting to feel like I'm writing for myself. Oh well, maybe I am.
Anyway, classes started Monday. I had only one, it was my Reef Fishes course, which actually turned out to be a bummer because the teacher is still on vacation in the Galapagos! But on Wednesday for the same class we watched a cool video of his work on Lizard Island. It definitely got me motivated!
I'm starting to really feel fine here, but at the same time I think I am actually starting to miss people, maybe its just hormones, who knows!
Tuesday I only had one class too-Conserving Marine Wildlife. That was another heart thumper. I think I told my mom-maybe conservation work is what I'm suppose do with my life. We'll see!! Tomorrow we get a lecture on sea turtles, I'm psyched! Typically I would also have a reef fishes "prac"(short for practical, equivalent to our labs) after that class but all of my labs aren't happening for this first week of classes (for some of them the first 2 weeks). At this point I was getting really sick of being in my room so I decided to go for a walk (like Mag-my twin- always tells me to do). So I did, but more like a hike! Right behind my building is a road that turns into gravel and then red Australian earth. So I followed that up up and away. It was SOOOOOOOOOOOOO cool. It was like my own hidden place-there were tons of little paths leading up the side of this mountain. Check out my previous pictures of campus with the mountains and you'll see exactly what I climbed up. The coolest part was that it was so near to raining and it was thundering in the distance and the clouds were moving so fast. The temperature was pretty cool so it was really enjoyable. And the view! WOwee you could see the ocean and all of Townsville. I told myself I would wake up every morning and climb it, but lets be honest-I'm only a morning person when I have to be. After climbing down, I still felt like I couldn't go back to my room. So I switched shoes and went for a run around campus! That was fun, lots of dead cane toads (I think thats what they are) and I ran into this Swedish kid I met at the Billabong. Sweds! Gotta love 'em. You can imagine I was pooped after all this exercise and slept well that night.
Wednesday I woke to a Coral Reef Geomorphology lecture. Also another exciting course! Our teacher is young and funny and has that Aussie accent. He talked to us a lot about the GBR (Great Barrier Reef) and what the heck geomorphology even is. Surprisingly when he asked us if we knew what it was..no one raised their hands. Later that day I had my first rainforest ecosystems lecture. The teacher is an old guy and the room was dark with no windows and sadly I had this class after lunch so as you can imagine..zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..not really because again it was extremely interesting. But you can see how close to sleep I would have been if it wasn't interesting. Who woulda thunk, plants could win over the lunch time zz's? After this class I went and bought a pool membership for 39.95 AUD and did some laps for an hour! That was fun except that as soon as I got out and changed it began raining! Oh well, I went back to my room and grabbed my raincoat before heading off to my next class (the video of my reef fish's teacher on Lizard Island). That night Rhona and I watched a movie-what a fun way to spend a rainy night.
Thursday I woke up and went to The Strand! YAYYY. I LOVE the ocean. I convinced Scott and Morgan to go with me--tried to get Rhona but she wasn't enthralled by the idea. We went to a different area than I went last Saturday so that was nice. There was this jungle gym apparatus at this spot made out of ropes and it probably went about 30 feet. It was fun to climb -but no pictures this time, sorry. It was pretty early in the morning so when it finally got so hot and unbearable we went in the water. It was a lot cooler than Saturday, likely due to the rain, but refreshing just the same. What a way to start the day! Then we rushed back to try and get to campus before lunch was over. Somehow I made it, I'm not sure about them (they live in a different building). After lunch I wanted to go find the dive club who only appear on Thursdays between 12-2 haha. I found them! And I booked a trip with them to get my Advanced Open Water Certification. 590AUD wa wa we wa. It should be well worth it though as it will be on the world famous Yongala wreck. Had class again after that-rainforest ecosystems-in which I was a lot more active today. I actually brought my computer and typed my notes on it. I think I am goingi to do that for the whole semester to save paper and still be able to bring my notes home with me. (I got a new computer over winter break-an Acer mini-it lasts for 5.5 hours!! sweeeeeeeeet)
Well thats about it. I had dinner with my Aussie crew, which is always divine! Tomorrow we are having a movie night, which I am definetly looking forward too!! Now its time for bed because I have an 8 AM class -yuck! I know I know on a Friday!! But before I depart I must say I have made plans to go visit my awesome friend Theresa in Cairns for next weekend where I will perform my first dive trip in the Australian GREAT BARRIER REEF!! WOHOO!!
Thats all for now. Please shoot me an email or comment and let me know whats up with you!
Love you all and miss you too!

"O" Week from a glance

HEY! Welcome again.

Just thought I would sum up O week as I'm sure after my last long entry, no one probably wants to read that much detail. If you do, let me know and I'll continue with it.

Tuesday:

Tuesday was the International Student BBQ day. In the morning I had to go to a small meeting, info meeting for study abroad students. It was basically a girl telling us all the good drinking places and clubs. Not particularly exciting. She was a Canadian student here for all four years.

Then I went over to the BBQ, where the President of the University spoke as well as the mayor (so I was told). If you check out my photos--those not posted on here you should find a picture of a male speaking and a female--thats them! It mostly went right through me, whatever they were saying, except one thing the President said. She said she studied abroad too, but in America and she talked about how challenging study abroad can be. But she told herself, the other country was just a different lifestyle, it wasn't any better or any worse and that was how she got through it, simply thinking it was different and appreciating it for that. I thought that was nice. Maybe it doesn't make sense to you, but if you've ever been to another country and lived there for a while I'm sure you can appreciate this.

Anyway, then there were Aboriginal dancers and a group of some other natives (though I am not sure what they were sorry!) Check out the videos though! (which seems to have moved to the bottom of this blog)

After this I got ready for some Kiteboarding lessons!!! Unfortuantely it wasn't as glamorous as it sounds. When I got to the place where it was suppose to be the instructor wasn't there. A group of us waited there for a half hour and then across the field we saw a kite in the air. Angry we went over to where it was flying. It turned out the cricket oval we were suppose to meet at was actually the cricket rectangle. hahaa....oh goodness. And the instructors were kind of silly, they said that we basically couldn't do anything because the wind was bad and the University hadn't provided them with any transportation for us. BUT we did get a good lesson on what it was all about and where we could go to do it in the future. Basically its flying a kite on the water while standing on a board. Sounds cool to me! The school supposedly has a club, I'll look into that.

Tuesday night was the infamous Toga Night, only the biggest night ever of O week. I debated back and forth about going, finally deciding not to go but rather to go to a free movie night showing Get Smart. I think it was a good choice, the line to get into the club for toga night took others an hour and a half to get through and was supposedly way crowded inside anyway. Not my kind of scene eh. The movie was funny and the people I went with were great so I was glad of that choice.

Wednesday:

Wednesday morning I woke up to go on a Townsville backyard tour! It wasn't very glamorous but it was cool to see what was around. We went past all the sweet shops and night clubs. We passed one that was four stories high and we passed by the Strand! The strand if I haven't said already is the beach, and oh man did I want to jump off there!!

When we got back to campus there was this event going on called Market Extravaganza. Lots of little stalls were set up for either vendors selling jewelry or for clubs advertising their coolness. There was also a stall for the billabong sanctuary which I was going to go to on Friday, so I got a sneak peak at the groovy animals. Here I also signed up for the JCU student association, which basically gives you discounts to everything and free admission to the JCU club. They also gave me this awesome tote bag, which I was very thankful for so now I can carry around all my stuff (no offense to my big backpacking bag which has already served quite useful).

That night was the meet the Fossils event. What did this mean? We had no idea. Fossils are the older students who have already lived in Uni Hall for more than a semester. Hazing is a HUGE thing here so of course this is what we expected. I think I mentioned in a previous blog that the Fossils on the first day gave us underwear with our name on them that we were suppose to wear to every event. So that night we put on our underwear (on our head) and a t-shirt with some random junk on the back that I still don't understand and jumped on a bus filled with others that looked as ridiculous as us! (see pictures-for some reason they only posted to the top) I won't tell you what they did to us or what they made us do, but lets just say if it was done in the US there would have been some law suits. Despite these horrible things, if you took it with a laugh it was bareable (spelling?) and worth the experience. At the least, it brought the four of us in the picture closer so that was cool!

Thursday:

Thursday was my trip to the Reef HQ aquarium, boosting the largest coral reef exhibit in the world. That it may have been, however, that was about all there was to it. This was rather a disappointing trip. It may have been better if I hadn't just finished an internship at one of the best aquariums I've ever been to (National Aquarium in Baltimore). We were suppose to get a behind the scenes tour of the turtle hospital, which we did, but I didn't see a turtle in the hospital and I only saw one turtle on exhibit so I'm not sure why they even needed a hospital. They did have some posinous sea snakes and fish and even some luminescing flashlight fish.

One thing I've noticed so far is that Aussies lie about time, we were suppose to get to the aquarium at 9 and leave at 1-we got there at 940 and left at 1230. Luckily as I said the aquarium wasn't that great so I didn't need any more time but that wasn't my same feeling as Fridays events...

Thursday night my friends and I (the girls in the picture at the top of this post) had a movie night-There's Something About Mary. Ya thats a great movie. The End.

Friday:

This was the day I was waiting for! The trip to the Billabong Sanctuary! The Sanctuary was maybe a half an hour down the road and when we got there we found out you had to pay to hold some of the animals, bummer, but I'm use to it now. You have to pay for EVERYTHING in Australia, thats why the tuition is so cheap. haha. Anyway, I opted out of holding the fuzzies-I'd rather save the 15 dollars and simply just touch the animals. But I did splurge and spent the 80 cents to get some food to feed the roos!!! Totally worth the money haha.

First they let us spend some time with the kangaroos and had to drag us away to the crocodile feeding. The first croc they tried to get to move was just not having it. But the others, oh wow, it was soo cool. They were probably about 4 meters long and very sneaky. Can you imagine? Some little boy was eaten the other day by a crocodile, but I guess it was out of stupidity. The boy's parents were people who gave tours to people LOOKING for crocodiles, so clearly they were in an area where you would expect crocs. The boy was playing by the water with his dog (2 food sources for a croc) and the dog was barking. Supposedly this is basically a dinner call to a croc. No parents around the boy was snapped up and eaten. The sanctuary guide told us that more people get killed a year by coconuts bonking them on the head, 47 people got killed by crocs last year and 34 of them were Australian. He said that people who get eaten or attacked by crocs have to be doing something completely stupid to be in a situation like that. I believe him.

Friday night my new friends and I decided to go to Bludgers at The Club. Bludgers I guess are lazy people, so its basically a lazy night at the club. It was nice, there was a live band and they were not too bad, we danced around, did some people watching and played pool. Quite enjoyable to the last "party type" thing I went to.

Saturday:

Wohoo, Saturday involved waking up late (9AM) going for breakfast and then heading down to the Strand!! The Strand, as I may have mentioned already, is the beach! It was an hour bus ride but well worth it (really would take 15 minutes by car) The water was soooo warm like 27 C, but it was so wonderful. My friends Noor and Dylan were brave enough to go in with me, while Rhona and Miranda sat on the sidelines. They said next time they'd definetly go in. We stayed in the water for a good hour and as you can imagine I had a sunburn when I came out. So much for sunscreen!!! We also walked along the sidewalk, saw some quite birds "laurakeets?" and I even had some kind of nut get dropped on my head! From the Strand you can see across to Magnetic Island. Hopefully sometime soon I'll be able to get over there! (see pictures at top!)

On our ride back we stopped at the shopping center to pick up some popcorn for another movie night! We piled 10 people into a small single room and watched Slumdog Millionaire, some new Indian movie. It was good.

Sunday:

Today is clearly a blogging day, chatted with my parents for a while on skype and watched the rain come down! Its a lazy day here in Australia. Hope to have more pictures available soon but until then...adios!

some pictures to tide you over till I write again

Its hard to tell perhaps but these first two pictures are of kangaroos!!! The second one obviously with me trying to be with them. The third is of Uni Hall but not where I am living. The fourth is of campus and the mountains! And the last is of some indigenous people dancing. This is a taste of my Tuesday. (Please excuse me if the pictures are out of order from what I say) After I post what happened I will also post some videos that you won't want to miss! Kangaroos commentated (spelling?) by me and some of the aboriginal dancings! Groovy. Enjoy!

A little more talk a little less action

Hey! Welcome back. I figured today I have a bit of time I should probably write something wicked lengthy to tell ya'll what I've been doing -second by second!


It feels like ages ago since I've been home, but I guess it hasn't been all that long. I initially left Minoa at like 8AM Thursday morning. Mom drove me to the airport-dad waited for me to get through security. I basically had to unpack my entire carry on because it was loaded with electronics. BUT I did buzz when I went through security-dang hairclip! Made my way to my gate just to sit for an hour or so. Tested out the wireless internet-no go though, which turned out to be a repeating trend across all the world's airports I visited. I got to JFK at about 11:45. WOW is that airport a city or what? I arrived in like a mini airport all for Delta CONNECTION flights, and figured hey okay Qantas must be right in there too. NOT hahhaha...I had to walk ten minutes to find this thing called the airtrain and then travel about 10 minutes on that just to get to the Qantas terminal which was only two stops away. Imagine if I needed to go to something farther? Luckily I had 6 entire hours in which to do this. Thank goodness right-you all know I need that much time! haha. Qantas, as it turns out, doesn't even open until 2:15PM on any given day so there wasn't even a spot for Qantas when I got there. As you can imagine I was EXTREMELY confused. haha oh well. I ended up going to the British Airways people and asking them where they hey was Qantas. There was a white chick in front of me though who got there first and asked. So I started talking to her-turned out she was from PA and was headed to Sydney for a semester. What a small world! Not really because clearly if you are taking Qantas you are going to the other side of the world. Anyway she was my entertainment for the next few hours till I boarded the plane to LA.


This was a lonnnnnnnnnnnnnnng flight, but not as bad as what was to come. I did get an end seat because there was a couple next to me and there were movies to watch, but of course I did get a bit motion sick. I left JFK at about 6:45 and hit LA at about 2AM NY time. Claire (my big sister) was the only one I called since she's in Denver. There was a delay in LA, I'm not sure why because I was getting back on the same plane I had just got off of.


The plane ride from LA to Sydney was soooooooooo longggg. This time I was between two people because the couple I was between before got off to catch a flight to Melbourne. Now it was an Indian girl, working as a chemical engineer for Loreal, and a sick pregnant Australian. They were lovely, but I certainly didn't want to be between two people whoever they were. Luckily there again, were movies! I think I had a second dinner on this plane trip, which was weird because it was like 4 AM. But I ate it because the sweet Australian flight attendant went out of his way to get me vegetarian (even though I hadn't ordered it-which supposedly I was suppose to have done). We later went on to have "Qantas snack pack" and breakfast, so I was content on food. 15 hours later, or in my mind a century later, we arrived in Sydney at 930 am.


Here I had to go through customs, which was silly really, I didn't get asked any questions and I went through the express lane whatever that means. I had to pick up my luggage and lug it down to Qantas transfers where there was a huggeee line waiting to go through to the domestic end of Qantas. I was nervous I was going to be late for my connecting flight but luckily I had plenty of time and the line moved pretty fast. I saw my pregnant companion from the plane, somehow she got there sooner than I did! Weird.


Oh I neglected to tell you that twice including this go through security I left my SCUBA regulator and computer in my carry on and twice they pulled it out wondering what the heck it was. hahahaha.. fools. They were all psyched that it was for diving so that was good. Here in Sydney I had to take a bus to get to the domestic terminal, so you can imagine it was a large airport too. Next flight brought me to Brisbane, which was a small and cute airport. Here I met a girl who was traveling to JCU as well!! She is philipino, name Rhona, and she is a "fresher". Hopefully you can figure out what that is. Also on the plane I met a few more people headed to JCU. Unlike Rhona I haven't seen or talked to them since then. Rhona on the other hand has become an instant friend, we have many meals together so thats great. She has been in Australia for 3 years and lives in a place called Charlieville, I'm not sure where that is.


Anyway back to Brisbane--the little flight from Sydney to brisbane and brisbane to townsville were the worst for motion sickness. I seriously wanted to vomit at every movement and the worst part was, it was lunch time so they were feeding me too!! But of course I didn't order a vegetarian meal so I was SOL. Except, again another nice flight attendant (who oddly looked the same to me as the one I had earlier) gave me an apple and pretzel packs. He also offered me wine, to which I clearly rejected (haha sorry Cas).


Once to Townsville, Rhona and I headed to get our luggage and proceeded to meet the guy with the sign for JCU pickup. Here we met a few more students going to JCU. They were wonderfully nice. One is a grad student studying archaeology and she is from LA. Another is from India and she was studying psychology as a grad student, then there was one from Peru, Malaysia and another from India though I didn't find out much about them. All of them didnt actually have accomodation on campus and some don't even have permanent accomodation yet. I feel so horrible because for the ones from India, I mean not speaking english very well kind of makes it hard to figure things out here. I've seen them once or twice since and they seem OK but not well.


Townsville is/was HOT and HUMID. Wow. We had a fun drive on the left hand side of the road to drop off those girls and then headed to JCU where Rhona and I got dropped off at Uni Hall, how ironic -we were both staying there! Cool! As soon as we got there our driver got someone to help us out. That girl I guess was an RA and she gave us keys but then decided we should just go have dinner. Mom you will hate to hear this but she told me to leave my stuff outside and that no one would bother it. (Luckily they didnt) She said she would show me to my room after, which she never did. I waited in line, with my backpack on for some grub and sat at a table by myself. Lucky me, some poor Tassies pitied me and came and sat with me. They were beautiful people and quite nice. It was a mom and her daughter. The mom chatted me up-finally inviting me to come stay at her house when I went to Tassie, which was nice indeed! The daughter was nice too -she took a year off before coming to Uni to make enough money to pay for it. I guess they pay themselves-no parental help? I should ask. Finally Rhona came around from her room--after I already had a table full of lovely folk who pitied me. It was great!


Finally Rhona and I went off to find my room. We found an RA who took us there. Man was I in for a surprise once we opened the door! It smelled/and still smells like cat pee. I guess because of the rain? Weird I say. Anyway there I was finally in my room!





Sunday





Sunday I spent a lot of time sleeping because I didn't know what else to do. I think I went to breakfast at 730 AM then had a meeting for Uni hall to go to. Here they did their hazing. This was of course for the freshers. So they gave us all underwear, or they say "jocks", and we have to wear them on our heads for all their silly events. I haven't worn mine again since then haha..whoops. Later Sunday I went on a hunt for this international student meeting that I had to attend. It didn't take me too long to find it and the meeting was helpful. I also saw some of the peeps that traveled from the airport with me. One girl, the one from LA, walked around with me after (and with her roommate) and so we hung out for a bit. The rest of the day is history!



Monday



Monday kicked off the infamous O week. I had to go to my faculty meeting, which basically is the course I'm studying. Here it is in Science and Engineering. Once here I ran into Morgan, for those of you who don't know her she is a girl I went to highschool with and who actually went to the first school I attended for college up in Maine. After the meeting we went over to find her boyfriend who lives in another college (dorm) on campus. Both of them have airconditioning!! JEALOUS. They let me try some snacks they bought called Tim Tams, which are yummy cookies that I will hopefully be able to sneak back and let you all try! Then we hiked across campus back to Morgan's building to hang for a little while before grabbing a bus to Stockland! Stockland is what I would call a mall but I guess they just call a shopping center. When I first heard of it I assumed it was simply a store in itself, oh no it was a mall. So Morgan, Scott (her boyfriend) and I took a bus to Stockland. We had to activate our health insurance cards and buy a few things (in my case many) I ended up getting a cell phone, bed sheets, towel, clock radio, toiletries, laudnry soap etc. for 135 bucks. YUCK! And they wouldn't take my travelers check. I am sparing you the details but I was kind of chaotic because the stores close at 5 and this was at about 415 and what I didnt tell you was that they ran out of adaptors (the one thing I really needed so I could write you all some emails!). Then I found out the banks close at 4pm and I had wanted to set up a bank account so I would be able to take money out more easily. Perhaps you can imagine that I was sweating from anger? There was an ATM machine close at hand but I really didn't want to use it since I didn't know how much money they'd charge me for taking money out. I ended up taking out 200 bucks and checked later online and I think they only charged a dollar for using the ATM so not too bad. I then went on to try and exchange the 4 50s the machine gave me for smaller tender so that I could pay for the bus ride back to school. This seemed like a hassle to the ladies at the store, but I think they felt bad and did it anyway.
So determined as I was to get an adaptor I proceeded to run across the street to Kmart, but when I went outside it was downpouring like you wouldn't believe. Seriously. And I found out later that that was actually light! Scary I wish I could show you a video. I decided it was a bad idea and just went back to find Scott and Morgan and take the bus back to Uni. By the time we got back it had stopped raining.
Monday night at dinner I went by myself because I hadn't been with any of the Aussies all day. I ended up sitting with this kid that was alone at a table and it turned out he is actually from Cicero North Syracuse (which for anyone not from the cuse this is a neighboring school district) so that was really cool. Eventually my Aussie friends made it to dinner so we had a lovely talk about Australia and American life.
Thats about it for Monday and its now too late for me to start thinking about Tuesday. If you make it through this far in this post please leave me a comment telling me so!! Till tomorrow--

picture explanation

Hey so you probably want an explanation of those pictures, hey? (thats what the Australians do-they put hey at the end of a sentence) The first one is a frogggg I took a shower with yesterday haha. The next two are the mountains right behind the Uni. Then the Qantas airplane kangaroo (the closest picture I have to a real one) and finally the clouds from the plane because I thought that was cool.

This is a video of townsville houses...sorry for the bad videography.

Townsville!