"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!