Well, I guess I should start by saying that they sure know how to keep us busy here – although I’m sure some of that is my own doing, as usual. Since I last posted, I’ve done the cliff walk, experimented with the microwave, made lots of new friends, visited Hyde Park, started class, and booked a trip to the Outback! Things coming up this weekend: visiting my school, going up to the Hunter Valley Wine Region in the Blue Mountains for a tour, visiting the Featherdale petting zoo (not just any petting zoo, one with kangaroos and koalas!), and seeing Ben Folds at the Opera House! Going back to the past week, the cliff walk was unbelievably stunning. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful. And the sand – softest and finest sand I’ve ever felt. I can’t wait to go back when it’s not winter and is a bit warmer so I can lay out and go swimming. Although the water is FREEZING. I fully plan on spending at least one day of every weekend in November at the beach. I’ll do my lesson planning there if I have to. And I did try making cookies with the microwave – and it worked OK. It was kind of a comedy of errors to begin with, because I overthawed the frozen butter, and then had to add more flour to compensate. I also forgot to get vanilla when I went to the store, and, because of the butter again, the dough was still hot when I went to cook it, and of course I was too impatient to cool it in the fridge before baking the cookies. All that said, and acknowledged that it was definitely an epic cookie dough fail, they didn’t turn out so bad. They tasted pretty good, but they were a strange consistency, which I think was a combination of the dough making errors and having to bake them on the cake setting – they came out more like the consistency of scones. But everyone said they were good, so they were either just being really nice or they were actually ok. I’ll try again with dough that is actually made correctly and see if that helps, or if it’s just the microwave. I also would love to get my hands on the manual for the microwave, so that I can actually use it properly. I also used the (free) laundry facilities we have in our apartments today – other than taking a really long time, everything worked great! That’s definitely one of the major peaks of living here. Cal, one of the staff at the BU Sydney Center, made a comment the other day about how our apartment building is like the SED sorority house, because there are only girls in our program, and we all live in the same building. I thought that was pretty funny. Also, people keep asking me about the weather here. Technically, it’s still winter, so it’s not hot, at least, not in this part of the country. It’s actually raining at the moment. Further north it’s pretty hot already, but here we’re just getting into spring, so it’s been mid-high 60s, low 70s if we’re lucky. Which is certainly nothing to complain about; it’s been gorgeous. But it is different here too, especially with there being no ozone layer (don’t worry, Mom, I’m wearing lots of sunscreen :D). It’s really hot in the sun, but quite chilly in the shade. And the mornings and nights are significantly colder than the mild midday and afternoons. But, since we’re going into summer down here, it’ll only get nicer :).
We’ve also started looking into travel – there are so many awesome places to go, and not enough time or money to do it all. My friend Sam and I got an extra day for Labour Day weekend (it’s in Oct. here) because our school isn’t in session that week, so we’re going to take advantage of that and go camp in the Outback. I’m really excited for that. We get to sleep under the stars and hike and experience the Australian desert. Then, the next week is our spring break. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I’m going to do. I really want to see Cairns, and dive or snorkel the great barrier reef, so I’m going to make that happen. I also want to check out the Whitsundays – a group of islands off the east coast of Australia, so I’ll see if I can fit that in. It’s been a mad dash for cheap flights because we’re all generally trying to go to the same place. It’ll be a fun week though. We’re also going canyoning in a couple of weekends up in the Blue Mountains – basically we repel down the side of a mountain into a waterfall. I’m really excited for that. And surf camp is the weekend before that – my weekends are pretty much packed until I start my full-time student teaching after spring break. I’m going to visit my school tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll get to meet my cooperating teacher tomorrow too, but he might not be available until Monday.
The class that we’re all taking here is one about Australian history and culture, and right now we’re learning about how Australia was colonized and discovered, and about the Aboriginal culture. It’s been really interesting so far, and yesterday we took a field trip downtown where we walked through the city seeing where the original government buildings were. We even got to go into the Hyde Park Barracks museum, and lay down in the bunks where the convicts lived when they were transported to Sydney back in the 1800s. It was very cool. I’m also starting to pick up on some of the slang – or not even slang, really, but just Australian terms for certain things. Such as a round trip ticket is called a return ticket; instead of saying for here or to go, they’ll ask if it’s to eat here or take away. They call pitchers jugs – so if you’re out at the pub with your friends you order a jug of beer, not a pitcher. They often say cheers when they’re saying goodbye, and the chocolate special k has chocolate flakes instead of chocolate chips. Oh, and everything is in the metric system – milliliters, kilograms – I’m still not used to that. And I went into a Starbucks here just to check it out – they have four sizes: short, tall, grande, and venti. And they’re not the same – probably because they’re in mL. And it’s a lot more expensive, and I’m not sure how much of that is just the conversion rate and how much of it is just because we’re abroad. So there are lots of little things, but overall, it still doesn’t feel all that different here. Although we did go out last night to the Lansdowne hotel, where it was Uni night, and there were lots of Aussie students who were at the end of a pub crawl, and had written all over each other. They were quite entertaining. There was a cover band, which was pretty awesome, actually. Apparently the Lansdowne also shows Sunday and Monday night football sometime, so I will definitely be going back there. We actually went there for lunch last week, too – they have really good food, and have a $6 menu, which is awesome. I’ll end with some photos from the cliff walk (that's Jane with m
e in that photo, and B
ondi Beach behind us and through the trees), and I’ll post again soon with stories from this wee
kend. Cheers!
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