Good friends, good fun, good sun

Orientation and all! Allow me to present you to my school, the University of Sydney. This is the main quadrangle, the oldest part of campus. Not all too exciting, but it's really pretty! Gothic style and all, but it's actually really new--all of it was built after 1850, some even as recent as the 1920's.

There was lots of information, lots of talking, lots of meeting new people, and lots of tours. Some sights from around campus...

The Graffiti Tunnel! I plan on painting my name in here sometime this semester. Expect a picture within the next few months. But there's much more! There are a couple of museums on campus; a natural history/anthropology museum, and this other museum, Nicholson Museum. It houses the collections of one of the forefathers of the school (I think he isn't actually the founder, but he's pretty up there).










Anyhow, I've made some new friends, and we went to visit Bondi Beach again. The weather's finally gotten better after a couple of wet weeks.


Of course, this week is all about "welcoming the international students," so there's been BBQ and parties galore. BBQ's here are all about the "sausages" or hot dogs--there's just about nothing else they serve at a BBQ, but a free meal is a free meal, no?














So, lots of parties and lots of going out with friends. We also went on a weekend trip: wine tasting and dolphin watching!
The vineyards were nice, especially one where there was cheese tasting as well. Yum, you know me, I love good food!

For dinner, we went to "The Brewery" in Newcastle, which turns into a bar/club scene after dinner. There was a bachelorette party going on there, and there was this little old granny groovin' to the beat! It was so adorable. I got a picture of her, but you can't really see it too clearly. Nevertheless, it was a pretty cool night.

We stayed overnight in Newcastle, and then took off to Port Stephens the next day! We went out to Nelson Bay...

and we saw some dolphins! They were kind of hard to spot, and there weren't too many, but it was still pretty awesome.


We also got to hang out in the boom (sp?) net, which was pretty cool except sitting on that net with the water pushing you right against it really hurts something ridiculous.

There was also a water slide and some drifting in the water, but there are no pictures because my camera is unfortunately not waterproof.

Anyways...there was also a trip to Birubi Beach, which was absolutely gorgeous. It was super relaxed, and a conversation overhead:

"I'll meet you back here on the beach tomorrow after school, yeah?"
"What time, do you think?"
"About four."

Now, let me show you that beach. And adorable Mickis and Sina!

Green Gardens and Blue Mountains

So in Sydney, there are lots of parks and gardens. It's very refreshing, seeing as it's all in a huge bustling city, and you get huge patches of green. Across the street from my apartment, there's Victoria Park, a couple blocks behind my apartment, there's Wentworth Park...yada yada. Well, about a fifteen minute walk from my house there's a Chinese Friendship Garden, and not knowing what it was, I decided to visit it earlier this week.

First, allow me to present to you: Australian schoolgirls.
Don't they remind you of Madeline, from those books you used to read as a kid?

Anyways, the inside of the park turns out to be like any other Chinese garden I've visited, although I can't say for sure if this one seemed more cluttered, or if I have simply grown since last visiting a Chinese garden. Nonetheless, it's pretty, and it was definitely kind of interesting to look around this peaceful garden and then look over the hedges and see a huge Novotel in the background.

In any case, I took my time around the garden, and then left. To my surprise, I can walk quite easily from the garden (which was only a short walk from my house) all the way to the Rocks and then Circular Quay (home of the Sydney Opera House)!

So there I was again, at the Sydney Opera House. I had tons more time today, because I like to saunter around town on my own, and so I took an abundant amount of photographs (as if I hadn't already the other day), but I'll just share one.
It was a pretty cloudy day, and so the opera house stood out a little more in black and white than in normal coloured pictures. I'll visit the inside of it someday. Supposedly, you have to go in the morning if you want to see backstage, or else rehearsals cause them to stop the tours.

This is the Customs House. I'm not really quite sure what the cultural significance is of it now, but it used to be the first Customs office in Sydney (duh, the name).

Inside there's a library, and some art exhibit that I found quite interesting. They're only showing six of a set called "The Regal Twelve" by Alexia Sinclair. It's based on the stories of twelve female monarchs, and they seem like collages of photographs and the like turned into a single picture. From what I saw, some of the stories are a little simplified, but it was definitely a fun thing to look at.



The last few days, I've been gone in the Blue Mountains, Katoomba more specifically. The Blue Mountains are about a two-hour train ride east of Sydney, and they're gorgeous!
Supposedly, they're called the Blue Mountains because of a fine mist of evaporated eucalyptus oil. However, it was rainy and cold the few days that I was there, so I didn't see the blue haze that gives the mountains their name.

It was super misty throughout the day, and the fog was really thick, so visibility at one point was about 10m.


In order to see anything, I decided to go below the fog layer. Which meant climbing down the Giant Stairway. When they say Giant, they mean Giant. That thing was so scary, being that it was unbelievably steep and extremely slippery. Let me help you picture how steep it is. I was standing on a step, and if I reached my arm in front of my face, I could touch the step that was level with my head. So I was holding onto the railing for dear life both going up and down.

When I finally got back up, the fog had cleared enough for me to see The Three Sisters. Quite beautiful, no?
They remind me of the Grand Tetons. Maybe not, it's been a while since I last saw the Grand Tetons. Either way, national parks in Australia are quite different from those in the States. For one thing, there's no entrance fee. Secondly, their visitor centres consist mainly of a little shop, not so much an exhibit like most national parks in the do. It's like the title of National Park is simply imposed upon a pre-existing town, community, area, rather than a parcel of land being set aside as a National Park and having only certain businesses within its boundaries.
This is Katoomba Cascades, which eventually lead to this:
Katoomba Falls. I was on the Scenic Railway the second day when I took this picture. It's kind of hard to tell just how big this waterfall is in the picture, since it's an aerial view. But it's humongous.

Instead of the Giant Stairway again the second day, I took the Furber steps instead to get to Jamison Valley, to the rain forest. I wonder if all rain forests look like this. To me, this shot looked like the prototypical rain forest shot, with all the vines and stuff.

Anyhow, for the next week or so, I'm back in Sydney, and am busy with orientation and the like.

I miss you guys!

EAP Orientation

So, we had EAP orientation. It was quite fun, met some nice people, learned about the dealio is here with academics, went out a couple times at night, and finally did some sightseeing. I'd been so busy setting up bank accounts, cell phones, apartment stuff, and school stuff that I hadn't gone sightseeing yet until EAP took us.

First, we have some pictures of my park and my future school:


This is Victoria Park. I live catty-corner from the park, and I can walk through the park straight to school.

This here on the right is the afore- mentioned path.

And this is what may be the front entrance of the school. Now, I have my doubts about that, because I haven't actually seen the whole campus yet (it's absolutely HUGE), but if that's not the front entrance, then I can't wait to see what the front entrance looks like.





Now for the sightseeing...

This, of course, is the Sydney Opera House. The weird thing is, it looks really white in all the pictures and at night, but it's actually cream-coloured up close. It looks really different from all the different angles, too. We got to see it from the harbour and all, so I have lots of pictures, but my internet here is immensely slow, so I'll be posting a minimal number of pictures.

This is the Sydney Harbour Bridge, then. I'm planning on climbing it. Do you see the little people on top of the bridge, near the flags? That's what I'll be doing, come fall, probably. It's a little too sunny at the moment to be climbing that bridge for two hours and getting skin cancer.

And finally, this is Bondi Beach. There are so many beaches around here, it'll take a while to visit them all. But this beach was super nice, the sand was so fine and clean for the most part, save a couple cigarette butts, and it wasn't actually that crowded. There were tons of people, but it didn't feel like there were that many.

But everytime I'm outside now, I'm so aware of the sun because of the hole in the ozone layer that's above Australia.

The Australian government has a whole bunch of PSA's on TV, and they all warn about skin cancer, so it's kind of making me paranoid. Anyways, email me and keep me from feeling lonely!

First post from Australia!

Greetings from the land down under! I haven’t actually done any sightseeing just yet, so this post will be short and picture-less. I’ve spent the last two days spending too much money to move into my apartment, getting used to walking on the left side of the road, and getting used to the fact that while I can understand everything I hear, I have to think about it just a little bit more.

Australia seems to be pretty Americanised. Aside from the 7-11 on every other corner, there is an abundance of fast food restaurants, as well, including the requisite McDonald’s (which they call “Macker’s” instead of “Mickey-D’s”) and KFC. They even enjoy American candy! A friend I made at the bank really likes Reese’s peanut butter cups, and apparently was very disappointed because of the recent peanut-butter product recall, which deprived him of his regular shipment of aforementioned goodies from his friends in the States.

Meanwhile, I now carry around two cell phones at all times; if you don’t know how to contact me, please let me know and I’ll get back to you ASAP. EAP orientation starts tomorrow, and so perhaps I’ll actually start going to see all the tourist spots.