I've been in Australia now for over a month, and I truly feel like I live here. This is a good thing, but at the same time, sort of a bad thing.

I've met some of my friend's parents and gotten to have happy family dinners. I really miss big family get-togethers when I am away from home for a long while. The excitement of the trains and trams is starting to wear off, and I no longer smile giddily while the rest of the commuters look fed-up with public transport. I now have a bicycle, so I can explore much of the city like I do in Austin. Going grocery shopping in the city without a car now feels natural. However, I really miss the mega-shopping centers of the states where you can buy anything and everything you've ever wanted in one place. Essay deadlines are starting to approach, so I am having to study some like the rest of the university students. I love the money here, and it's so easy to use. I don't know why the states doesn't have pretty, waterproof, colorful bills that are different sizes or one and two dollar coins.

This weekend, I had a very relaxing time just hanging out in Melbourne. It's the first weekend I haven't been away in over a month! Last night, we had a sleepover at Jules's house. We made tacos because the Mexican food here is a sad, sad sight. Their nachos are just a bowl of chips with some toppings thrown on top :( We went all out on the tacos, and we had so many toppings. It was wonderful! I made some delicious guacamole, which was a total surprise to all of my friends because they they thought avocados become guacamole when they are simply mushed up in a bowl. They loved the real guacamole and the tacos were a huge success. We then made s'mores, which is a new thing to Australians. It's hard to make them right because they don't have graham crackers or the right kind of marshmallows here. In the morning, we made pancakes which Australians often top with lemon and sugar. It's surprisingly good!

We are going to go to a footie game soon. I don't really understand the game, and I am not really an Australian until I know which team I barrack (cheer) for. On the tram yesterday, I was listening to a little seven year old boy talk extensively about which teams were the best, how Carlton should win the next match, and how it was always one sided against another team. It made my day, especially because he had an Ozzie accent!

I really miss everyone at home. Moving to the other side of the earth is a very interesting experience. I know I am growing and changing a lot here, and I know things are growing and changing at home while I'm gone. When I come home, things will be different, but as my friend Erik said to this, "That's life." So, in a way, I'm excited that there will be new things awaiting me at home! However, leaving here is going to be so so so hard. Leaving Texas was not all that bad because I know I will see everybody again in a few months. I can't say the same to my friends here. I know I will come back, but it could be years, so I'm currently encouraging people to study abroad at UT!

Mom, here are some things you would love about Australia: The suburbs here are far enough to feel like you are out of the city, but they are still compact with a life of their own and an easy train-ride away from downtown. You can get to a pretty beach in about fifteen minutes, and you can get to a stunningly beautiful beach in about two hours. The water is freezing, but you don't really like to get in the water, so laying on the beach is perfect. Plays, museums, and craft fairs are plentiful. The Queen Victoria Market is the coolest thing. You can buy heaps of fresh food for super cheap!

Pop, you would love the outdoors here. It is so varied, and it is still relatively close to cities. The open grasslands just look like you. Surf beaches are beautiful and so close! Torquay is apparently the home of all the big surf brands, and it is only an hour out from Melbourne. They hunt Kangaroos here, and hitting kangaroos with your car is a legitimate problem! The trees and plants that grow here are so unique looking. You could have a really cool garden!

Anyway, here is a link to some pictures of where I live, so you can get an idea of what it looks like:
http://www2.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=277741931/a=53093359_53093359/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish

First Mountaineering Club Trip

Spending time with people in the outdoors forms bonds extremely quickly. This past weekend, I was lucky enough to have one of those experiences on the mountaineering club trip to the Grampians National Park. I met and became close to so many new people over the two days we spent camping, hiking and climbing. Jules, Lauren, and Chris are my new close friends from the mountaineering club.

It helps that the Grampians is one of the most spectacularly beautiful places I've ever been. In the states, any time I have been camping, it has mostly been through pure forest. In Australia, there are so many rocks, that you're basically hiking up boulders and climbing around trees the whole time. If you don't know this about me, I love to climb. This past weekend I was able to climb walls, boulders, mountains and trees. I was in heaven.

Camping was really fun. When our group of around forty-five people showed up on Friday at midnight, it was almost as if a new colony had appeared in the middle of the night. Saturday during the early morning, it started pouring rain. Fortunately, even though we practically had our tent situated on a river, the tent stood up to the challenge and stayed completely dry. It was forecast to rain throughout the whole weekend, but we only got a few light showers over the next two days, so we were able to get some really good climbing in.

The rock climbing here is pretty much a million times better than any climbing I've done in the states. The sandstone makes great handholds, and there is good bouldering anywhere you look. My fingers were completely raw by the end of the trip. My friend Chris is really into climbing, and we went bouldering today near his house. They have a free artificial bouldering wall underneath a bridge in the city right next to a bike trail. It is awesome!

I will be doing a lot more camping, climbing and hiking in the future. I love it, and I can't believe I haven't done more. This next weekend, I am going camping, kayaking, and bushwalking in Otways National Park. We'll see how that goes! The water is colddddd.

Here, once again, is a link to some pictures:
http://www2.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=277623225/a=53093359_53093359/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish

Hanging Around

I think I have finally sorted out my schedule mess, and I am in satisfactory classes. I am now taking Linear Algebra, Organizational Engineering, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, and American History to 1941. I really haven't found any of these classes all that intriguing thus far, but I get credit for all of them at UT. Yay!

This past weekend, I went to the Moomba Waterfest with Sara and my new friends Jules and Meghan. Meghan is from Canada and lives down the hall. We met on the day we arrived looking like death from the gazillion hour plane ride and have been friends ever since. Jules lives in a suburb of Melbourne, and I met her through the mountaineering club. Jules and I became friends through destiny. Allow me to explain. At the first meeting of the mountaineering club, I happened to be wearing my homemade Notting Hill shirt with the clever quotes. It has long been my philosophy and hope that someone will recognize these quotes, and we shall become lifelong friends. Jules is the first one to do this in about four years. It is fate. The festival was a lot of fun, and I got to watch professional water skiers. I had never seen anyone very good ski, and it was completely amazing! I have now decided that my backup career will be professional water skier.

On Sunday, I went scuba diving again with a few people from the underwater club at Phillip Island. This is the island that has the world's smallest penguins, but we dove on the other side. Anyway, apparently I get seasick. Last weekend I was completely fine on the boat, but I think the waves were larger or something because I definitely fed the fish. Luckily, I only puked before and after my dive. That was extremely unpleasant, and I felt like death, but at lease I got to see some pretty reef and fish. Needless to say, the next time I climb aboard any seafaring vessel, I will be drugged up.

This coming weekend, I am going camping, climbing, and bushwalking in the Grampians National Park. I am super excited, and I'm trying to get a lot of schoolwork done during this week so I won't be bogged down on the weekend. The weekend after that, I am going camping and kayaking on the beach. I don't know where. I guess wherever they take me.

Australia is on the other side of the world

I have truly started to notice some of the differences between Australia and America. Most of the time, I am way too excited about these new little bits of trivia I learn. Anyway, here is a short list of examples:

Bicycles are called Pushbikes

Australia has recently overtaken America as the country with the highest percentage of obese people (26% as opposed to 25%)

Chicken Parmesan is just called Parma, and it is a common pub food served with chips (fries) that people get really excited about.

Australia has the top 11 most venomous snakes in the world

Free refills here are something to get overly excited about

A pickup truck is called a ute (short for utility)

A fanny here is not another word for booty--Hence the fanny pack gets a lot of laughs

A bogan is a derogatory term for a redneck

The boot and bonnet are equivalent to the trunk and hood of a car

An esky is actually an ice chest

Anyway, my favorite part of Australia is the accent. Honestly, after three weeks, it still makes me happy to just listen to people talk. I've gotten fairly used to the accent when I'm talking to people in public, but when I answer the phone to hear, "How ya going mate?," it always surprises me and makes me smile. I really like the trees. They are all so different. It was one of the first things I noticed when I got off the plane. There are also no squirrels. Weird.

Here We Go

OK. So I have finally begun my blog to tell of my adventures. Don’t expect there to be brilliantly written, clever, remarks because if I have to think hard, I won’t end up writing anything.

This past weekend, I went on a trip with the Underwater Club (Scuba Diving). I went lawn bowling with the club Thursday night, and they invited me to come the next day. (Lawn bowling was pretty boring, but I was good at it!) So basically, I decided at around 10 o’clock Thursday night to hope in the car with some nice people at 7 the next morning for three days of camping and diving. It turned out to be an amazing trip, but at the same time, a complete disaster! I hadn’t brought the right clothes to deal with the freezing water, I slept in the living room of the cabin and therefore got very little sleep, and I was very unprepared for diving. I only got three hours of sleep Thursday night (Friday morning), so when Ivan and Amelia picked me up the next morning, I was delirious. I then proceeded to sleep on and off for most of the trip to Apollo Bay. We stopped in various towns and beaches along the way, which was great fun, but I was basically sleep walking. I distinctly remember waking up at some point and thinking, “I am halfway around the world curled up asleep in the back of the car with scuba divers I met a few hours ago while we drive down the Great Ocean Road. Sweet.” I pretty much missed all of the pretty drive, but I figure I’ll see it again.

All day Friday I spent on the beach. The water is freezing, but I had a very thick wetsuit. A few of us snorkeled out to a rocky island where a family of seals lives. It turned out to be much farther than it looked, as always. Most of the seals ran away when we got close, but there was a group that was asleep. They really look like underwater dogs. One of the guys, Macker, pet a seal, and it instantly woke up, looked at us like, “Holy Crap!”, and the group of seals flip-flopped away as quickly as their ungraceful bodies would allow. It was amazing how humanlike its reaction was. It’s as if you woke up to have a seal petting you. Freaky.

The next day, we woke up ridiculously early to go diving. Preparing for a dive is so tedious, but it is worth it whenever you get in the water. I hadn’t been on a boat in the ocean in quite a while, and I forgot how different it is from a lake. Anyway, the dive went well. We explored a sort of kelp forest, and I got to swim with the seals! They were so cute and curious in the water. We also went for a hike through the rainforest on Saturday. It was only about an hour hike, but it was incredibly beautiful. I took a lot of pictures. The waterfall at the end was picturesque. We then decided to walk back through the river/stream, and so naturally, I fell in the water trying to jump to really far away rocks. It wasn’t really a shock though. I saw it coming. Unfortunately, that meant my tennis shoes were soaked for the rest of the trip, so I had no closed in shoes.

The dive on Sunday was a lot of fun. It was very different from the one on Saturday in that we explored a rocky, reef ledge. I found two lobsters that looked very creepy, and I wished I had gloves so I could catch and eat one. I also saw a sting ray and several schools of fish.

Today is the first day of school, and I have been to two classes that didn’t meet on the first day. That was not fun. However, I am sitting on the lawn in front of the union with a ton of other students. A lot of students commute from home in the suburbs, so no one goes home during the day. Everyone is very friendly, and I like talking to random strangers. They are surprisingly good at interesting small talk. The administration here is very inefficient, and getting registered for the right classes is a pain to say the least. I am still not in the right classes, and I have no paper. None. That is me prepared for the first day.

Here is a link to some photos I've taken:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/35894926@N05/sets/72157614829264131/